U.S.-Mexico border

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August 22, 2011 | 3:04 PM | By

A unique binational gathering place turns 40

Learning recently that a unique gathering place on the U.S.-Mexico border was turning 40 inspired me to dig up this slide show from last year, with the audio and photos taken during my last visit there.

Friendship Park is a small circle surrounding a worn marble border monument from 1851 that sits on the international boundary south of San Diego. It’s part of the larger Border Field State Park, a place I’ve always found fascinating in that for years, it has been the only public park on the border where people can gather – though more recently, only with U.S. government permission – to visit with people in Mexico through the fence.

Until 2009, this was a popular day trip destination for Mexican American families from Los Angeles, Riverside and beyond. The park drew families who would pull up beach chairs and umbrellas and spend the day catching up with relatives on the Tijuana side of the fence. Some who traveled there were the spouses of deportees. Many were mixed-status families in which some members could travel, but some could not.

There were also cultural exchanges at the park, including the one above, a “fandango fronterizo” in May of last year that drew musicians and aficionados of traditional Veracruz son jarocho to both sides of the fence, playing and singing call-and-response style. It was organized by a San Diego group called Border Encuentro that for several years has organized binational concerts, salsa dancing, language classes and other events there.

The scene at the park changed radically two years ago, after Homeland Security erected a second fence several yards to the north, barring public access to the border. But groups are still able to obtain special permission to visit the monument area, now accessible through a gate operated by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Last weekend, dozens gathered there to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Friendship Park’s dedication on August 18, 1971 by then-first lady Pat Nixon. Many were activists and lawmakers who hope to see the park restored to its pre-2009 state. And judging from the photos in the accompanying story, there was also music.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Politics/Justice, Friendship Park, U.S.-Mexico border
March 4, 2011 | 6:04 PM | By

Before Banksy, the running family was immigration icon and art

Photo by Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

One of the original signs as seen on I-5 just north of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2006

If you don’t live in California, you might not be familiar with the road sign that has become synonymous with illegal immigration and immigration in general, and that has spawned countless interpretations over the years. But you may have seen the image itself, or a version of it.

It’s the black silhouette of a family of three set against a bright yellow background, the characters leaning forward as they run. There’s a man, a woman and a little girl, her pigtails flying. Even without faces, the characters convey a sense of desperation.

The running family was a familiar sight to motorists driving between Los Angeles and San Diego for close to 20 years, emblazoned on signs along Interstate 5. Several of the signs went up in the San Diego area in the early 1990s as a warning to motorists at a time when smugglers were forcing their charges to run across the freeway to evade immigration authorities, often with tragic results.

Screen shot of a Banksy stencil from a video posted on L.A. blog Mis Neighbors

The week before the Oscars, the elusive British street artist Banksy catapulted the running migrant family back into the spotlight. While visiting Los Angeles after being nominated for his documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the artist went about town putting up his signature stencils, among them at least one of the road sign characters, who were depicted flying a kite.

But while Banksy is perhaps the best known artist to reinterpret the running family lately, he’s hardly the first.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Politics/Justice, Banksy, Caltrans, Running family freeway sign, U.S.-Mexico border
January 10, 2011 | 1:37 PM | By

After the Tucson shooting, conversation about ‘rhetoric’ remains tied to immigration

Photo by Tom Peck/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Border fence in Cochise County, AZ

It’s a given that the suspected gunman in the fatal shooting that left six dead and critically wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords this weekend in Tucson wasn’t acting purely on the political rhetoric coming out of the Grand Canyon State, nor on Sarah Palin’s map of congressional districts with crosshairs over them. As with most things, it’s much more complicated than that.

But Saturday’s tragedy, regardless of the shooter’s motive, has opened up a discussion that is still worth having. The incident has led to a national conversation about the political tone that has been coming out of Arizona, and much of that has to do with immigration politics – and, yes, the surrounding rhetoric.

The state is embroiled in controversy over its SB 1070 illegal immigration law, another new law that has essentially banned a Mexican American studies program, and the championing by some conservative political leaders of a national movement to deny U.S. citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants.

