COLUMN ONE : Fears of a Border Run Fall Short : Although the peso’s plunge is driving many immigrants north, the predicted mass exodus has not materialized. Stricter U.S. enforcement, the recession and Prop. 187 are thwarting many.

A dispirited Pedro Estanislao was perched just inside the border fence, atop a mound of used tires. He contemplated an imposing phalanx of U.S. Border Patrol vehicles 200 yards to the north.

“The need in Mexico is greater than ever,” said Estanislao, a 35-year-old father of three, who for years had resisted the lure of comparatively high wages in the north for the security of his home near Lake Patzcuaro in western Mexico. “But it’s so hard to cross now.”

Estanislao--thrown out of a job when the fertilizer plant where he worked shut its doors--is but one of thousands left unemployed as the Mexican economic abyss deepens. His plight says much about the contradictory scene unfolding along the border, where authorities have braced for a vast surge in illegal immigration since the peso’s collapse in December.

Mexico’s latest economic crisis has indeed driven more people to attempt the crossing. But the doomsaying forecasts of a mass exodus have not materialized.

“We don’t see signs of huge shifts to the north, of Depression-era movements of people,” said Robert Bach, executive associate commissioner for policy and planning for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The traditional peak spring season is almost over in this heavily trafficked corridor, which accounts for as many as half of all illicit crossers.

Arrests are up 30% border-wide, but immigration authorities, scholars and migrants themselves attribute the increase largely to a single factor: bolstered enforcement.

During the January-May period, Border Patrol apprehensions were up in neighboring San Diego, almost 20% more than in the same time span last year. And May was a near-record month, resulting in 67,282 arrests--more than 2,000 a day.

The strengthened ranks of agents around Tijuana has pushed some of the flow eastward: apprehensions in the Tucson area have also increased significantly, although the overall numbers are much less than near San Diego. The Clinton Administration has responded by adding agents in Tucson as well.

U.S. officials in San Diego have launched a major crackdown, dubbed Operation Gatekeeper, which has concentrated agents and equipment on the international line, where arrests are most likely. Meantime, Border Patrol staffing continues to increase in San Diego, now up to 1,350, almost double the level of 10 years ago.

Augmenting border agents and resources inevitably leads to more arrests, often repeat detentions. Some people have been arrested a dozen or more times, inflating apprehension statistics.

Even with increased enforcement, the overall numbers of arrivals do not approach the historically high levels of the mid-1980s, when far fewer resources were arrayed against what seemed to be an inexorable flow, officials say.

“We think we can control it, assuming conditions in Mexico don’t get much worse, and don’t go through the basement,” said Bach, who heads a national border evaluation board.

Recession, Prop. 187 Cited

Interviews with scores of people here and in the Mexican interior indicate that two broad factors--the stricter enforcement and the diminished star of recession-ravaged, post-Proposition 187 California--are working to discourage some from venturing north, despite mounting economic pressures. Many who came to the border have returned to their homes in the Mexican interior, despairing of ever getting through, a phenomenon largely unheard of a few years ago.

“People always say it’s difficult to cross, but I’ve never seen it as hard as it is now,” said Jorge Campos, a brash 22-year-old who was heading back to his home in the industrial city of Leon after several unsuccessful efforts to enter. “There’s migra on horses, on motorbikes, on foot, in Broncos. They’re everywhere.”

Still, the deepening economic distress is pushing some migrants to undertake the journey to the border and beyond, however uncertain the potential payoff. Heavily represented among first-time crossers: professionals, merchants, middle-class entrepreneurs and young men--all groups particularly vulnerable to the swirling economic currents buffeting the nation.

“I never thought this would happen to me,” said Jaime Martinez, 27. His family dairy is headed for bankruptcy, he said, prompting him to seek his fortunes in the north.

The worst may be yet to come. After the much larger peso devaluation in 1982, the number of illegal border-crossers initially surged, then leveled off, and later continued to build for years.

“There are going to be more people coming, but the question is: How many more?” said Wayne A. Cornelius, a longtime scholar of Mexican immigration at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego. “Is it going to be a predictable, absorbable increase? Or is it going to be a tidal wave?”

The border is weathering the almost tectonic collision of two contrary forces: broadening economic woe in the south and expanding enforcement in the north. The explosive potential, Cornelius said, “must be . . . defused in some way, if immigration is not to become the principal irritant in U.S.-Mexican relations for the remainder of the 1990s.”

