An Immigration Dispute Far South of the U.S. Border

As dusk fades to darkness, the rickety riverboat slides into the long grass along the shore. Half a dozen young men sling backpacks over their shoulders and walk into the night with grim, determined faces.

The success of a long, arduous journey depends on what happens in the next half an hour. From here, they must dodge border guards to reach the land of opportunity--and well-paid jobs.

It’s a scene familiar to anyone who has watched television footage of the nightly gatherings along the Rio Grande that separates the United States and Mexico.

But this is the Rio San Juan. And these workers aren’t headed north, but south.

They are Nicaraguans, from the Americas’ second-poorest country, trying to sneak into Costa Rica, the most developed nation in Central America. If they succeed, they will join 500,000 to 700,000 compatriots, more than half of them without work permits, who harvest coffee and sugar cane or clean up construction sites and houses.

Costa Ricans grudgingly accepted Nicaraguan refugees during their northern neighbor’s civil war in the 1980s. But eight years after the fighting stopped, the migration is clearly economic--Nicaragua has an unemployment rate of at least 50%--rather than political. And Costa Ricans are becoming impatient as the number of migrants has reached more than 15% of their population and the influx of foreigners without papers continues to grow.

“Costa Rica is not prepared to deal with this massive immigration,” said Costa Rican Immigration Director Eduardo Vilchez Hurtado. The number of Nicaraguans is too much for a nation of more than 3 million people to absorb, he said, complaining, “It is interfering with our system of social services and job availability.”

The issue is becoming particularly prickly because Costa Ricans are facing tough adjustments as they try to move their traditionally prosperous country, with social services that rival Canada’s, into a global economy based on cheap labor markets. As in the United States, when the economy sours, migrants--especially ones without work permits--are among the first to be blamed.

Border Patrols Are Stepped Up

In the nearly three months since Miguel Angel Rodriguez became president, Costa Rica has stepped up its border patrols. As a result, the number of Nicaraguan rechazados--literally rejects, or potential migrants turned back at the border--has tripled, Nicaraguan immigration authorities estimate.

In those three months, 3,500 Nicaraguan rechazados have been returned by Costa Rica, according to Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry figures. That count is probably inflated by prospective migrants who try unsuccessfully several times to cross the border and are tossed back, the government acknowledges.

For potential migrants such as Alberto Estrada, that means more chances of getting caught. In the past two years, the 37-year-old cobbler from the northwestern colonial city of Leon has twice made the journey to the southeastern river and on to Costa Rica.

“I just do not make enough” at home, said the father of three. “Some days, I will only earn 20 cordobas,” about 20 cents. In Costa Rica, he can make six times that amount as a farm worker.

So he boards the bus to Granada, where, for the equivalent of $4, he can take a 16-hour boat ride across Lago de Nicaragua, the biggest lake in Central America, to San Carlos at the mouth of the Rio San Juan.

Passengers try to sleep on the boat’s hard, wooden benches to escape the heat and the stench of sweat and urine mixed with the scent of overused frying oil from the tiny galley next to the restroom. Cockroaches crawl over the children lying on the deck.

Even so, the journey by boat is cheaper and more reliable than bus travel around the lake on a road that is often impassable in the rainy season. Once past San Carlos, there are no roads, only the river.

In the muddy streets and open-air market of San Carlos, inexperienced migrants can find a coyote--a paid immigrant smuggler--to guide them across the border. By 2 in the afternoon, migrants are ready to board the riverboat that charges $3 for a trip halfway down the river to El Castillo.

But the migrants disembark at one of the boat’s dozen stops before reaching El Castillo, the spot where the Rio San Juan begins to form the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Before El Castillo, both sides of the river are Nicaraguan.

Getting Caught by Surprise

The challenge for migrants is to walk into Costa Rica without being detected by that nation’s border guards. Many favor this nameless spot just downriver from the bustling lumber town of Boca de Savalo. From here, they can follow a tributary of the Rio San Juan south into Costa Rica.

The first two times Estrada made the trip, it was simple. So simple in fact, that this month he decided to bring along his 18-year-old son, Carlos, and a 16-year-old friend, Mario Benito.

“I decided to show them so that they could work,” Estrada said, chuckling ruefully. “And look what happened.” The trio were caught by Costa Rican immigration authorities and held briefly in the detention center in the Costa Rican border town of Los Chiles. Less than a week after they left home, they were on a boat back to San Carlos.

“Here we are with no money and no place to sleep,” he lamented. “I don’t know whether to go back home or to try again.”

That is a dilemma that Capt. Anibal Sobalvaro, the Nicaraguan immigration official in charge of San Carlos, has seen increasing numbers of rechazados confront since early May.

“They have thrown out three times as many, and now three times as many go back” and try to cross again, he said. “As long as Nicaragua’s economy is weak, workers will go to Costa Rica.”

Sobalvaro said he expects the numbers to increase in August, when harvest season begins and more Nicaraguans go south looking for jobs.

‘We Need to Regain Control’ of Borders

The arguments over migration will sound familiar to Southern Californians.

“We need to regain control over our borders,” Vilchez said. “We need to be able to determine who enters our country and who doesn’t.”

As for the other side, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Emilio Alvarez Montalvan said, “Costa Ricans do not like heavy labor,” stating a widely held belief on the northern side of the border. So they hire Nicaraguans to do the dirty work.

Vilchez acknowledged: “Costa Rica needs the migratory groups that come to fill vacancies in the manual labor work force. But these should be considered migratory workers who must return to their country once the harvest is finished. It must be a cyclical migration.”

To that end, Alvarez and his Costa Rican counterpart tried to solve the problem earlier this year by signing a legal migration agreement that permits seasonal migration depending on the needs of growers--similar to farm worker agreements between the United States and Mexico.

Both Central American governments are eager to guide the migratory flow into legal, regulated channels before illegal immigration becomes an entrenched tradition, as it is in North America. Thousands of workers from central Mexican towns in Michoacan, Jalisco and Zacatecas states, for example, follow the same routes northward to the U.S. that their grandparents took.

Attempts to stop that migration by tightening up the border at longtime crossing points in California and Texas have forced prospective migrants to take more dangerous routes through the Arizona and New Mexico deserts. Costa Rica and Nicaragua hope to establish orderly, seasonal migration.

But those who watch migration up close give the pact little chance of stopping the flow of workers without papers.

Workers with permits will cross at the well-regulated western border at Penas Blancas on the Pan-American Highway, as they always have, they predict. And illegal traffic will keep traveling along the uncontrollable eastern rivers.

“The Costa Ricans do not want to legalize workers because then they would have to pay them their [legal] fringe benefits,” Sobalvaro said. “This situation is not going to be resolved. Migrants leave Nicaragua because there is no work. They have one option: Costa Rica.”

Further, while many Nicaraguans go to Costa Rica with the intention of working only a few months, they become accustomed to the prosperity and want to prolong their stay, which a legal permit would not allow.

But from across the border, Vilchez replied: “We can’t carry Nicaragua’s problems on our backs. . . . We cannot sustain the migratory influx from Nicaragua. It’s like putting your hands across a waterfall. The water still flows through your fingers.”

Researcher Auriana Koutnik in San Jose, Costa Rica, contributed to this report.