What’s the Point of I-5 Checkpoint?

Inside the tiny Palmdale apartment of Jose Aguilar, his wife and children lamented the recent death of “Grandpa,” Jose’s 80-year-old father, Custodio Aguilar.

The old man died after being struck by a pickup truck last month while crossing Interstate 5. He was No. 12, the twelfth immigrant to die this year trying to avoid detection at the San Clemente immigration checkpoint.

In his case, he wanted to visit his grandchildren. It was his son Jose who told him to cross the busy freeway after Jose became nervous and dropped his father off in the northbound shoulder.

Ironically, Custodio Aguilar had applied for a visitor’s permit through the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara, his family said. But it was denied. Now he’s dead.

“We wanted to do things legally,” said Jose’s wife, Maria Guadalupe. “We wanted him to enter the country legally.”

That statement was uttered repeatedly by the grief-stricken family during a recent interview. As a Chicano born in East Los Angeles, I was moved by their story.

Although they tried a legal means first, they victimized themselves by a dangerously dumb idea to cross a California interstate at night.

When Custodio’s granddaughter, Angeles, said, “Why don’t they get rid of that checkpoint?” I started thinking. How many times had I thought that before? How many times have I heard about the intimidation that other Chicanos and Mexican-Americans feel when they travel through the checkpoint?

Many non-Latinos don’t understand those feelings. When they approach a checkpoint, they don’t think about fear, but rather if their hair is combed or if they’re wearing a fresh shirt.

The feeling, at least among Latinos, is one of inadequacy. We feel second-class. It’s ironic that after a weekend in Mexico of eating carnitas and listening to mariachis and feeling Mexican again, I too worry when I return to my own country and approach the checkpoint.

I thought I was alone with these feelings of intimidation until I brought up Custodio’s death with my dentist, Steven R. Chew.

“Hey, Dave, don’t feel bad. I get the same feelings when I cross the border or go through the checkpoint,” said Chew, whose blond hair and blue eyes would make him less likely than I or my dark-skinned brethren to ever be stopped and questioned by Border Patrol agents.

Even Chew asked, “Why do we have the checkpoint there? It’s so far from the border.”

I posed the question to Ted Swofford, U.S. Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego.

“The checkpoint is a tool that we use to act as a backup to our primary line of defense here at the border,” Swofford said, adding that the Border Patrol averages about 6,000 apprehensions of undocumented workers a month at the San Clemente checkpoint.

“The checkpoint is not the problem, the people crossing the freeway are the problem. We understand they cross due to the checkpoint, but if they were killed while crossing the border, would they argue to close the border?” he said.

Swofford is not a dumb man. He’s an intelligent and articulate representative of the federal government. But it’s a government that has spent millions of dollars in the passage and enactment of the Immigration Reform Act of 1986, the biggest overhaul of our nation’s immigration policy ever.

But it’s not working, said Custodio’s son, Jose. Every day, thousands of Mexican immigrants successfully arrive in Orange County, Los Angeles and even Palmdale, he said.

Jorge Bustamante, president of a Tijuana-based think tank called College of the Northern Border, said of the immigration reform act at a University of Texas seminar on Mexican demographics earlier this month: “It does not work. It failed at stemming the flow.”

I wish I had a penny for every word uttered by Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) and Rep. Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), who has since retired, during their speeches on behalf of the reform act they drafted.

Their act did nothing about Mexico’s deteriorating economic condition and very little to stem the need for a cheap source of illegal labor in this country.

The Border Patrol’s own figures bear out that little has been done to stop illegal migration. Swofford says that 427,772 people were apprehended in the San Diego region in fiscal year 1985. For fiscal year 1989-90, it has gone up to 473,323, the third-highest tally in the history of the Border Patrol, he said.

For the family of Custodio Aguilar, who described him as a tolerant but reserved farmer who grew corn, rice, beans “and whatever the land could support,” I’ll give them the simple solution to this nation’s immigration dilemma.

It’s a global problem that needs as its base a political and economic solution, not an enforcement one. That will be 18 cents, Mr. Simpson.