Mexicans say it will take more than three layers of fence and 6,000 National
Guard troops to keep them out of the United States.
Hundreds of protesters
rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to press Congress for
immigration reform. Senators took a swipe at illegal immigration, ordering
construction of a fence along hundreds of kilometers of the US-Mexico
border, even as Hispanic activists pressed for immediate immigration
reform.[AFP] |
As U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday visited the stretch of Arizona
desert that serves as a cactus-studded freeway for thousands of undocumented
migrants, those preparing to make the perilous trip said they will find a way
around almost any obstacle.
Increased security could also lead smugglers to raise their fees, driving
immigrants deeper into debt and making them even more desperate to make it
north.
While a tired, bedraggled column of deportees filed across a Nogales border
bridge _ just as Bush was giving a speech on border security west of here _ some
migrants used cell phones to contact migrant smugglers for their next attempt.
"Of course we'll cross again. We're just waiting for them to come and pick us
up," said Javier Torres, 22, of the northwestern Mexican city of Culiacan. Just
100 yards (90 meters) away, vans like those used by smugglers waited at an
underpass to pick up groups of deportees.
Martin Doriane, who for the last four years has surveyed returning migrants
for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, greeted the deportees on the Mexican side.
Doraine says at least 95 percent of migrants deported say they will try to
cross again, partly because they've pawned everything they own in Mexico to pay
for increasingly expensive and sophisticated smuggling efforts needed to
overcome tightened border security.
"They say, 'I had a roof and a frying pan in Mexico, but I sold both to come
north, and went into debt, so what do I have to return to?"' Doraine said.
One of the deportees, Maria del Carmen Valadez, brought her 12-year-old son,
Julio Cesar Castaneda, on the dangerous two-day trek through the desert. The boy
hungrily ate a taco Doriane had given to him as his mother acknowledged that "it
is a risk" to bring her child on the trip.
"I did it to give him a different life," said Valadez, of Fresnillo, in
northern Mexico. She said she'll probably try to cross again, because in her
hometown, "there's nothing but poverty."
That sense of desperation _ and determination _ is everywhere.
On Monday, a detained woman told agents she had left her 3-year-old son dead
in the desert.
Jesus Santana, a Tijuana truck driver who was recently deported, said there
are no obstacles the U.S. could put up that will stop migrants.
"We'll go under it, we'll go over it, we'll go through the air, the sea or
the earth, but they're never going to stop us from crossing," Santana said.
Mexico's government says the expansion of the barrier and deployment of the
National Guard aren't the way to solve problems of border security and illegal
migration.
"Building walls, constructing barriers on the border does not offer an
efficient solution in a relationship of friends, neighbors and partners," Fox
said Thursday in Tijuana. "We will go on defending the rights of our countrymen
without rest or respite. With passion we will demand the full respect of their
human rights."
Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said that Fox has sent a diplomatic
letter to the U.S. State Department outlining his concern.
The proposed 595 kilometers (370 miles) of triple-layer fencing, approved by
the Senate on Wednesday, as well as Bush's plan to send National Guard troops to
play supporting roles in border enforcement, have raised tempers and tensions
here.
"Somebody is going to start shooting, and then there will be problems between
the two countries," Santana predicted.
The Senate measure, which has yet to be approved, includes provisions that
would give some undocumented immigrants a path toward citizenship and allow more
people to work temporarily in the United States.
But Santana said Americans are mistaken if they think they can stop illegal
immigration.
"There will always be more people wanting to come," he said. "It will always
be like this."
