TV Review : ‘Frontline’ Examines Immigration Fears

The illegal immigrant story is probably too big to examine in one television hour, and so it’s a strength of the “Frontline” report, “Go Back to Mexico!,” that it doesn’t aim for comprehensiveness. Instead, it takes the form of a personal essay by reporter William Langewiesche, who once flew the Southern California-Mexico border area as an air-taxi pilot. He has seen the land from above, where there’s no border to be seen.

Yet the border is very real, and Langewiesche is passionately interested in what makes nice, family people risk their lives and break the law to cross that border, and what fears exist among Americans who feel that those people are somehow changing the country’s identity. He is a thoughtful liberal in the old-fashioned sense, taking in every point of view, absorbing them and trying to make sense of them.

Running through the essay is the adventure of 24-year-old Maria Salas, who leaves her poverty-striken town of Agua Verde with her son, Jesus, to reunite with her husband in Los Angeles. Along the way, we see every impediment erected in their way north--the border patrol’s infra-red cameras, the tall fences, high-powered night lights, the beefed-up checking of doctored ID cards--but Maria and Jesus elude all of them. How? She simply rides in the front seat of a smuggler’s car crossing the main Tijuana border checkpoint.

Langewiesche also has the novel idea of visiting a San Diego talk-radio station, listening to callers complaining about the illegals, and then personally visiting the callers. Their concerns aren’t abstract, but always personally grounded. Mexico’s problems, one unemployed man says, shouldn’t have to be mine.

Langewiesche understands him; it would have been good to hear this reporter add that the ultimate solution to the unprecedented rush of immigrants across the southern border is a wealthier Mexico. The other solutions carry the resounding thud of futility--illegal immigrant prisons, Berlin Wall-like erections, more patrolling guards, laminated national ID cards. They’re futile, he argues, because there’s always some way to be found around them. Desperate people will find it.

“Go Back to Mexico!” airs such immediate concerns as the alleged abuses of California’s welfare and health systems by illegal immigrants, but it’s best at reflecting on what the fear of new immigrants by a nation of immigrants says about the nation.

* “Go Back to Mexico!” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.