It’s not surprising, given all this, that the comments made this weekend by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik have made the rounds the way they have, making him a hero to some and a villain to others. What he said:

“The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous…And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Has it? A series of stories and commentaries have been addressing the influence of immigration politics in Arizona as part of the greater discourse surrounding the shooting. A sampling:

The Los Angeles Times had an interesting analysis of what is described as an “us-versus-them” political climate largely fueled by immigration, quoting state Sen. Russell Pearce (the sponsor of SB 1070, and an anti-birthright citizenship advocate) at an event in Phoenix that took place before the shooting:

“We’re leading the nation,” state Sen. Russell Pearce told the Maricopa County Republican Party as he celebrated the GOP’s clean sweep of state elections in November and Arizona’s influence on immigration and other issues.

Pearce, who wrote a tough immigration law last year, went on in the speech later posted on YouTube: “If it wasn’t for Arizona you wouldn’t have the debate going on that you have. … We’ve changed the face of this nation through the tea party, through Americans who want their government back.”

Congressional Quarterly’s Theodore Emery wrote in Congress.org that the shooting occurred against a “backdrop” of immigration issues, quoting various sources and noting that Giffords had opposed SB 1070. From the piece:

…immigration has been a consistent theme for Giffords, a Democratic moderate whose district in the southeast part of Arizona shares a 100-mile border with Mexico and has seen several high-profile shootings.

It was inside Arizona’s 8th District boundaries that 58-year-old rancher Robert Krentz and his dog were shot and killed last March, fueling concerns about spillover drug violence along the border and helping spur state lawmakers to enact a tough and controversial crackdown on illegal immigration.

Writing for CNN, syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette (a former colleague) mentioned having lived for a while in Arizona in the 1990s in an opinion piece titled “Sheriff Dupnik is right about Arizona.” He wrote:

Raise your hand if you have had it with the drama capital of America, which seems to spend more time on the front page than the other 49 states combined. Or if you think the Grand Canyon State has become, in recent years, more trouble than it’s worth. Or if you feel like saying, to paraphrase what folk singer Phil Ochs said about Mississippi in the 1960s: “Here’s to the people you’ve torn out the heart of. Arizona, find yourself another country to be part of.”

While not specifically addressing Arizona politics or immigration, Jennifer Rubin defended conservative lawmakers and media in a Washington Post opinion piece, pointing out that accused shooter Jared Lee Loughner had no known political agenda:

It is as noxious to associate Saturday’s shooting with conservative campaign rhetoric, even that which is over-the-top, as it would be to claim that violence is the doing of those who labeled Tea Partyers un-American (as Democratic leaders did during the health-care debate) or of those who accuse senators of being unpatriotic (as a liberal newspaper columnist recently did). If a lunatic attacks a businessman, are we to blame Obama for vilifying the Chamber of Commerce?

Lastly, Dee Dee Garcia Blase, the founder of a conservative Latino group in Arizona called Somos Republicans, posted on the group’s website yesterday that she overheard a comment that offended her while at a political gathering Saturday, shortly after news of the shooting was announced:

While in shock and in disbelief, I heard snickers in the distance and muffled voices asserting that the shooting was probably “done by an illegal.”

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Arizona shooting, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, SB 1070, Sen. Russell Pearce, U.S.-Mexico border
January 5, 2011 | 11:40 PM | By

Video: Climbing the border fence in less than 18 seconds

This comes via The Atlantic’s Daily Dish.

I probably couldn’t do this myself, at least not nearly as fast. But obviously, many people can.

Embedded into the video near the end is a link to a trailer for filmmaker Roy Germano’s award-winning documentary “The Other Side of Immigration,” which tells the immigration story from the perspective of small-town residents in Mexico and explores why so many people leave to work in the United States.

The fence video is a clever attention-grabber for the film, but it gets its own point across in no time.

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Border fence, U.S.-Mexico border
December 27, 2010 | 5:20 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2010, #5: The Tamaulipas migrant massacre

A screen shot from the website, 72migrantes.com. Photo by Lenin Nolly Araujo.

Immigration has been one of the biggest topics in the news this year, pretty much as it has been nearly every year during the past decade. This year was of special interest, however, not only in terms of what happened (as in Arizona’s partial enactment of its precedent-setting SB 1070), but also because of what didn’t happen, as in the recent defeat of the Dream Act.

