Migration is a worldwide phenomenon; a consequence of the Neoliberal politics imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as a form of inhuman enrichment of the most powerful businesses, while the poor become poorer, paying the costs of that enrichment. But at the same time, globalization is generating its own enemies as it continues to divide. For example, one of the countries that impose Neoliberal measures is the United States, a country that receives undocumented laborers from the entire world to such a degree that the government of the country considers them an issue of national security. The imprisonments and racist laws increase day by day, illustrated by the fact that members of the US border patrol have been authorized to shoot rubber bullets at migrants, and by official tolerance of the ranchers that hunt migrants like rabbits.

The United States pressures Mexico more than other countries because it is the obligatory entry point, and for previous issues with some migrant workers, largely those that have been part of guerrilla or other social movements in Colombia, Korea, El Salvador, Peru, China, Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Russia, the Philippines, etc.

This migrant phenomenon is being generated on a worldwide level due to lack of employment, the lowered prices of agricultural products and the high costs of staple items, by natural disasters, wars, and by unequal relations between nations, where the most rich submit the most poor to their economic restructuring, etc.

As migrant numbers increase, the borders become the most important point of control, as they are the focal point for entry, in this case into the United States. For this reason, I will elaborate here on the migration problem and national security in Mexico, its relation with the United States, and the implications for Mexico’s southern border.

Immigrants from any part of the world who wish to enter the United States “to leave poverty behind” do so with great effort. Unfortunately, along the route they are swindled by “polleros” and a network of migrant traffickers. According to the statistics of the National Institute of Migration (INM) in Chiapas, this network is composed of 52 groups that operate in Mexico alone, possessing instruments and sophisticated machinery to falsify documents, with clandestine hierarchies that permit the localization of the operators but not the bosses. They are victims of extortion from the Mexican immigration agents and various elements of police that they encounter along the way. Along with this network of undocumented labor traffickers, corollary problems arise in prostitution, drug trafficking, organized delinquency, etc.

Immigration Statistics from the Southern Border of Mexico

By land, the obligatory passage of Central American, South American and Asian migrants to the United States is the southern border of Mexico. In this sense, Chiapas is the principal port of entry as it shares with Guatemala 962 kilometers of border, corresponding to 17 Chiapanecan municipalities in the mountains, the coast and the jungle. The principal points of entry have been Ciudad Hidalgo, Talisman, Motozintla, Mazapa de Madero, Amatenango de la Frontera, Frontera Comalapa, Ciudad Cuauhtemoc, Marques de Comillas, and others. Migrants continually look for more obscure points of entry and now they try to cross by water, mountains and air. According to the official report from the National Institute of Migration published in the Milenio Semanal magazine on June 18, 2001, in 1999 53,432 Guatemalans were detained, 47,707 Hondurans, 26,998 Salvadorans, 1,597 Nicaraguans, 647 Ecuadorians, 458 Chinese, 153 Colombians, 117 from Belize, 107 from Russia, and 760 from various other countries. In 2000, 78,819 Guatemalans were detained, along with 45,604 Hondurans, 37,203 Salvadorans, 2,416 Ecuadorians, 1,938 Nicaraguans, 294 Peruvians, 273 Colombians, 184 from Iraq, 181 from Dominican Republic, and 1,535 from various other countries. Migrants have died from assaults and robberies at the hands of known gangs such as the “salvatruchas”, from heat exhaustion, from accidents, hunger, etc. In 1999, 192 persons died. In 2000, 326 died and in 2001 to date, 47 persons have perished. But the Consul of El Salvador in Tapachula informed that 130 Central Americans have died to date this year.

The migration problem has also become an issue of national security for Mexico, in that the implementation of the Puebla Panama Plan (PPP) is a project that encompasses various issues, among them, the reduction of immigration. Although the coordinator of the PPP, Florencio Salazar, refuses to recognize that Mexico is doing the dirty work for the United States, the facts from Chiapas confirm that that is in fact the truth.

The PPP proposes the installation of maquiladoras in Central America and the southern border of Mexico as a tool for stopping immigration, but it does not propose that adequate salary scales be established. Neither does it address the necessity for health and education services, and much less that workers have the right to form unions. For these reasons, the original causes of migration are not resolved by the PPP. To guarantee its implementation, the southern borders of Mexico and Central America are being militarized. In Chiapas, the Mexican army has repositioned along the Guatemalan border, and is visible more and more along more obscure routes like Niquivil, Tonincanake, Pavencul and Buenos Aires between the municipalities of Motozintla, Mazapa de Madero y Comalapa, in roadblocks that are installed daily in an intermittent manner, and with constant patrols from Tapachula to Angel Albino Corzo, crossing the entire Sierra Madre mountains of Chiapas – arguing that they are applying the Federal Firearms and Explosives Law. It is furthermore evident that this military-police belt goes from Ciudad Hidalgo, passing through La Trinitaria, Marques de Comillas, and continues to Palenque in Chiapas, prolonging all the way to the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo on the border with Belize. While it may be true that militarization is implemented in Chiapas in response to the presence of the EZLN, it also functions for the detention of migrants and to protect interests of the transnational companies integrated into the PPP (though Chiapan government agents and Vicente Fox deny it, the evidences have been manifest upon observing the border with Guatemala). Immigration agents, police agents and the military have not been able to avoid that some of their own members become involved in the trafficking of migrant workers. In a recent case only four weeks ago, 3 Mexican soldiers that were assigned to bring humanitarian aid to El Salvador during their natural disasters, introduced a group of undocumented individuals upon their return to Mexico.

