Why Violence Is Growing Along the U.S.-Mexico Border

SAN MARCOS, CALIF. — ‘Death at the Border,” a study conducted by researchers at the University of Houston, illuminates the violence at the root of government policies like Operation Gatekeeper. According to its authors, from 1993-96, nearly 1,200 illegal immigrants died while attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. San Diego County had the greatest number of deaths: 194 immigrants. Another 30 have perished thus far in 1997.

Since the inception of Operation Gatekeeper in October 1994, many of the deaths in San Diego County have been linked to the Border Patrol’s “channelization” strategy, which effectively pushes entering immigrants eastward, where they must traverse treacherous mountain terrain. Falls resulting in injury are common, as are snake bites; those who set out without adequate provisions become ill and disoriented, some wandering for days before reaching their destination.

Other deaths can be linked to Gatekeeper’s heightened criminalization of entering immigrants and the “coyotes” who aid and abet them. Facing felony convictions and long prison terms--five years for the first offense, 15 years for a second--coyotes have resorted to increasingly desperate means of escaping arrest, thereby imperiling not only their own lives but those of their human cargo and anyone else who may get in their way. Since Operation Gatekeeper went into effect, no fewer than six violent car accidents have occurred in the San Diego area alone, leaving at least 15 dead and 68 injured.

Gatekeeper’s emphasis on criminalization has produced another kind of problem: There are not enough jails and detention centers to house the apprehended. In San Diego, there is one federal jail--the 23-story Metropolitan Correctional Center--that can house 1,300 inmates. The mounting backlog of Gatekeeper-related cases has lengthened the average stay of its mostly Latino inmates--80% compared with a 26.3% average in similar federal institutions--from three months to more than six months. This has heightened anxiety among detainees, leading to more violence and suicide attempts; the facility’s psychiatric ward is overcrowded. These conditions prompted the recent opening of the Miramar naval brig, but it closed days later after an inmate revolt. Detainees are still being held in jails as far away as Las Vegas, from which they are shuttled by plane or bus to hearings in San Diego.

One consequence of Gatekeeper’s obsession with criminalizing the immigration problem is to siphon off resources from drug prosecutions. On any given day in San Diego, judges may be looking at more than 200 criminal cases related to illegal immigration. Nevertheless, second- and third-time border violators are rarely if ever prosecuted; nor are drug cases involving fewer than 125 pounds of marijuana. There simply are not enough prosecutors to try and judges to hear such cases.

Gatekeeper’s failure is all the more compelling in light of the Clinton administration’s unwillingness to prosecute large-scale employers who themselves engage in a kind of coyotism. From the huge agribusinesses of Southern California to the major meat-processing plants in central Iowa, tens of thousands of undocumented workers are satisfying employers’ demands for cheap, unskilled labor. Yet, aside from occasional and much-publicized forays into small sweatshops in Chicago or Los Angeles, neither the Immigration and Naturalization Service nor the Department of Labor has shown much of an inclination to clamp down on employers.

Gatekeeper’s gung-ho criminalization approach leaves little room for discussions of alternatives. But it’s clear that employers’ demand for unskilled, seasonal and migrant labor in the United States is strong enough to warrant a comprehensive policy dealing with such. This might include dual citizenship, which could be based upon property rights as well as rights that accrue from contributing one’s work to the social collective. This would help to unify Americans and Mexicans in common cause--and spare lives.

Short of such discussions, further escalation of the “war” currently being waged along the U.S.-Mexico border, as many are urging, will only produce more violence and more bodies. As passage into the United States is made more arduous, and as the state’s criminalization of strawberry pickers heats up, we can expect a heightening of desperation and risk-taking among Mexican workers. When elected officials cry out for more money to stop speeding vans overfilled with illegal immigrants, we need to recognize that policies such as Operation Gatekeeper play a role in fostering the problem. When government spokespersons stand over corpses and claim coyotes are responsible, we need to ask which ones: those who accept payment in dollars to assist immigrants’ illegal passage, or those who accept labor in exchange for a wage in U.S. fields and factories?