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Title: Designed to Kill Author: CrimethInc. Date: May 22, 2011 Language: en Topics: borders Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2011/05/22/designed-to-kill-border-policy-and-how-to-change-it
Designed to Kill analyzes US border control policy, exploring how its
actual effects and objectives differ from its ostensible purpose. The
conclusions are based on several years of firsthand observation of both
sides of the border by a participant in No More Deaths. For additional
context, Four Stories from the Border offers glimpses into the lives of
those who risk death to cross the border. These texts have since been
expanded into a book, No Wall They Can Build, which you can download for
free or order online.
For a number of years now I’ve worked in the desert on the
Mexican-American border with a group that provides humanitarian aid to
migrants who are attempting to enter the United States—a journey that
claims hundreds of lives every year. We’ve spent years mapping the
trails that cross this desert. We walk the trails, find places to leave
food and water along them, look for people in distress, and provide
medical care when we run into someone who needs it. If the situation is
bad enough, we can get an ambulance or helicopter to bring people to the
hospital. We strive to act in accordance with the migrants’ wishes at
all times, and we never call the Border Patrol on people who don’t want
to turn themselves in.
During this time I’ve been a part of many extraordinary situations and
I’ve heard about many more. Some of the things I’ve seen have been truly
heartwarming, and some of them have been deeply sad and wrong. I’ve seen
people who were too weak to stand, too sick to hold down water, hurt too
badly to continue, too scared to sleep, too sad for words, hopelessly
lost, desperately hungry, literally dying of thirst, never going to be
able to see their children again, vomiting blood, penniless in torn
shoes two thousand miles from home, suffering from heat stroke, kidney
damage, terrible blisters, wounds, hypothermia, post-traumatic stress,
and just about every other tribulation you could possibly think of. I’ve
been to places where people were robbed and raped and murdered; my
friends have found bodies. In addition to bearing witness to others’
suffering, I myself have fallen off of cliffs, torn my face open on
barbed wire, run out of water, had guns pointed at me, been charged by
bulls and circled by vultures, jumped over rattlesnakes, pulled pieces
of cactus out of many different parts of my body with pliers, had to
tear off my pants because they were full of fire ants, gotten gray
hairs, and in general poured no small amount of my own sweat, blood, and
tears into the thirsty desert.
There is nowhere on earth like the place where we work. It is beautiful
beyond telling: harsh, vast, mountainous, remote, rugged, unforgiving,
every cliché you can think of and more. I have been humbled countless
times by the incredible selflessness and courage of the people that I
have met there, and I have been driven nearly out of my head with rage
at the utterly heartless economic and political system that drives
people to such lengths in order to provide for their families. Doing
this work has given me a great deal of opportunity to observe how the
border is managed on a day-to-day basis, and hopefully some insight into
the functions that it performs within global capitalism—the real
objectives that it serves. I offer this essay as ammunition to anyone
who still cares enough about anything to intervene when people around
them are being treated like pieces of meat.
“Answer the question of who benefits or profits most directly from an
action, event, or outcome and you always have the starting point for
your analysis or investigation, and sometimes it will also give you the
end point.”
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The first thing that I want to make clear is that the atrocious
suffering that happens on the border every day is not an accident. It is
not a mistake and it is not the result of a misunderstanding. It is the
predictable and intentional result of policies implemented at every
level of government on both sides of the border. These policies have
rational objectives and directly benefit identifiable sectors of the
population of both countries. It may be evil, but it’s not stupid. If
this sounds a little shrill, let me tell you how I’ve seen this play out
on the ground.
When I started working in the desert I began to notice some very
peculiar things about the Border Patrol’s operations there. They would
do a lot of enforcement in some areas and very little in others, and
this would not necessarily correspond to which areas were busy and which
areas were slow. In fact, very often the enforcement would clearly be
done in such a way that it would push traffic into rather than out of
the busiest areas, where Border Patrol would keep a low profile until
the very northern end of the route. At that point there would be a
moderate amount of enforcement again, but not really what you would
expect given the numbers of people that were moving through.
Then they started building lots of surveillance towers. But once again,
the towers were not really built in the places where the traffic was
heaviest—they were built on the edges of them. If anything, they seemed
to be intent on forcing traffic into the busiest routes rather than out
of them. What was happening?
Meanwhile, I was constantly meeting migrants whose groups had been split
up by helicopters. The Border Patrol would fly over them a few feet off
the ground, everybody would run in different directions, and soon there
would be thirty people wandering lost across the desert in groups of two
or three. What seemed particularly odd was that the Border Patrol often
made no effort to actually apprehend these groups after breaking them
up—they just flew away. Why?
And then there’s this. Over the last few years, the organization I work
for has developed a pretty comprehensive understanding of the area we
cover, which at times has been one of the most heavily traveled sections
of the entire border. We’ve formed a fairly clear picture of where
traffic starts, where it goes, how it gets there, where it’s busy and
where it’s slow at any given time, where the pinch points are, and so
on. I honestly believe that if I worked for the Border Patrol I could
basically point at a map and tell them how to shut down the whole
sector. It’s really not rocket science. Keep in mind that all of our
work has been done by untrained civilian volunteers, armed with low-end
GPS units, a few old trucks, run-of-the-mill mapping software, cheap
cell phones with spotty service, and a very limited budget. Does it seem
logical that we could figure this stuff out while the government of the
United States of America cannot, despite access to helicopters, unmanned
drones, electronic sensors, fleets of well-maintained trucks, night
vision systems, state-of-the-art communications and surveillance and
mapping technology, tens of thousands of paid employees, and a limitless
supply of money to shovel down the hole at every possible opportunity? I
don’t think it does. So what’s going on?