This week I’ll be highlighting the top five immigration stories of 2010. This is only my list – everyone who is affected by or follows immigration issues will likely have his or her own list of the most important stories, as there are many of them. But here are the biggest stories as I’ve observed them this year, starting with this one:

#5: The Tamaulipas migrant massacre

Last week, when the Mexican government admitted that it was investigating the reported kidnapping of 50 Central American migrants earlier this month in the southern state of Chiapas, the news recalled a disturbing story from earlier this year: The tragic kidnapping and mass murder of 72 Central and South American migrants last August by drug cartel soldiers in the border state of Tamaulipas.

A young Ecuadoran man who lived to tell about it did so by pretending he was dead after receiving a bullet wound to the neck, then fleeing and seeking help. From one story:

He and fellow migrants from Central and South America, he told authorities, were headed to the Texas border with the hope of making it into the United States. Instead, everyone had been shot dead, slaughtered by gangsters even as they pleaded for their lives.

Much has been reported on the life-threatening dangers encountered by those crossing illegally over the Mexican border: the searing heat that kills hundreds each year, bandits, smugglers who kidnap the migrants and hold them for ransom in drop houses. Much has also been reported on the hazards faced by people from other countries who traverse Mexico in hopes of reaching the United States, many of them Central Americans who risk death, mutilation and assault clinging to the northbound trains.

However, the story of the 72 murdered migrants, their bodies left in an abandoned warehouse on a ranch less than a hundred miles from the Texas border, brought international attention to just how perilous this journey has become. The human smuggling trade has become ever more rife with dangerous organized crime elements, and the border region that these people make their way across continues to be gripped by drug violence. As a story in The Economist put it after the killings, there is no safe passage.

The Mexican government’s National Human Rights Commission has estimated that several thousand migrants, mostly Central Americans, fell victim to kidnappers last year. Just yesterday, El Salvador’s government reported the kidnapping of nine additional migrants by gunmen last week from a Mexican train, five of whom escaped. One was killed, and three are missing.

Some of those murdered in Tamaulipas were never unidentified. Last fall for the Day of the Dead, a group of writers and photographers put together a moving tribute to all of the victims.

May they rest in peace.

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Dream Act, SB 1070, Tamaulipas, Top stories of 2010, U.S.-Mexico border
December 21, 2010 | 1:33 PM | By

Q&A: UCSD immigration expert Wayne Cornelius on why the Dream Act went down

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

Participants in a vigil and rally for the Dream Act in downtown Los Angeles earlier this month

The defeat in the Senate last Saturday of the Dream Act, which would have granted conditional legal status to qualifying undocumented college students, graduates and military hopefuls who arrived here before age 16, was just the most recent action on a proposal that has been circulating for nearly a decade. And each time it has come up for a vote, UC San Diego’s Wayne Cornelius has followed it, as he has every other federal immigration proposal that has come and gone since then.

Cornelius is one of the nation’s leading scholars on immigration and U.S.-Mexico border issues, a political scientist and director emeritus of UCSD’s Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. He is now associate director of the university’s Center of Expertise on Migration and Health.

After years of observing the politics of immigration, Cornelius has his own take on why the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act failed this time around, in spite of unprecedented student activism and a streamlining of the bill that allowed it to clear the House. He shares his opinion on the Obama administration’s strategy of pushing tough enforcement as a means to win support for broader immigration reform, a strategy he believes is doomed to fail.

M-A: Why do you think that in this latest round of the Dream Act, with all of the activism, the recent tightening of the bill and the positive Congressional Budget Office analysis, the proposal still failed? Was it purely partisan politics, or is there any sort of adjustment that could have saved it?

Cornelius: The partisan politics of the Dream Act were impossible to overcome. In this sense, it wasn’t fixable, however many tightening concessions were made.

The larger problem is that the entire Obama immigration policy strategy was based on a high-risk gamble that winning credibility on border and interior enforcement among members of Congress would buy the political space needed to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

This strategy was fundamentally misconceived because Republicans in Congress have found tough immigration stances to be reliably effective in mobilizing their base, and because the Great Recession heightened public anxiety and anger about immigration.

The Obama administration has continued the Bush II-era border fortification project and also significantly toughened interior enforcement, pushing spending on all forms of immigration enforcement to unprecedented levels. But with the failure of the Dream Act, and the negligible probability of enacting any larger legalization program in the next Congress, President Obama is left with nothing but the stick.

