Reporter takes a journey into an immigration hot spot
It's easy to get caught up in the insidethebeltway political gamesmanship and forget that what lawmakers do here does have an impact on people's lives.
Arizona is the hot spot for illegal immigration these days. Ever since the mid1990s, when immigration officials began Operation Gateway at the San Diego border, those determined to get into the United States began crossing eastward. Now tens of thousands enter via Arizona each month.
I was among a group of 10 journalists in Tucson for a threeday University of Arizona fellowship on immigration reporting. There was classroom time on the economics of illegal immigration north face jackets for cheap and its effect on education, health care and the legal system. But it was our daylong dusty trip to the border and a breakfast the next day with bordertown mayors who live every day with the consequences of legal and illegal immigration that made me think every senator and House member who may cast votes in the coming weeks on an immigration bill would do well to retrace my steps.
Early one day we started out in two vans and headed about 60 miles into Mexico to Altar. We were told beforehand that this little town is the last staging area for migrants making their way to the United States. I'm not sure women north face jackets on clearance what I expected. Probably a clandestine little crossroads with coyotes "guides" who take several thousand dollars to smuggle people across the border waiting to load crossers into trucks, vans and other such vehicles.
But it was a much bigger and more organized place than that. The main action was in the square ringed with small tented eateries and booths that sold everything from backpacks to bottles of water to cans of tuna fish where the mostly Mexican nationals stocked up for the last leg of their trek to the United States.
We met up with a couple making their second try to cross the border. I don't speak Spanish so I paired up with one of the reporters who does.
As the 30yearold slightly built man began talking his wife silent at his side a crowd began to grow. They said they were all from Chiapas, about 1,000 miles away in southeast Mexico. They planned to go to North Carolina because they'd heard they could get work and there were beaches there.
This couple had left their five children with his 79yearold parents. The youngest child was 15 months old. They had a hopeful air about them until we asked what happened the first time they tried to come north. That's when the young woman bowed her head and looked very sad. Her husband said they'd gone back because they missed their children too much.
What struck me about talking to this couple was how confident they seemed that they could make it. They seemed oblivious to the danger they faced. Congress was debating thousands of miles away. Most had been caught multiple times by the Border Patrol.
The Tucsonbased organization No More Deaths which guided our border trip estimates that 279 people died crossing the Arizona border between October 2004 and October 2005. And they expect more than that to perish crossing the desert this year.
As these migrants talked to us, I thought about the road we had taken to Altar and the poverty we saw along the way towns with makeshift shacks that served as homes, no running water, no visible signs of any commerce or industry.
From Altar we went to a place called the Brickyards about four miles from the border. That looked more like what I expected. It's a place where locals still do make bricks. But it also serves as a way station for illegal immigrants. It looks like a junkyard, with burnedout vehicles, pigs including one of the biggest ones I've ever seen roaming around. About 15 families live there and basically act as stationmasters. Vans from Altar come in. Trucks leave loaded with migrants. side.
As we headed back to Tucson, we whizzed past a small Minuteman encampment. I was disappointed we didn't stop and talk to these volunteer border patrollers. I found out later that the journalists in the van behind us had.
The next day, at lunch with four Arizona state lawmakers two Democrats and two Republicans we heard from Republican state Rep. Jonathon Paton about what his constituents tell him is going on. He said ranchers who live near the border tell of hearing people crossing their property in the middle of the night. One young woman awoke to find a migrant on the roof of her house with the garden hose, taking a shower. Paton and other Arizona lawmakers have proposed a slew of bills to police the border, a job they say federal officials aren't doing. Paton's stories made me wish we'd been able to talk with some of those people to get their perspective on this issue. (The organizers told us the Minutemen were invited but declined). And it also made me realize that three days in the field on this issue is just not enough. I wonder how lawmakers who boast of having made day trips to the border can really learn very much.
We did sit down with the mayors of Yuma and Douglas, two border towns.
These mayors say their economies depend on the free flow of Mexicans back and forth across the border. Yuma Mayor Ray Borane said his City Council passed a resolution asking the Minutemen to stay out of their community, which is 95 percent Hispanic.