US-Mexico Border
With its patrols, helicopters, and jails, the US-Mexico border can seem like a war zone—and little wonder, according to Spanish professor Diana Barnes: People hear in the news about the failed immigration bill and the record numbers of deportations. They don’t hear about the economics of militarizing the border. They don’t hear about the hundreds of private prisons all over the US making billions of dollars by holding deportees awaiting their court dates. A daily detention quota—passed by legislators hoping to look “tough on immigration”—mandates that at least 34,000 immigrant detainees be imprisoned each night. This absurd law motivates racism, as officers search for people who might look “illegal” to help them fill the quota. And tax- payers are paying for this. The price is much higher for the migrants, who are pawns in this moneymaking scheme. In El Paso one detention center is nicknamed “the refrigerator” be- cause the temperature is kept so low that people are freezing. Detainees are at times shackled hand and foot. These individ- uals are not terrorists. They are not criminals. They are fleeing violence, looking for work, trying to keep their families alive. The technology being used to patrol the border is startling. What are we doing with military gear left over from our ten - ure in Afghanistan—the drones, the guns, the night-vision goggles, the Blackhawks? We’re taking them to the border. All this to search for migrants who may be dying of thirst in the desert. Illegal crossings have dropped in part because the mili-
tarization of the border in populous areas is funneling people to cross in remote, dangerous places in the desert. There are fewer crossings and more crosses. A lot of nonprofits operate at the border, volunteers who understand that hundreds of thousands are being detained and deported, families are being separated, children are get- ting adopted out when their mothers are deported. I get real- ly discouraged, after working on the border for so long. It doesn’t seem to change for the better. There’s a saying in Spanish: “de mal en peor,” from bad to worse. Our history with Mexico keeps repeating itself, but this time around the players are ruthless—the players on the southern side who are smuggling and running drugs, and the players in Wash- ington, D.C., whose laws directly impact the quality of life at the border.
The migrants crossing the border simply want to feed their families and remove them from violence at home. We open the gates when we need a workforce and close them when we don’t. We send two messages: the first is “help wanted,” and the second is “don’t get caught.” There is racism, absolutely. But a lot of what is going on is big money being made— whether by arms dealers, private prisons, or drug cartels—and that is hard to fight. It’s time to put a priority on decency and humanity and de-emphasize border economics. You can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats its neighbors. • In the foreign languages and literatures department, Diana Barnes teaches Spanish lit and border studies.
18 SCOPE SPRING 2015
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