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Hired Hands: Breaching the border
Thousands start the perilous trek with offers in hand from U.S. employers.
By Susan Ferriss -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:01 am PDT Sunday, September 3, 2006
SÁSABE, Mexico -- Somewhere north of this Mexican cattle outpost, U.S. National Guard troops man 24-hour observation posts and better-equipped U.S. Border Patrol agents roam the desert, searching for illegal immigrants.

Yet even as the Bush administration points to a drop in apprehensions at the border as proof that the new security measures are working, thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans still gather daily in border towns like this, willing to risk anything for a slot in the U.S. labor market.

"There's a lot of migra now, mucha migra, but I must keep trying," said Felipe Pérez, 30, using the name migrants collectively call the border forces.

Pérez wiped away rivulets of sweat as he shouldered his backpack for a second attempt in 48 hours to climb over the wire cattle fence dividing this section of Mexico's Sonora state from Arizona. Once over, he planned to walk toward Phoenix, through the kind of 100-plus-degree heat that killed 267 migrants in Arizona alone last year.

But Pérez's determination is no blind desperation -- like most others making the trek, he not only knows he'll find work in the United States, he knows exactly what he will be doing, for whom and where.

In a mix of Spanish and English, he ticked off his past jobs: picking tomatoes in Florida and building homes in the Rockies. Now, after a visit home to Mexico, he was eager to get back to a construction job awaiting him in Colorado Springs.

No amount of enforcement, it seems, can counterbalance the fundamental motivations for crossing the border illegally.

Hurricanes wreaked havoc in Mexico's far south and Central America last year, prompting migration from places where it had been rare. Small Mexican farmers increasingly find they can't compete with bigger domestic producers or U.S. imports. Most industrial and service jobs still pay a pittance south of the border, migrants complain, and factory jobs assembling clothes for U.S. chain stores pay poorly, too.

By contrast, there is no shortage of promises of jobs from family and friends in the United States. Sometimes U.S. employers even assure veteran undocumented workers that they will hold a job open for them while they visit an ailing parent or a pining spouse back home. GGGG

Heeding the call -- job waiting
Eliezar Reyes was pondering a second attempt at crossing through Sásabe precisely because of a call from Florida to his home in Veracruz state, Mexico.

"In January, the boss called me. I mean, he told someone who speaks Spanish to call me and tell me there was work waiting for me," said Reyes, 24.

Three years ago, Reyes started mowing golf courses in St. Augustine, Fla., then moved into construction, earning $100 a day. He took a break last November to visit his wife in Mexico.

His construction boss was able to reach him there, Reyes said, because he had earned enough in the United States to have a telephone installed back home.

For those lacking a close connection to a U.S. boss, the smugglers known as coyotes make the link to employment.

In Tijuana, at a government-run shelter for underage deportees, 16-year-old Juan José Pérez told his story. From field work starting at age 12 in Mexico's Jalisco state, he had gone on to work construction in San Diego.

"I was given the name of a gringo coyote, a Mr. Wilson," he said. The man came to Pérez's Tijuana hotel to tell him whom to meet for his trek over mountains east of Tijuana. The smuggler also helped Pérez get a job renovating houses.

"Wherever you go there's corruption," Pérez said, eating cereal on his bunk bed at the shelter. "The gringos at work said, 'If the migra comes, you just run.' "

He'd be in the United States still, Pérez added, had he not been caught driving a car without a license. GGGG

Hooked on migrant labor
Even before President Bush ordered National Guard troops to the border in May, the United States had invested billions over the past decade attempting to block illegal immigrants from crossing in urban areas, such as Tijuana and El Paso.

That pushed migrants into Arizona's desert and other isolated terrain, resulting in a 500 percent increase in deaths between 1994 and 2004, according to the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. More than 3,000 fatalities have been recorded since the mid-1990s, and hundreds of bodies and bones remain unidentified, according to the CRLA Foundation and Mexico's Foreign Ministry.

Human rights activists have long objected to a border policy they consider not only cruel but contradictory, given that U.S. employers still hire undocumented immigrants.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major labor unions also have become migrant allies. They're urging the House of Representatives to look beyond border enforcement and support a Senate bill to increase immigrant and temporary work visas. Currently, low-skilled immigrant work visas are capped at 5,000 a year.

At the border, however, the political dispute often is expressed in simpler, personal terms.