At ‘The Line’

Here at “The Line,” as the border zone is known, the ever-tightening noose of U.S. vigilance means increased delays and, critically, higher costs for aspiring border-crossers.

“We’re losing money every day here,” complained Sabino Bueno Pardo, a 25-year-old from Mexico’s Nayarit state who was on a hillside a few miles east of the beach, the lights of Tijuana glittering behind him. He recalled crossing with relative ease just a few years earlier.

Delays add hundreds of dollars in expenses for food and hotels, while costing migrants precious job opportunities and wages. Those costs come on top of rising smuggling fees imposed by “coyotes”--who typically demand payment in dollars, now almost 50% more expensive.

Although most people once crossed on their own, following relatively direct, well-trod paths, migrants now say use of the well organized coyote networks is almost essential.

Today, would-be illegal immigrants from central Mexico must be prepared to spend $1,000 or so before landing a job in Southern California, the most ever, according to a study by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Tijuana research institution. Such expenses weigh heavily on many who often go into debt to finance their travels. Some who might otherwise be inclined to go cannot come up with the substantial start-up funds.

Many migrants and coyotes have taken to testing the more circuitous--and less policed--routes to the east, via the San Diego backcountry and Arizona. But torturous excursions through the desert and bush offer no guarantee of success, while running up expenses and compounding hazards--especially as the unforgiving Southwestern summer approaches.

The resulting frustration is palpable along the boundary line, now delineated by a 14-mile fence, crafted of surplus airplane landing mat, which has helped shut down once-bustling entry points.

The mood is far different from that of a decade ago, during the anarchic heyday of illegal immigration. Back then, hundreds regularly massed along major Tijuana gathering zones. Only a tattered fence and an understaffed, ill-equipped Border Patrol separated them and the streets of San Diego, where smugglers lined up to ferry them farther north.

Years later, an economic crash and the specter of political instability have undoubtedly exacerbated immigration “push” factors. But the once-prevalent sense of bravado is gone.

Cristino Avendano, detained seven times by the Border Patrol, said he was fed up. He and about two dozen neighbors from southern Oaxaca state were recently stranded in Tijuana for more than a week, sleeping in a fetid strip of dirt near the border fence.

“I’m trying two more times,” declared Avendano, a 23-year-old farmer. “Then I’m going back home.”

He and his fellow crossers are all experienced migrants. They said they would have headed to California this year regardless of the devaluation, which, they said, has only aggravated the difficulties for campesinos barely surviving in Mexico’s reeling agricultural economy. The annual sojourn to the Central Valley has become an economic linchpin of their hardscrabble existence.

Finding Work Difficult

Discouraging large numbers of such repeat migrants--especially in the wake of a developing economic crisis--would represent a major victory for the Clinton Administration’s much-touted border control efforts. It remains to be seen whether that longtime goal can be accomplished. There are no figures on migrants who have turned back.

But, in their efforts to discourage them, U.S. authorities now have an unexpected ally: The sluggish economy in California, traditional destination of perhaps half of all illegal border-crossers.

During the economically robust 1980s, California provided a seemingly limitless bounty of low-skilled jobs. Arrivals found opportunity in expanding service and manufacturing sectors; agribusiness remained a mainstay.

In recent years, the buzz in immigrant communities in the United States often centers on how difficult it is to find steady chamba (work) that pays more than marginally above the minimum wage.

“The bosses constantly remind you: There’s always someone else waiting to take your job,” said Jose Rangel, who works in a Los Angeles sewing loft, sending $200 or so in savings home monthly to his wife and three children in Mexico City.

Moreover, the hostility that Rangel and many others say they feel in the wake of Proposition 187 further dims enthusiasm. Sensational coverage in the Mexican media ensures that exaggerated accounts of California’s inflamed climate reach home. Many here speak of striking out for new horizons in New York, Florida, Chicago and the Pacific Northwest.

A group of four from the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz was heading for the orchards and berry patches of Oregon. The three veteran crossers among them were happy to bypass California, where they had worked before and found greater ill will than in the Northwest. The fourth, Josefina Rohos, a mother of six, was embarking on her first trip.

“Just buying supplies and clothes for the children to go to school is a burden now,” Rohos said as she waited patiently on a cool hillside, hugging a hometown neighbor, Felicitas Flores, who had made the trip before. “The way prices are rising, I felt the need to try it this time.”

