Human Cargo Read online

  On a busy night, back then, Agent Angel Santa Ana of the Border Patrol told me when he showed me this photograph and explained its significance, there would be as many as three thousand arrests. It was unnerving to be an agent back in the 1980s, he said, waiting lonely and apprehensive for dark to fall, bracing yourself to hold back the surge of people as they came racing down the hillside toward you; but you soon learned that if you took a very tough line with one member of a group, the rest would fall into line and go quietly. “Even now when it is all tougher,” he said, “Mexicans are not hard to catch: they are easily cowed by authority and they are fearful of men with guns.” They are, as he puts it, “docile.” In those days, he went on, the men crossing sometimes dug holes under parts of the fence for women and children to crawl through, while they, being men, insisted on climbing over. Agent Santa Ana is a good-looking and agreeable man in his thirties, attuned to the nuances of border affairs, and he wears cowboy boots under his green uniform. A second-generation Mexican Californian, he grew up in Texas and plans to return there.

  In 1993, the newly inaugurated President Clinton, facing a recession in California and the rise of anti-immigration groups claiming that by mid-2050 only half the population of the United States would be white, launched a program to “regain control” of the country’s southwestern border.* The border—particularly the most popular crossing area, around San Diego, with its few stretches of weak fencing—had long been perceived as loose but adequate: it was now seen as dangerously porous. While California became a center of anti-immigration rhetoric, Washington hardened its approach to illegal immigrants. Generous new funds were poured into the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS, and with the money came more guns, more agents, more equipment. Some helicopters arrived. An electronic identification system known as IDENT, which stores the fingerprints and photographs of those caught trying to cross, was introduced at border points, and the military, bringing with it sheets of corrugated-steel landing mats, sent army reservists to build a ten-foot-high fence along fourteen miles of the most vulnerable crossing points. The idea behind the Clinton administration’s new commitment to curb illegal migrants was simple: “prevention through deterrence.” The Border Patrol concentrated large resources of staff and technology on the relatively short stretches of border traditionally most used by illegal crossers, rather than taking the other possible course, which would have been to appoint large numbers of inspectors to mop up migrants once they were in.

  It was under Clinton’s presidency that the first coordinated assault to frustrate Mexican immigrants was launched along the Rio Grande in Texas, where a police chief called Silvestre Reyes deployed closely spaced border control vehicles along a number of popular crossing points. Operation Blockade—renamed Operation Hold the Line after the Mexican government protested—was declared successful and was soon followed by Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego. Then came an extension of Operation Hold the Line, ten more miles of enforcement west into New Mexico. In 1999 came Operation Safeguard, to improve control along 300 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border. Everywhere, underground sensors, infrared scopes, huge portable floodlights, and many new agents arrived to carry out the program. It has become, say its critics, like a futuristic film, full of gadgets; only the proposal to electrify the fence has actually been defeated, after human rights groups protested. Even devices designed to save lives, like watering stations, are wired with infrared sensors that betray that they have been used.

  At first, Clinton’s aggressive border policies looked highly successful. The crackdown was reported widely and with approval. Silvestre Reyes announced that arrests along his stretch of the border had dropped by a dramatic 76 percent, which suggested to him— though not to many others—that those migrants were now staying at home. Reyes left to pursue a successful career in Washington.

  It was true that the arrests were dropping wherever the border was now effectively enforced by patrols and equipment. But it rapidly became obvious that the numbers of those crossing had not dropped; they had simply shifted elsewhere. Squeezed away from the regular routes, migrants were resorting to coyotes, whose activities became more efficient and more professional, and who began to charge ever higher fees. Heretofore, the coyotes had operated informally; now they began to group themselves into highly effective syndicates, with agents all around Mexico, sophisticated processes for forging and selling documents, arranging safe houses and journeys by train, plane, and truck, and with carefully worked out ways of collecting fees for successful crossings. What was once a relatively simple and straightforward illegal practice has now become a complex underground web, connected to, though not the same as, the drug trade, whose members use the same routes.

  And, of course, the routes the migrants were now driven to use were more dangerous. They passed through the desert, with its immense surges and drops in temperature. Or they swam: across the treacherous twenty-one-foot-deep All American Canal, in some places as wide as a football field, with undercurrents too powerful for all but the strongest swimmer, or the New River, said to be the most polluted stretch of water in the world, carrying typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis. It is down this river that many of the crossers now float, holding their breaths under submerged bridges and along a twenty-foot culvert. As Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego, sees it, there is something deeply immoral in a policy that deliberately puts people in harm’s way. Like Father Luis in Tijuana, he is angry about the casualties. When he talks at seminars and conferences about the border, he tells his audiences about the 1,700 migrants who died trying to cross between 1994 and 2001, and the many others who have lost their lives unreported in the mountains and the desert. He shows his students slides of the Berlin Wall, and tells them that only 239 people in all lost their lives during the forty-three years of the wall’s existence, stating that this is a tenth of the number who have died on the Mexico-California border. Cornelius makes another point. Increased enforcement has altered the composition of those who cross: fewer women, children, and older people now attempt the journey.

