Thread: The Sixx O'Clock News: "Hard Line: Life and Death on th

Hard border issues get hard look in 'Line'
http://www.al.com/books/mobileregister/ ... xml&coll=3
Saturday, August 13, 2005
tstretches almost 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, anchored on the east by Brownsville/Matamoros and on the west by San Diego/Tijuana. In between, it traverses a forbidding no man's land punctuated by small desert communities like Douglas, Az., and Calexico, Calif. The U.S.-Mexico border has always been a complex and difficult divide, never more so than now, what with increasing economic insecurities and national defense worries on the north side of the line.

Dispassionate examination of border issues is hard to come by. Millions of people north and south are vitally affected by whatever policies obtain, the stakes not only economic and social but all too often life-or-death. Not surprisingly, posturing and hyperbole tend to rule, as when conservative politician Pat Buchanan ventured to Imperial Beach, Calif., to decry what he termed an "illegal invasion" of a million Mexicans a year.

It is therefore refreshing to read Los Angeles journalist Ken Ellingwood's book, "Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border" (Vintage, paper, $14), a clear-eyed and objective piece of reportage that cuts through simplistic rhetoric and humanizes its subject.

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Ellingwood knows the border well. He has spent time with overworked patrol agents, desperate immigrants and exasperated ranchers, and he has come to an understanding of what motivates them. He brings their myriad personalities and stories to the fore and carefully explores how they have been impacted by U.S. policies past and present. While globalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement have, according to Ellingwood, "begun to dissolve the U.S.-Mexico border as we knew it, that same frontier, in other ways, was hardened as never before." It is the story of this hardening and its effects that primarily concern him here.

When video was aired a decade ago depicting bands of Mexicans, many of them women and children, dodging through border traffic jams into the United States, American politicians were outraged and demanded tougher enforcement. The Clinton administration responded with Operation Gatekeeper, a draconian effort which included more border patrols plus multiple physical barriers, sensors and lights south of San Diego and El Paso.

Operation Gatekeeper was a dramatic success -- or so it initially seemed. Illegal immigration arrests fell to 30-year lows, and local residents rejoiced. In the case of San Diego, Ellingwood writes, "Anyone returning after an absence of several years would have been flabbergasted at the difference." Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein chortled: "What it tells me is it's a myth that the border can't be enforced. It can be enforced."

But the border is wide, and determined Mexicans simply shifted their focus to the desert communities in Arizona, to widespread consternation there. "This border is so open," one rancher grumbled to Ellingwood, "it's a ... joke." Good, independent-minded American that he was, this rancher apprehended illegals himself and held them for nervous border patrol agents. "You can't imagine what it's like to go eight or ten months without being woken up a half dozen times a night," he said.

Yet the aggravations faced by the ranchers pale in comparison to what was happening to many immigrants in the searing desert. Inadequately clothed and provisioned, and led by unscrupulous guides known as "coyotes" who frequently abandoned them, these vulnerable people began dying in droves. Alarmed border agents quickly went into rescue mode, tracking the vast wastes for dehydrated border crossers. Church groups set out water stations marked by blue flags.

Ellingwood details the grim prospects facing someone far from shade and water in triple-digit heat: "Muscles cramp and nausea sets in. The pulse and breathing quicken. The person may feel weak, suffer a headache or go faint as a result of the body's decision to steer blood from the organs -- brain included -- to the skin." When internal temperature hits 105 degrees, the skin becomes hot, the heart works harder, and the temperature continues to climb. Finally overwhelmed, the person thrashes about before dying. "It's a grisly, terrible, terrible death," one border agent told Ellingwood. "It's one of the most terrible deaths that can happen to a human being."

Ellingwood offers no pat solutions to the ongoing heartbreak along the border. As long as the labor-hungry U.S. economy hums, Mexicans seeking to improve their lot will attempt the dangerous crossing, with profound consequences to them, those whose land they must traverse, and, ultimately, the rest of us.

John Sledge edits the Mobile Register's Books page. He may be reached at the Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.

These deaths sit SQUARE ON THE SHOULDERS OF US OFFICIALS who have not the sense, courage or morality to stop this NONSENSE.

You cut off aid to Mexico; you enforce American law; you deport llegals; you prosecute lawbreakers; you seal that border and this nauseating crap will stop in a heartbeat.

Those "water bottle do-gooders" are getting people killed. They aren't saving lives, they are doing the opposite by creating media events that lead the people in Mexico to think there will be help and provisions along the way; that they will be welcomed here; and if they just "make it" to the United States all their dreams will come true.

THAT is a lie. THAT is a misconception. THAT is a fraud.