"It looks like they don't like us but they want us for the work," said Oscar Galindo, 18, who had been deported earlier that day to Nogales, Mexico, a city separated from Nogales, Ariz., by a 10-foot metal fence.

Galindo had hoped to trade a waiter job paying $5 a day, plus tips, in Tlaxcala, Mexico, for work in Queens, N.Y., restaurants with his uncle.

Traveling with Galindo was Federico Ramírez, 24, who hoped to reach a place he called "Co-neck-tee-coot."

"New Haven," he added, where his parents have been living since he was 16.

"My mother went, my father went, my sister went and now I'm going," Ramírez said, trying to sound determined.

The two watched an American activist clean the injured feet of Armando Chávez, 26, whose family in New York had agreed to pay $2,000 in smuggling fees, on delivery.

Chávez grimaced as the volunteer from the Tucson-based No More Deaths poured a saltwater solution onto his split toes. He accepted a pair of new socks before limping toward a man whispering advice about how to get over the line.

No More Deaths has drawn both criticism and praise for providing water and food to migrants in the desert. Another group, Humane Borders, has erected water stations marked by blue flags.

"This is an issue that seems to cut to the hypocrisy of the United States today," said No More Deaths volunteer Charles Vernon, 30, a Colorado school bus driver, sitting in the shade of a tarp, handing out water.

"These are jobs we need people to do," Vernon said. "But we're going to make it as hard as possible for people to get into the United States to do them." GGGG

Many workers, many stories
Virginia National Guard volunteer Sgt. Clyde Hester sat on a hill just across the border from Vernon, scanning the horizon through binoculars.

"I can see the point of view of these people; however, I've got a job to do," said the Iraq veteran from Lee County, Va.

Hester wore a flak jacket and had an automatic weapon at his side, but his orders were to observe and report suspicious movement to the Border Patrol.

"We've got lots of unemployed people where I'm from," Hester said. "Of course, you have to find someone willing to work. We got people on welfare for generations."

About 40 percent of the 6,000 National Guard troops on border duty were sent to Arizona because of its popularity as a crossing point. Packed vans unload scores of people daily in Sásabe alone, dropping them near a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Led by a smuggler, a group of young men approached the Virgin, crossing themselves, then marched toward the fence with the purposefulness of Army recruits on a training mission. Dressed in black and camouflage, they carried heavy backpacks and gallons of water.

"Fresno," one said, when asked where they were headed. "Virginia," murmured another. "Washington," several said.

Nearby, a couple from Cancún piled out of a van with a crying 3-year-old. The boy's mother, Sandra Luz Ordóñez, 23, looked terrified, and with good reason: Another 3-year-old had perished in the desert earlier in the summer.

Ordóñez's husband, Amilcar Rodríguez, said he was tired of receiving what he considered poor wages -- less than $100 a week -- as an electrician in the high-cost Cancún resort. Sandra cleaned motels for $6 a day plus tips.

Their destination: North Carolina.

Joselino Velásquez, 36, who had accompanied them in the van, was trying to get to Tennessee, where relatives work in factories making chairs, batteries and car parts.

Last year's hurricanes, he said, left him with nowhere to work in Chiapas state, on the Guatemalan border.

"The plantations just slid away, destroying all the coffee and bananas," Velásquez said. GGGG

This day, it's too hot to cross
Two hours to the south, in another smuggling hub called Altar, a group sat in a main plaza awaiting smugglers' instructions.

Among them was Carlos Zozoya, 25, a Guatemalan who had learned English doing landscaping in Florida, Georgia and Michigan for more than five years. He had left the United States to visit his mother and now wanted to head back.

When he was just 3, Zozoya's family fled civil war in Guatemala and he grew up in a U.N. refugee camp in Mexico. Though the family eventually gained Mexican residency, that didn't assure economic stability. Many moved farther north, to the United States.

Referring to the summer heat as well as the National Guard, Zozoya said, "It is too hot now. We will try again to get across in October or November."

Some others who had recently been deported said they, too, were considering giving up -- at least for now. As Julio Adrian, 24, a Mexico City electrician and his sister, Norma, a secretary, took refuge from the heat under the No More Deaths tent in Nogales, they debated the risks of repeated attempts.

"It's Americans who kicked us out, and Americans who received us and helped us here," Julio said. "Now we have to decide whether to return to our ordinary lives, or keep going to cross over to the American dream."