  While half of Mexico lives in poverty, and Americans depend on cheap Mexican labor, economic agreements between the two countries continue to favor the migration of goods and not people—the crucial 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, at U.S. insistence, omitted all mention of labor migration. The border remains patchily and symbolically controlled, with great shows of strength in some places and an absence of all legal authority in others, so the migrants will keep on coming, drawn by the promise of dollars that lie just within reach, confused but not deterred by the ambivalence with which Americans view their arrival. Not deterred either, it seems, by the vigilantes spawned by this particular mixture of official encouragement and restriction: in Arizona and Texas, ranchers turned cowboys, carrying machine guns and two-way radios, now regularly patrol the border. The Web site of Ranch Rescue offers the slogan “Private property first, foremost, and always,” advertises weapons and combat gear, and recruits volunteers for Operations Foxbat, Jaguar, and Thunderbird. It quotes Cicero on the moral Tightness of self-protection. Ranch Rescue is for people who “believe that when government fails or refuses to act, individual Citizens are obligated to act on their own” and for whom “socialism in all its forms” as well as “Environmentalist measures” are just for “liars and fools of the very worst kind.” It was the vigilantes who first used a new weapon being investigated by the Border Patrol, a drone that flies along border areas and beams back photographs of people attempting to cross. The vigilantes are acting in total violation of federal and state laws, but they appear to escape prosecution.

  The migrants are not put off by the penalties they face if caught. Despite the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which increased penalties for illegal entry and people-smuggling, in practice very little happens to the migrant who is arrested. So overloaded is the system all along th
e border that only recidivists whose fingerprints have been recorded are actually prosecuted. All others are simply returned across the border, in a “humane and orderly” fashion, as demanded by the human rights organizations active in the region and as subscribed to by the Border Patrol. Agent Angel is proud of his district and his work. Along the border as a whole, half a million crossers are said to be apprehended each year, but no U.S. border state has the resources to prosecute more than a tiny fraction of them. A migrant today is said to have just one chance in eight of being prosecuted.

  It would be wrong to say that the fence dominates the border, or even that it is particularly noticeable. On the contrary, it is almost invisible. In the minds of most San Diegans, says Wayne Cornelius, the fence is an abstraction, a place where from time to time politi-, cians make speeches, seeking votes by taking a stand against the dangers of illegal immigration, and where members of various churches gather to honor those who die in their attempts to reach America. Ordinary San Diegans, he says, do not know about the fence, and they do not care.

  It is, of course, possible that a semiclosed border is precisely what suits most people. The United States needs Mexican labor. Mexicans need U.S. jobs, which enable them to send $7 billion home each year to their families in remittances. An open and free border—as advocated by some Wall Street liberal economists—would result in an unregulated surge of new arrivals, which the United States cannot handle and which would rapidly lead to an even larger anti-immigrant backlash. In any case, the events of September 11 have introduced the specter of terrorists using the migrant route, and there is something comforting about the idea of a fence, a barricade against the nightmare of a world out of control. The United States must therefore be seen to be attempting to prevent illegal immigration, with showy displays of border controls, while at the same time allowing enough people through to feed the market for cheap labor.

  Seen like this, the fence and the activities that surround it become like an elaborate childhood game, in which, as darkness falls each night, the two opposing sides line up, the migrants waiting to cross, the border patrols waiting to catch enough of them to appear efficient and in control. The light grows dim, the whistle goes, the migrants begin their race toward the new world. Only, of course, it is a game with a very dark side, one in which only the fittest survive; and among the casualties are many of the women and children for whom the new rules are, quite simply, too tough.

  • • •

  WHAT DREW ME to San Diego’s fence initially was a chance remark made one day by Jeff Crisp at UNHCR in Geneva. The fence, Crisp said, was fascinating because it was such a naked, unapologetic example of the lengths the West is willing to go to in order to keep unwanted people out. And he was right: there is something extraordinarily crude, even ridiculous, about these long stretches of wire and concrete, which look so small and insignificant against the large landscape and arid and stony mountains of the border areas. The fence does not look as if it could really keep anything out. But it was fascinating also, Crisp went on, because the people who come across every day are not all Mexicans. Among them are Turkish Kurds and Iraqis, Sri Lankans and Nigerians, and even Chinese, like the four young men I tried to talk to on the beach at Tijuana. And indeed, when I got to San Diego, I learned that, in 2003, researchers gathering material on the nationalities of those trying to cross the border illegally discovered people from seventy-three different countries in a single period of three months.

