La Linea Fronteriza
SPECIAL FEATURE
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REPORT TO BE POSTED
IMMIGRATION
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Even as we were conducting interviews in Reynosa during August 2004, eight migrants and a smuggler died when a car veered into an irrigation canal near McAllen, Texas. Four were from El Salvador and two from Honduras. News pages are frequently filled with analysis of migrant deaths in tractor-trailers and rail cars across Texas and the Southwest.
In a routine period, May 1 - 12, 2003, along the border between Reynosa and Nuevo Loredo, Mexico's National Migration Institute (Instituto Nacional de Migracion) officers arrested 55 Central Americans, 23 from Honduras, 19 from Guatemala, and 13 from El Salvador. One migrant from Colombia and one from the Dominican Republic were also arrested.
The largest number of migrants come from Mexico. University of California-Davis Migration News reports that "about 10 percent of the 115 million persons born in Mexico have migrated to the United States, and Mexicans continue to settle in the U.S. at the rate of about 500,000 a year."
Other sources indicate the numbers are much higher. A Time Magazine investigation claims three million people will illegally enter the U.S. in 2004, nearly half of which will illegally cross Arizona's 375-mile border with Mexico at a rate of 4,000 per day.
As the economic imbalance between the United States and Mexico grows, and the peso continues to decline against the dollar, immigrants are seeking work as day laborers, service providers, and business owners within the growing immigrant communities.
Americans' higher standard of living is increasingly dependent on production of cheap products based on cheap labor. With continuing consolidation of ownership in most industries, Americans rely on the ability of their dollar to by more, and on growing credit card debt, rather than increasing their status compared to suitable incomes, in order to maintain their standards.
Some say NAFTA will allow for further consolidation of ownership across international boundaries and increase the demand for cheap labor, both in the United States, where the average American's buying power of services is decreased, and in other countries where products are manufactured at the lowest possible price. (The practice is the basis of maquiladora operations on the Mexican side of the border.)
During a discussion of the free trade agreement's policies, one undocumented worker in Houston told an audience of sympathizers, "I came here to trade my labor."
Some American businesses rely on buying labor below living standards in the U.S. to compete for maximum profits.
By the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, for every illegal immigrant companies hire, employers can be fined $10,000, an amount substantially less than the increased cost of hiring U.S. citizens and paying for their health and retirement benefits.
Time Magazine reports, Immigration and Naturalization Service fines against employers for immigration-law violations" have decreased as reliance on cheap labor provided by undocumented workers has increased: 909 fines in 1995; fewer than 800 in 97; fewer than 200 in 2000; fewer than 100 in 2001; 13 in 2002.
CORRUPTION AND CRIME
The U.S.-Mexico border's most infamous crimes are the deaths and disappearances of several hundred young women in Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. Most of the women worked in the maquiladora industry, and most were forced to commute during odd hours in unsafe conditions. Organizations on both sides of the border have called for the assembly factory owners to invest in security, with little progress. Authorities have done little solve the crimes.
Juarez has been the site of an ongoing struggle between drug cartels, as well as gunfights between local and federal police.
In Nuevo Laredo, officials have expressed concern over alleged corruption of local and federal police by powerful cartels, while there have been unsolved murders of young women and mass killings of rival drug traffickers, reported in the Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo newspapers, El Mañana, and Ciudad Juarez's El Diario.
Police corruption in Reynosa led the U.S. State Department to issue a Travel Advisory warning to tourists in September 2004.
ECONOMY
Coming soon.
EDUCATION
Coming soon.
Sources:
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Copyright © 2004 by Mark Lacy and Houston Institute for Culture.