Monday, June 20, 2005
Cycle of migration broken: Illegal migrants staying longer

CLAUDINE LoMONACO
Tucson Citizen

Supervisory Border Patrol agent Mike Gramley waits for a transport vehicle after taking an illegal immigrant into custody outside Yuma on June 6.
Raul Rodriguez tried to cross the border July 4 because he figured Border Patrol agents would be on holiday and he'd have a better chance to make it.
He was wrong.

Over the next two weeks, he made several more unsuccessful attempts, dodged Border Patrol bullets and saw a woman bleed to death while giving birth in the desert before he finally made it to a construction job in Tucson.

It was the third time he'd crossed in three years and his 14th attempt. The 33-year-old, 6-foot-1-inch carpenter swore he'd never cross again. It was too dangerous.

A month later, he arranged for his wife, named America, to join him in what they agreed would be their new country. With the aid of fake papers, they later brought in their 4-year-old daughter, Noemi, and then-8-year-old, Raul. By December 2001, the family was reunited.

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America and Raul are two of a growing number of Mexicans who are settling permanently in the United States to keep their families together and avoid tightened border security rather than shuttling back and forth like earlier illegal migrants.

It's one of the main reasons, experts say, that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has ballooned to an estimated 11 million people - 6 million of them from Mexico - and why nearly half of all illegal immigrants are now women and children.

The Rodriguezes haven't returned to Aconchi, Raul's village outside Hermosillo, since they moved here.

It's hard being away from home and their parents, but they are not alone. Friends and family from Aconchi fill at least 12 units in the well-manicured, midtown apartment complex where the Rodriguezes live.

Most are here to stay. But it wasn't always like this.

Rodriguez's 35-year-old sister, Mercedes, who lives in the complex with her two American-born children, remembers when their grandfather used to work in the Yuma lettuce fields. He'd leave Aconchi for six months every year.

"He'd bring us dolls, toys, clothes, everything," said Mercedes, who originally came to Tucson in 1995 to study English and pursue a master's degree at the University of Arizona in biochemistry. Lack of money derailed her plans, and she now works as a cook in a restaurant. "It was a party when he came home."

Their grandfather, Francisco Rodriguez, first started crossing north in the 1940s as a part of the bracero program, when U.S. companies traveled to villages such as Aconchi to recruit workers. The program, and legal papers that came with it, ended in the early 1960s, but crossing was still relatively easy, and companies still needed the labor.

The cycle of migration was broken in mid-1990s, when the United States began the first serious attempt to stem illegal immigration along its border, said Jorge Santibanez, president of El Colegio de Frontera Norte in Tijuana.

Since 1993, the United States has spent $14 billion fortifying the border. Spending has increased from $480 million a year, adjusted for inflation, to $1.4 billion, most of it for the Southwest border. Over that time, the U.S. Border Patrol has swelled from 3,389 agents to 9,700 and become the largest uniformed police force in the nation. The Southwest border has become militarized with fences, aircraft, sensors and cameras, and Arizona has become the superhighway of illegal immigration.

But the push appears to have done little to the number of people crossing. The Border Patrol catches about a million people a year, about the same number it has caught each of the past 20 years. But the cost has ballooned. In 1992, it cost $300 to make one arrest along the border. Today, it costs $1,700, according to a recently released Cato Institute study by Princeton professor and immigration expert Douglas Massey.