Undocumented migrants face bigger obstacles, but still come

Arizona Borderlands Report

by Marie & Phil Heft

Marie and Phil Heft of Kent, WA traveled to the Arizona borderlands in June of this year as members of a Christian Peace Makers team to observe the migration of undocumented workers entering the US to obtain employment. Christian Peacemakers is sponsored by the Quaker, Mennonite, and Brethren churches.

The Sunday after we arrived in Tucson, we attended a church service presided over by the Rev. John Fife. Rev. Fife is retiring after 35 years of service to Southside Presbyterian Church. The sermon told how the church had aided over 13,000 refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and had become a key element in the underground railway that transported migrants North and even into Canada. Those were the years that the governments of those countries were executing their own citizens in death squad fashion and their citizens were fleeing for their lives to the US border.

Since the mid 1990s there has been a new flow of refugees from south of the border. These are economic refugees. The economies of Mexico and other countries are in shambles due to the new world economy.

Coffee prices have plummeted. Farm subsidies in North America have made it impossible for farmers south of the border to compete, so people are moving north into the US for employment. The money that the Mexicans send back to their families is the second biggest source of revenue, after oil, to the Mexican economy and is a major stabilizing influence on Mexico.

It is said that before the immigration of Mexicans into the US that literally the only choices the Mexicans were faced with were armed rebellion or immigration. Some of the farmers in Chiapas actually did arm and rebel against the Mexican government.

Mark Adams, a Presbyterian pastor working with the Mexican Presbyterian church in Agua Prieta, spoke with our team. Mark has lived in Mexico for nine years. He said that it has been border patrol policy to tightly shut down the traditional crossing areas. This has forced the migrants into the very inhospitable desert where lives are lost to dehydration and heat stroke. In the past, most of the migrants would return after the completion of seasonal employment. Today, most of them stay rather than risk another perilous crossing. Naturally spouses and other family members follow them.

Our delegation met with a lady who along with her husband are cattle ranchers. They are installing flags over water sources so that the migrants can obtain water and not suffer from dehydration and heat stroke. When migrants are in trouble medically, they give them food and water. Occasionally they find that migrants cut plastic pipes to get water. She felt that installation of faucets and flagging their water barrels would solve this problem.

When the migrants are allowed to use the phone, they very often will contact a relative in this country who will arrange for their transportation. Not all of the migrants are Mexicans. Brazilians and even people from Eastern Europe are showing up in small numbers.

We met with the Minutemen at their headquarters in Tombstone, AZ. Their spokesman was Gary Cole. He said he was originally from Goldbar, WA. He painted the Minutemen as a very patriotic group of people interested in protecting the Southern border of the US. He felt the US was very good at protecting the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan, so there is no reason that we cannot protect our southern border.

He expressed very little regard for politicians like President Bush and especially Senator McCain. He said Senator McCain was not communicating with them about a recent border incident. He expressed disdain for big box stores like Wal-Mart and for the movement of US manufacturing to Mexico.

The Minutemen are obviously working on improving their image--one of their members shot a video of the entire meeting and it was clear they intended to study it in order to be able to improve their presentations.

My opinion is that these people would be wonderful allies in a fight against Wal-Mart, but they have no feeling for the migrants and the terrible economic conditions they have found themselves in--they won't even give water to a migrant in distress without permission of the border patrol.

We met five recent migrants. There were three boys and two girls. They all appeared to be about 19 or 20 years old. One of the boys was from Guatemala. The rest were from Chiapas. They were bright, friendly, and outgoing. They were very glad to be alive and seemed ready to go to work.

The Kennedy-McCain Senate bill on immigration reform has some promise to normalize the situation on the border.

For more information, search for Southside Presbyterian Church on the internet.