style="font-size:15px;"> “No business for the coyote. No people dead along the border. Then people in Mexico can come here and work, and the United States has cheap workers. That’s simple. Open the border and you have no problems. Then Mexican people can feel free to come here, like the Americans go to Mexico.”
If the border were open, where would Juana María prefer to live, Mexico or California?
“I love the life in California, but I miss my family,” she says, sounding a little dreamy.
Especially Christmas time, or New Year, when we make family parties. The traditions are so different comparing here to there. In Mexico we eat beans and cheese and tortillas, but every family is together. Here we have turkeys with everything, but I don’t feel happy. […] I mean, I feel happy because my kids have the best school, and we stay together with my husband. But I have a heart, and my heart is in Mexico.
On the crime-ridden, violent streets of Nuevo Laredo, some huddled masses listen to mariachis and wait for nighttime as they plot how to cross without documents from Mexico into Texas.
“I’m not worried about the Migra,” says one worker poised to cross the Rio Grande. “Cuando el estómago tiene hambre, no piensa en dificultades.” When the stomach is hungry, you don’t think of difficulties. The men eat sardines from tins, sip orange soda and trade stories.
“I usually go to Florida with the tobacco, or North Carolina for the tomato.”
How many times have you crossed?
“Well, I’ve crossed a lot of times. Maybe fifty or sixty.” A laugh.
On the Day of the Migrant for years local Catholics led processions in Nuevo Laredo from the central park—where many migrants gather before making the crossing—across town to the International Bridge. They walk in silence and carry white crosses to commemorate the Mexicans who have died trying to get into the United States. Nuevo Laredo Priest Leonardo López calls the deaths “executions by unemployment, the economy, and the persecutions of migrants.”1 Advocates for migrants’ rights blame U.S. border policies and the unsuccessful Mexican economy for the desperation that drives them to cross the border illicitly. “These immigrants that have died are not only victims of a dream but also of their desire to get ahead, of the frustration of not having money or stability,” says López.
Trump-era orders added to the desperation in Nuevo Laredo and other Mexican borderland cities. Under the dismissive so-called Remain in Mexico policy, migrants traversing Mexico seeking asylum in the United States were forced to stay on the south side of the frontier until their number was called for a hearing—and wait for weeks that stretched into months, a dangerous and deplorable limbo that for most ended with asylum denied. The vicious, inhumane policy led desperate families to send their children across the border alone because U.S. law obligated officials to accept into El Norte unaccompanied minors applying for asylum.
Pueblos along the migrant trail make migradollars as staging points for the trek north. Places such as Altar, 160 miles southwest of Tucson, fill with travelers as the U.S. Border Patrol tightened border security at urban crossing points. From Altar north into the United States there is nothing much more than desert, bandits and bribe-taking cops. In addition to merchants selling food and water in Altar, organized smuggling gangs are at work, providing temporary housing in marginal casas de huéspedes—guesthouses—and offering onward guided trips into the United States at prices that increase as the United States make the border more difficult to cross. Deadly cartels expand their brands from drugs to guns to people smuggling.
It is not against Mexican law to cross from Mexico into the United States, but it is against the law to smuggle undocumented foreigners. Consequently Mexican law enforcement officials could chase the smugglers since plenty of their clients come from countries south of Mexico’s border—but the cartels can outgun the cops. The former Mexico interior minister, Santiago Creel, watched the smuggling business grow fast after the United States instituted its Southwest Border Strategy in 1994, a strategy that forces undocumented migrants from hardened border cities into the wild desert. “We are talking about international mafias of extremely dangerous groups that have caused great pain to many families,” Creel said of the smuggling operations. “The great problem we face is a humanitarian one,” agreed the head of the Organized Crime Unit of the Mexican attorney general’s office at the time, José Luis Vasconcelos.2
Travelers too poor to afford the guesthouses and the smugglers’ fees camp outdoors. The Catholic church at Altar tries to help the indigent migrants. There, Father René Castañeda Castro presides over a dormitory for scores of the overexposed, and a kitchen to feed them. He and his crew try to convince the desperate migrants to turn back, telling them stories and showing them videos of the dangers ahead. “It’s not a desert anymore,” he tells them, “it’s a cemetery.”3
A Legit Business Opportunity
The free market adapts to change quickly on the Tijuana-San Diego border. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, legal border crossers were faced with extraordinary delays as U.S. agents carefully checked documents and searched cars. Those walking across the border also were subject to increased scrutiny, their papers checked thoroughly and their possessions sent through airport-style inspection machines. The wait was hours long. But there was a third option. In addition to motor vehicles and pedestrians, there was a unique line for bicyclists. And very few border crossers were heading north by bicycle. There was virtually no waiting in the bicycle line.
Thus a group of Mexican entrepreneurs set up shop just south of the border with a haphazard collection of bicycles, offering them for rent to anyone standing in the hot sun waiting to pass the U.S. control point. I was in that line and jumped at the opportunity to speed up my passage, happy to rent a bicycle ludicrously too small for me. Riding was not an option. I couldn’t fit on it. I gave the new businessman five bucks and took temporary custody of the bike. He instructed me to push the bike up to the crossing point, passing the hundreds of pedestrians sweltering in the sun.
“What do I do with it once I’m on the other side?” I asked him.
He smiled. “There’s another bandito at the other end who will take the bike.”
And indeed there was. As soon as I cleared U.S. immigration minutes later, his partner grabbed my bicycle and sent it south to earn another five dollars.
Striptease Interlude
My wife and I were en route to Dallas and made a typical tourist stop along the border. We parked the car in the shade in El Paso, and left a window cracked open and plenty of water for our dog, Amigo. Then we walked over to Juárez just to see it, before the long drive across Texas. (As a popular postcard says, “The sun is riz, the sun is set, and we ain’t out of Texas yet.”)
We were strolling down the streets of Juárez, just walking around looking at the sleazy honky-tonk joints that hug the border, and Sheila said, “Why don’t we go into this one?” She’d never been in a strip club before. Inside were Formica tables lined up theater-like in front of a stage. The place was empty; it was still early in the afternoon. We sat down and ordered a couple of beers, asking for Carta Blanca. “Okay,” nodded the waiter. He disappeared into a back room and returned with a couple
