The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina by Hannah Gill

Author:Hannah Gill [Gill, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Hispanic American Studies, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9780807899380
Google: yLC0R_MwzGMC
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-11-01T03:57:51+00:00

Border Fortification

Rates of unauthorized border crossings from Mexico into the United States are the highest in history. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of undocumented Mexicans in the United States increased from 4.7 million to 6.2 million.72 Growing numbers of unauthorized entries by train, auto, or foot at a time when the U.S. government has spent an unprecedented amount on border fortification reveal immigrants’ desperation to escape poverty, war, and environmental disaster in their home countries. Members of the Norteño band Los Tigres del Norte express this desperation when they sing about the border in “Ni aquí ni allá” (“Neither here nor there”). In this song, the border is a bottleneck, blocking the immigrant from coming to the United States to take a job and later preventing him from returning home again:

I came looking for I don’t know what in this land so far away.

The first thing I found was that the people are very strange.

They have a really big fence so that no one leaves or no one enters.

I can’t understand it.

Vine buscando no sé que a estas tierras tan lejanas.

Y lo primero que me encontre que la gente es muy extraña.

Tienen un cerco muy grande para que nadie se salga o para que nadie entre.

Yo no lo puedo entender.

For the millions of Mexicans and Central Americans who come to the United States, changes in U.S. policies since the 1990s that have increasingly fortified the border have made the journey more dangerous, difficult, and expensive. In 1993, Congress approved additional expenditures for border security, including building ten-foot steel fences, adding state-of-the-art surveillance technology, and increasing border patrol agents. Over the next ten years, these resources were directed to four popular entry points along the two-thousand-mile border: El Paso, Texas; San Diego, California; central Arizona; and south Texas. Following the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, tightening U.S. borders became an even greater priority for federal lawmakers responding to increasingly nativist sentiment from their constituents.

Government efforts to fortify the border are based on the assumption that migrants would not be able to cross scorching deserts or polluted rivers in remote regions that have always served as “natural” borders. This assumption has not been accurate; many migrants are so desperate to come to the United States that they will risk their lives to cross in any way possible. A common refrain of immigrants is, “Each time you cross, it’s up to God.” Saul, a return migrant who lives in Celaya, Mexico, explained how people cope with the fear of crossing. “We know that it’s dangerous to cross the border, that many Mexicans die, but we put ourselves in God’s hand and trust that we will make it and that we’ll get ahead in life.“73 Migrants also put themselves in the hands of coyotes and find themselves in dangerous situations involving transport across the border. Migrants may spend hours in the backs of trucks or trunks of cars, cross rivers by makeshift raft, or swim through the polluted waters of the Rio Grande.

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