Deportee Elvira Sotelo, 45, said she had lived in California and Salt Lake City for a total of 22 years before returning to Guerrero, Mexico, a few months ago to see an ailing sister.

In Utah, she said, she never went without work, at McDonald's, Wendy's and "Carlos, Jr's." As she sat in the dark outside a Nogales migrant shelter, she stared at a claim ticket Border Patrol agents had given her when they took her backpack. She never got her belongings back, she said, including some Mexican pesos, gold earrings and a jacket.

Although she planned to try to cross again the next day, Sotelo was nearly penniless and was contemplating work at a clothing-assembly factory in Nogales.

City officials there are encouraging the migrants to consider factory jobs in town, so they'll have some income and be less likely to steal.

"I think I'll try it," Sotelo said, trying to sound interested in the $80-a-week-pay. "They say it's a factory for Wal-Mart."


SEEKING LABOR
A look at U.S. immigration policy through the ages:
1790: United States requires two years of residency to become a citizen.

1808: Congress bans importation of slaves.

1816: Effort to repatriate free slaves to Liberia in Africa begins.

1845: Influx of Irish immigrants after the Potato Famine.

1849: California's Gold Rush prompts influx from all over, including China.

1854: Know-Nothing candidates sweep Congress, urge limits on Roman Catholic immigrants and a 21-year wait before immigrants can vote.

1860: U.S. labor needs, turmoil in Poland lead to admission of Poles, who will number about 2 million by 1914.

1868: Japanese laborers contracted to work in Hawaiian sugar cane industry.

1877: After Chinese help build the U.S. railroads, Congress issues a report citing criminal influence and moral impact of the Chinese.

1880: U.S. labor needs and crop failures in Italy usher in admission of 4 million Italians.

1882: Chinese Exclusion Act signed; businesses in the West increase recruitment of Mexicans.

1892: Labor demands contribute to opening of Ellis Island, the admission point for 12 million Europeans in the early 20th century.

1910: Mexican Revolution prompts thousands to flee north, with a million seeking security and work over the next 20 years.

1919: Thousands of immigrant labor activists are deported after raids led by U.S. attorney J. Edgar Hoover and the U.S. Bureau of Immigration, then part of the U.S. Department of Labor.

1922: Supreme Court rules Japanese immigrants are not eligible for citizenship.

1924: National Origins Act imposes immigrant quotas based on heritage, severely limiting Eastern and Southern Europeans, shutting out Japanese.

1929: Great Depression begins. Massive forced deportation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans follows.

1942: Mexican bracero guest workers imported for farm and railroad work at onset of World War II.

1943: Chinese Exclusion Act repealed.

1952: Immigration and Nationality Act allows all races to naturalize. It sets no restriction on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, but it imposes quotas on others and gives preference to skilled workers.

1954: Ellis Island closes.

1965: Immigration Act ends national origin quotas, establishes yearly per-country quota of 20,000, mostly based on family ties. Bracero program ends after more than 4.5 million temporary permits are issued.

1986: Immigration Reform and Control Act requires employers to view, but not authenticate, identification proving legal eligibility for work. Grants amnesty to 3 million based on long-term work or residency history.

1992: Addition of barriers and beefed-up Border Patrol begin in San Diego and El Paso, Texas. Crossings shift to Arizona, where migrant deaths escalate.

1996: Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act eliminates most judicial paths for the undocumented to legalize via family or employer sponsors. Creates small pilot program to check employee IDs by computer.

1997: Central American Relief Act allows certain undocumented Central Americans, Cubans and former Soviet Bloc natives to legalize. Half of the planned 10,000 annual low-skilled immigrant work visas are reserved for these applicants.

2000: One-party rule ends in Mexico; President Vicente Fox and President Bush discuss more work visas for Mexicans.

2001: Sept. 11 terrorist attacks lead to Patriot Act, which tightens scrutiny for visas.

December 2005: House passes bill to make illegal immigration a felony and to increase border security and document checks.

May 2006: Senate passes bill to increase border security and ID checks, along with the number of work-related visas. Congress deadlocks. President Bush requests 6,000 National Guard volunteers to support the Border Patrol.

Sources: University of California Davis School of Law; Migration Policy Institute; Library of Congress; University of North Carolina; U.S. Justice Department; U.S. Border Patrol; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; Ellis Island Museum; American Immigration Lawyers Association.


About the writer:
The Bee's Susan Ferriss can be reached at (916) 321-1267 or sferriss@sacbee.com.