His immigration legacy may well turn out to be a step-level increase in immigration enforcement and spending, with no progress on anything unrelated to pursuing the undocumented – even high-achieving students brought to this country as children. To those of us who worked hard in his presidential campaign, that is a bitter pill.

M-A: What did you see as the Dream Act opponents’ main concerns?

Cornelius: Publicly, they said that they opposed rewarding law-breakers (undocumented students brought to the U.S. as children?), and that legalizing this small population would serve as a magnet for untold millions of new illegal aliens (despite a total lack of empirical evidence to support this “magnet” hypothesis). But this is a smoke screen. These are the arguments that play well with the GOP’s base and Tea Partiers. Whether GOP members of Congress really believe them or not, that’s what determines their strategy on this issue.
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M-A: What makes it so difficult for non-enforcement (i.e. non-fence, etc.) immigration reform bills to pass? Is it a question of being able to quantify results?

Cornelius: None of the proponents of tougher immigration controls is interested in evidence-based policymaking.

M-A: So what happens next? Non-enforcement measures like this one appear to stand no chance before 2012. Then what?

Cornelius: The next two years may bring some ramping down of the most heavy-handed interior enforcement activities, but the genie is now out of the bottle.

In many cities and counties, for example, local police have assumed an aggressive immigration enforcement role that will not be surrendered easily. Our most recent (UCSD/Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, January-February 2010) survey of migrants from Jalisco found that more than one-quarter of them had been stopped by police and interrogated about their immigration status within the last twelve months.

I don’t see a Congressional coalition capable of withstanding the anti-immigration forces anytime in the foreseeable future. Obama’s political advisors will be telling him that pushing comprehensive immigration reform would complicate the challenge of winning back independent voters who have deserted him in the last two years (independents tend to prefer a harder line on immigration than Democrats), so he can’t go too far in that direction. The countervailing pressure will come from Latinos, who will justifiably feel that they have been thrown under the reelection bus.

What it will take to change the basic political calculus is a broad, robust, sustained economic recovery that generates highly visible labor shortages across the country and refocuses public and Congressional attention on immigration as one solution to this problem.

Want to predict when that will happen?

FILED UNDER: Health/Education, Politics/Justice, Dream Act, U.S. Senate, U.S.-Mexico border, UC San Diego
November 10, 2010 | 1:46 PM | By

A haunting tribute to ‘Los 72′

A screen shot from the website, 72migrantes.com. Photo by Lenin Nolly Araujo

Via a post on Facebook the other day, I came across this moving tribute and “virtual altar” dedicated to the 72 U.S.-bound migrants who were massacred last August in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, just a stone’s throw from the Texas border.

The Central and South American victims had endured a long, arduous and dangerous trek to come so close to their destination. They were kidnapped, and ultimately killed, by drug cartel soldiers.

The website is in Spanish, with essays contributed by numerous writers in honor of each victim, including the unidentified. The photos and music are haunting enough to transcend language.

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Tamaulipas massacre, U.S.-Mexico border
November 3, 2010 | 1:38 PM | By

Quote of the moment: A Latino first-time voter on offensive campaign ads

“That was the final straw. She was depicting me as a gang member. I served seven years in the Marine Corps.”

- Gilberto Ramirez, a Reno concrete worker and first-time voter quoted in the Las Vegas Sun regarding defeated Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s campaign ads

The Sun and various other news outlets have reported on just how critically decisive the Latino vote was in the re-election of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid captured the support of 90 percent of Nevada’s Latino voters, who turned out in record numbers – some, like recently-naturalized citizen Ramirez, incensed by a series of much-criticized campaign ads from Reid’s Republican opponent Sharron Angle.

Perhaps the Angle ad that drew the most ire was one called “The Wave,” in which images of young Latino-looking men appeared with a voiceover that began: “Waves of illegal aliens streaming across our border, joining violent gangs, forcing families to live in fear…”

The Sun story referred to the record Latino voter turnout as a “likely backlash to an ad aired by a Republican operative explicitly telling Hispanics not to vote, as well as inflammatory ads from Angle’s campaign that used images of Hispanic youth dressed as gang members.”

For future campaign ad directors, food for thought.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Politics/Justice, Election 2010, Sen. Harry Reid, Sharron Angle, U.S.-Mexico border