EXPERT OPINION: Diana Barnes, on border issues
What’s your experience of the US-Mexico border?
Immigration policy is not my academic specialty, but re- cently I’ve been interviewing people on both sides of the border, seeing things I never saw as a kid when my family would cross into Mexico to visit my grand father. Today I notice little wooden crosses by the fence, for people who died trying to sneak across the desert into the US. I notice the sharp difference in the standard of living on the two sides of the fence. And I notice the fence: in places it’s steel and concrete, then it becomes mesh, and elsewhere it’s just painted boul- ders you can step across.
Describe the border areas you’ve seen.
Across from Anapra, Mexico, it’s open desert with a roadway heavily used by the US border patrol. Through the steel mesh you can see huge numbers of shacks, some made of packing crates— no electricity, no water, just endless sprawl. Most of the residents came to work in the maquiladoras, assembly fac- tories that often don't pay a living wage, although it may be a legal wage. Children run up and down the fence, looking for the border
officers they know, who pass candy to them through the mesh. Elsewhere, near a break in the fence, there’s a Mexican town with no hospital. Pregnant women come to the border and call an ambu- lance, are taken to a US hospital, and have a child born on US soil who is thus a US citizen. These chil-
dren grow up in Mexico but go to a US school—a school bus picks them up every morning at the hole in the fence. There are so many holes and contradic- tions and inconsisten- cies—the fence itself reflects Americans’ confusion about the border and immi- gration.
What about Saratoga’s own immigrant workers?
Every May through October, some 1,200 employees, many of them Hispanic, work in the backstretch area of Saratoga’s race- track, as grooms, horse walkers, barn cleaners... I volunteer with them, translat- ing for those who need medical care. Some people call them “Traxicans,” but they come from Paraguay, Chile, and other countries too. Most are earning money to send or take home, with no intention of staying permanently. Each year workers like them send some $20 billion back to Mexico, after paying US income taxes from which they will never get benefits.
What has struck you most from your border visits?
I met Javier Perez, who works at an El Paso shelter for migrant workers—almost all have legal documentation, but they don't earn enough money for food, shelter, or health care. And there is Reubén García, whose shelters for people who have crossed the desert into the US illegally give them a chance to regain their health and contact their families. (The border patrol knows that people stay in those houses every night, but it does nothing, because the US needs and wants these work- ers.) I’ve met many passionate and
courageous people, whose mantra is “We only want a life with dignity.” We need to sift through the mis -
information we get in the US, such as that Hispanics here don't want to learn English or are prone to criminal be- havior. We need to try to understand what frightens our country so much about these immigrant workers. As a spray-painted message at the border said, “There is no such thing as an illegal human being.”
Prof. Diana Barnes teaches Spanish language and literature at Skidmore. She was planning another visit to Mexico this spring, to speak with a human-rights attorney in Chihuahua.
SPRING 2010 SCOPE 9
MARK MCCARTY
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