  The numbers, compared to those of the Mexicans who cross, are very small: perhaps no more than 4 or 5 percent of the total. But they are enough to make an important point about modern migration: like the birds that circle the world in vast sweeps, covering thousands of miles every spring and autumn, refugees and migrants today will make extraordinary journeys in search of work and safety. But unlike the swallows’ routes, which are the same year after year, the journeys made by refugees can last several years, as they wander, apparently without reason, from continent to continent. In offices where people study migration, there are maps charting the most used paths to freedom, with distance covered and time taken. The longest recorded journeys begin in China and end in Surinam, some 15,200 miles on the road, taking between six months and a year and costing between $25,000 and $50,000; Thailand to New York, at 13,500 miles, is not far behind.

  Wanting to hear about these travels, wanting to understand the routes and the dangers, wanting to ask how the refugees decided which route to take, and what it was like traveling without possessions and with only a dim idea of the future to shape their days, guided not by their own instincts but by those of unknown traffickers whose honor they could not know to trust, I asked human rights lawyers in San Diego who work with asylum seekers if they would introduce me to some of their clients who had crossed into California from Mexico. The world of these long-distance crossers, as they are known—people who are not Mexican—who travel from all over the world to cross into the States along this border, is completely different. Unlike the Mexicans, most have come to California not so much in search of work as to escape persecution at home; they were not the economic migrants I originally came to find, but the asylum seekers I knew well from Europe and Africa, people so desperate that any journey, however long and arduous, however dangerous and financially ruinous, is better than likely captivity and torture at home. There are said to be about 11,000 of them in San Diego at any one time, at various stages of the asylum process.

  It was from a church group in El Cajon, west of San Diego, that I heard about the Chaldeans. San Diego, like Detroit, Phoenix, and Chicago, is home to a large community of these Iraqi Catholics— descendants of Sennacherib and of Sargon the Akkadian, who ruled Mesopotamia with Babylon as their capital. Modern Chaldeans use the Aramaic language and follow the teachings of Rome. They did not fare well under Saddam Hussein. They were merchants and well educated and, since their religion did not forbid it, ran liquor stores. All were harassed; thousands were arrested, imprisoned, tortured. In El Cajon, grouped into two congregations, are hundreds of Chaldeans who have fled Iraq since the early 1980s and, granted asylum, have settled legally along its freeways and in its suburbs. They say that southern California, with its dry air and sandy soil, reminds them of their native Iraq, and that they are happy here, though many have left relations behind. In their still oddly Middle Eastern living rooms, with sofas and chairs all around the walls, and large floral carpets in the middle, they have placed enormous television sets, on which they watch the news from Iraq. When I went to the Chaldean churches, I found Iraqis who had taken remarkable routes to reach the safety of California, who had walked and driven and taken buses and ships and planes, who had spent all their savings and left behind people they loved, people whom they mourn because they are too old, or too poor, or too frail to follow them to safety. But no journey I heard about was more dramatic than Salaam’s; his story alone shows what people will do in order to escape persecution.

  Salaam is twenty-nine and a doctor, a tall, spare, genial man with glasses and the gestures of someone who has always been at ease with his own life. His dark brown hair is cropped short, and his manner is generous and open. Already, in some indefinable way, alter only a few months in America, he looks American; his English has a Californian drawl. Salaam was working as a doctor in Baghdad in the spring of 1999 when his turn came to serve as prison doctor for a month in Abu Ghraib, the vast jail in the suburbs of Baghdad now known throughout the world as the place where U.S. reservists and private military contractors housed and maltreated their Iraqi prisoners. As Salaam was talking, I remembered hearing about Abu Ghraib in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein tortured his opponents in its dungeons, and something of the horror in the voices of its victims, who were confined in flooded underground cells—horror brought to the West’s notice by dissidents who had finally escaped Saddam Hussein’s executioners—has always stayed in my mind.

  When he reported for work, Salaam knew little about conditions inside Abu Ghraib. That w
asn’t something you talked about in Baghdad in the 1990s. What he saw revolted him; he observed, but he said nothing. But then one day seventy-two prisoners rebelled against the atrocities being committed every day around them. The prison governor ordered that as punishment they should be locked together in a single inner room, some four yards by five, as Salaam remembers it. The prisoners stood, or sat, in total darkness. On the second day, two died; on the third, thirteen. On the fourth, Salaam was ordered to visit the survivors. “I couldn’t get into the room because there was no air. The people inside had become like animals. The floor was sodden with urine and excrement and sweat.” Salaam did what he could: he dragged out twenty unconscious or semiconscious people and gave them oxygen.

  The next day, the governor summoned him. Salaam could no longer hold back his hatred and outrage. The conversation did not go well. Salaam was informed that he, too, would now be punished, and that his next medical job would be to extract the eyeballs of newly executed prisoners, so that the corneas could be removed for transplants. “I was ordered to attend the executions, so that the extraction could take place immediately. I refused. The governor called in a guard, and had me put into a cell.” There Salaam stayed for three and a half months. Because his parents had some influence and his sister was able to put up bail, he was released. “After that, I had to leave Iraq as quickly as I could. I was marked, as a Chaldean and as a dissident.”