The wide reaching program along Mexico’s southern border is known as the “Sealing of the Southern Border” that goes from Veracruz to the Yucatan peninsula, and is achieved through the coordination of various arms of the Mexican police such as the National Migration Institute, the Mexican Army, the Federal Highway Police, the Public Security Police, the Fiscal Police, the Attorney General (PGR), and others. Many of these coordinated groups function as Mixed Operation Bases (BOM) and are located at strategic points. One of the passages that is most intensively subject to efforts to close is the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, as the narrowest crossing in the Mexican territory, under the so-called “Southern Plan” that calls for intensification of police vigilance to detain immigrants. To achieve this, the programs of “Beta Sur” will be reinforced, that according to an immigration official from the south, Felipe de Jesus Preciado Coronado, will increase by three programs with a budget of 2 million pesos a month (Diario Cuarto Poder, July 26, 2001).

The Northern Border

While along the northern border of Mexico, along the more than 3000 kilometers that our country shares with the United States, in cities such as Tijuana and Mexicali, in Baja California; San Luis Rio Colorado, Agua Prieta and Nogales in Sonora; Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua; Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros in Tamaulipas, the situation is much more complicated because the US has reinforced police vigilance and increased measures to detain immigration. Along the 224 kilometers that the state of California shares with Mexico, since November 21, 1993 the United States constructed a metal fence and has increased the border patrols. In 1994, 1,475 border patrol agents worked along the border from San Diego to the Yuma desert. In 1999, there were 2,855 border patrol agents, the illumination system was reinforced for nighttime visibility, sensors were installed, and telescopic sighting devices were increased.  The US government’s strategy is to make crossing impossible along a 22.4 kilometer stretch  where visibility is especially good, and to detour immigration towards San Diego through remote zones where mountain peaks reach 1800 meters and temperatures may reach 50°C (122°F) in the shade. 

Most of the California border patrol is concentrated in San Diego, and dedicates its efforts to covering 105.6 kilometers of border. One fourth of the border patrol personnel is utilized along this stretch, where 72% of the metal fences and 54% of the high-intensity lights have been installed of those encountered along the entire 3200 kilometer border from the Pacific Ocean to Brownsville, Texas. According to Claudia Smith of California Rural Legal Assistance, these efforts are all a part of “Operation Gatekeeper”, implemented by the government of the US.

Data from the photo-journalist Roberto Cordova Leyva (photographic exposition “At the Edge of the Line”, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, November 2000): the number of dead in California alone has been: in 1994, 23 persons; in 1995, 61 persons; in 1996, 59 dead; in 1997, 89 dead; in 1998 there were 147 deaths; in 1999, 111 individuals perished; in 2000 there were 120 deaths registered, and all along the border between the US and Mexico, 491 people died according to reports from migrant defense groups, where half of those that died perished from hypothermia or sunstroke. California is the state that has registered the highest number of deaths, and is where 3 out of 4 of the highest risk areas for migrants are found. Since 1992, anonymous xenophobic campaigns have circulated against migrants, through flyers that say: “If he is not white, kill him. Remember: stop the mud or drown.” Many Mexican politicians who have campaigned along the northern border have spouted in speeches “for just and humane treatment for migrants” – and when they are in power, they continue to support Neoliberal policies that only make migration grow. Human rights violations against immigrants within the United States continue to occur, while in the last six years, only six migrant employers have been prosecuted in the border counties of California, for violation of human rights, because the Immigration and Naturalization Service dedicates only 2% of its time to enforcing immigration laws in the workplace. There are more than 3200 immigrants imprisoned in the states of Texas and Virginia, the states where the most racist laws have been implemented against them, including the death penalty.

Mexico has been a source of cheap laborers and undocumented persons to the United States for many years, but in the last ten years the process has been accelerated, to such a degree that of 11 million immigrants that work in the US, 3 million are Mexican, from the states of Oaxaca, Zacatecas, Michoacan, Guanajuato, Puebla, Chiapas, Guerrero, Sinaloa, and others. Due to the pressure put upon the Embassy and Consulates of our country by the immigrant workers and solidarity groups, the government of Vicente Fox is trying to implement a “bracero program” that consists of closing the southern border to Central Americans, and opening the border to Mexicans, who would then enter with legal documents to the US for a specified period. This plan would seem to imply low salaries, no right to health care or educational facilities, no right to unionize, and would generate a confrontation with the immigrant workers that have been working for several years living in the US, and are trying to legalize their immigration status (“amnesty” as the migrants call it), and generate massive unemployment.

On the other hand, the migrant organizations from various countries in the United States, for two years now have implemented a process to modify the law that would bestow an increased respect, more social mobility, rights to health care, education, and work – as for any North American citizen. This network of approximately 250 organizations is called the National Organizers Alliance, and has constructed a migrant organizers movement that seeks to obtain better living conditions through their own logic, dynamic and organizational structure. In its second meeting from June 27 to July 1 in Sonoma, California, more than 600 people attended and many of them formed part of the organized process against globalization that has manifested itself in Seattle, Washington, DC, etc., because then know and are conscious that they are a product of that same globalization.

Concerning the modification of US law with regard to immigration, one of the most advanced proposals that is significantly supported is the so-called “HR-500” presented to the National Congress in February of this year by Congressman Luis Gutierrez (Democrat from Illinois, of Puerto Rican descent). This proposal seeks to legalize and give permanent residence to migrants in the US, and among other things seeks labor protection and the solution of a series of necessities for the undocumented population. This legislative initiative is supported by 30 members of Congress, among them Maxine Walters, Grace Napolitano, Loretta Sanchez and others.

In conclusion, I consider that the migratory phenomenon will not be solved with increased infrastructure installed along the border: militarization, sensors and metal fences will not stop the flow of undocumented persons to any part of the world, as long as humane and just treatment is not afforded to them and the root causes that provoke migration are not solved -- when transnational capital centers its attention on the human face and not only increasing profits, when the world is more just.

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