The presence of Rohos, a street vendor, illustrates how Mexico’s so-called underground economy, which once provided a safety net for millions in the crisis-plagued 1980s, may be stretched to the limit. That leaves the victims of this crisis with even fewer alternatives than their counterparts in 1982.

Former street vendors are everywhere in the crowds gathered in popular spots such as Las Canelas, a bare stretch so named because a long-forgotten entrepreneur once served coffee laced with cinnamon ( canela ) there. It is a principal staging zone for those planning to cross illegally, either by jumping over the metal fence, tunneling under it, passing through blow-torched holes or hiking around the meandering steel curtain.

The emergence during the 1980s of Mexico City as a principal source of immigrants created a vast pool of potential newcomers, considering the capital’s population of nearly 20 million. At border way stations, street-smart capitalinos stand shoulder to shoulder with folks just off the farm. The many urban youths in their late teens and early 20s gathered here are testament to the failure of a system increasingly unable to provide for the 1 million Mexicans who enter the labor force each year.

“Prices keep rising and we just can’t keep up,” said Vicente Robles, 21, previously one of the legions of rag-bearing windshield washers who roam the capital’s traffic-clogged streets in search of change, competing with jugglers, fire-eaters and hawkers of Chiclets, key chains and sundry goods.

Middle-Class Flight

The current blight of inflation and recession appear to have hastened the departure of middle-class and professional Mexicans. A “brain drain” similarly followed the 1982 peso collapse; many doctors and engineers took menial jobs in the United States. In 1995, many highly educated and skilled Mexicans find themselves mired in debt.

Jorge Perez Garcia, a soft-spoken 26-year-old, headed north from the western state of Michoacan after giving up on his dream profession: teaching illiterate peasants to read and write. His teacher’s pay, once worth the equivalent of $50 a week, plummeted after the devaluation to $30 or so in real earnings, hardly sufficient to care for his wife and baby daughter.

“We professionals are being hit hard,” said Perez, his neat appearance notable amid the 200 or so mostly scruffy migrants gathered in Las Canelas. He said he would take any honest work that came his way. “I thought I’d try and see if I could do better for myself and my family.”

Those with some resources left may opt to skip the difficult illicit crossing and seek entry via legal means: with visitor’s visas or other valid short-term documents, which are often difficult for poor Mexicans to obtain. About one-half of illegal immigrants arrive in the United States legitimately, officials say, but violate the law by remaining permanently.

Many enter with false paperwork presented at busy land borders such as San Diego, where frenzied inspectors cannot verify each piece of identification. Others show legitimate papers, borrowed from others or purchased on the black market. Still others bluff their way in, claiming U.S. citizenship or legal resident status and hoping they are never asked to prove it.

Although first-time crossers are the most obvious sign of the peso crisis, another group has a significant presence here: those who had been home in Mexico for years after extensive stays in the United States. Many had amassed nest eggs during their U.S. sojourns, pumping their savings into businesses and homes in Mexico as security for the future. The devaluation has derailed their plans.

Jose Mota Perez, a 30-year-old father of six from Acapulco, said it had been three years since his last trip to Southern California. He reckoned he could pocket up to $900 a week in Los Angeles at his preferred profession: painting cars. The $150 or so he earned in Mexico was just fine, he said, until la crisis halved his real earnings.

“I plan to go back to Los Angeles for one year, work as hard as I can, and save as much as possible,” an exhausted Mota said as he waited on a hillside just inside the United States. “One earns more over on the other side, but there’s much more tranquillity at home. For my part, I say this: ‘I hope I never have to come back again.’ ”

NEXT: Residents of a township in western Mexico wrestle with the question of whether to risk the trip to el norte as the economic crisis deepens.

Rise in Border Arrests

Since the peso devaluation, arrests are up by almost one-third along the Southwestern border.

U.S. Border Patrol arrests, January to May

Sector 1995 1994 % Change San Diego 274,908 229,195 19.9 El Centro 15,798 13,112 20.5 Yuma 9,055 10,525 -14 Tucson 115,486 64,989 77.7 El Paso 48,820 35,597 37.1 Marfa 4,647 5,823 -20.2 Del Rio 35,470 24,434 45.2 Laredo 40,894 34,510 18.5 McAllen 80,378 61,479 30.7 Totals 625,456 479,664 30.3

Note: Many individuals are arrested multiple times, inflating statistics. Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.