If you accept the stated objectives of the border at face value, then
none of this makes any sense at all. If you accept that the actual
objectives may not be the stated ones, things start to come together
fast. The task of the Border Patrol—and the actual objective of the
policies it is there to enforce—is not in any sense to STOP ILLEGAL
IMMIGRATION. It is to manage and control that migration. Trust me on
this.
But to what end? To whose benefit? Settle in, because it’s complicated.
First of all, it’s as plain as day that the economy of the United States
of America is dependent in no small part on the hyper-exploitation of
undocumented labor. You know it’s true, I know it’s true, the
Guatemalans that shovel the shit out of Lou Dobbs’ horses’ barn know
it’s true, but it is considered extremely taboo to mention this fact in
public. Excuse me, but anyone with a modicum of common sense should be
able to see that if the government were to actually build a
two-thousand-mile-long Berlin Wall tonight and then somehow round up and
deport every undocumented person in the country tomorrow, there would be
massive and immediate disruption in the agriculture and animal
exploitation industries, not to mention in everything related to
construction—quite possibly leading to a serious breakdown in the
national food distribution network and conceivably even famine. I’m not
exaggerating. The people that write border policies are not fools. They
understand this perfectly, even if your racist co-workers evidently do
not. Regardless of what any politician or pundit says, I don’t believe
anyone is going to put a stop to illegal immigration as long as
undocumented labor is needed to maintain the stability of the economic
system. But this isn’t good news to those of you who dislike seeing
people treated like shit and then discarded like diapers, because what’s
more important is that this migration will continue to be managed and
controlled.
The border is a sick farce with a deadly conclusion. The goal is to make
entering the country without papers extremely dangerous, traumatizing,
and expensive, but possible. The point isn’t to deter people from
coming—far from it. It is to ensure that when they do come, the threat
of deportation will mean something very serious. It means spending a ton
of money. It means risking your life to return. It means that you may
never see your family again. This is supposed to provide American
employers with a vast and disposable pool of labor that is kept
vulnerable and therefore easy to exploit—and this in turn drives down
wages for workers with American citizenship, which is why the old saw
about the “illegals coming to our country and taking our jobs” is so
convincing. Like many good lies, it’s powerful because it omits the most
important part of the truth.
Those who believe that immigration and border enforcement protect the
jobs or wages of American workers are seriously misinterpreting the
situation. Even if you limit the scope of your analysis to market-based
behavior, it seems clear that if undocumented workers were not subjected
to such extraordinary risks and pressures they would act like anybody
else and obtain the highest price for their labor that the market would
bear. In fact, these same workers have proven themselves able time and
again to struggle successfully for higher wages, despite having to
overcome obstacles other workers do not face. But border and immigration
enforcement drives down wages across the board—that’s the point of it.
Here’s another lead that is easy to follow: the recent wave of
anti-immigrant hysteria sounded very similar to the anti-Muslim
fear-mongering of five to ten years ago. It’s easy to trace this to the
mid-term elections. With the war in Iraq winding down, and in lieu of
any recent successful domestic Al Qaeda attacks, the so-called
immigration debate became the de facto national security issue for
politicians to talk about.
The Republican strategy was pretty straightforward. They hoped to regain
power by appealing to white fear, anxiety, guilt, and racism. The
Democratic strategy was more nuanced. First, they blamed Republicans for
lack of progress on immigration issues. They hoped that this would
maintain the support of voters from immigrant communities. Second, they
did not actually try to push any pro-immigrant measures. They hoped that
this would avoid alienating anti-immigrant voters. Third, they ramped up
deportations. The Obama administration deported almost 400,000 people in
2010, the most in a single year ever. Now they can use those numbers to
emphasize their toughness on immigration. With these law and order
credentials, the Democrats hoped to woo conservative voters before the
last elections and in the next ones. Expect to see some version of this
charade play out again in 2012, unless it’s trumped by another war or
major terrorist attack.
Here’s one last clue: much of the legislation that becomes government
policy is written by the corporations that stand to profit from it.
Arizona’s State Bill 1070, which among other things would require police
to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof of having entered the
country legally, was drafted in December 2009 at the Grand Hyatt hotel
in Washington D.C. by officials of the billion-dollar Corrections
Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the
country. This took place at a meeting of the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership organization of state legislators
and powerful corporations. The law, which was partially overturned but
may still go into effect, could send hundreds of thousands of immigrants
to prison, which would mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits
for the companies such as CCA that would be responsible for housing
them. It almost goes without saying that it is not in this industry’s
interest to completely stop illegal immigration from happening; it is in
their interest to let in enough people to fill their jails.
So who benefits from the death in the desert? In a broad sense, the
entire ruling class does. That’s pretty ugly. But that’s not the whole
story, not by any means. To tell that story we’re going to need to back
up a bit.
To start with, permit me to subject you to an extremely abbreviated
history lesson, beginning with some very inconvenient truths. Like the
rest of the Western Hemisphere, the land that is currently called the
United States of America was stolen from its rightful inhabitants by
European colonists through a well-documented orgy of bloodshed,
massacre, treachery, and genocide of proportions so epic that they are
arguably unprecedented in the thousands of often gruesome years of human
history preceding them and unsurpassed in the hardly tranquil ones that
followed. This monstrous crime has been in progress for over five
hundred years, has never been atoned for in any meaningful way, and
continues to be perpetrated to this day.
Everybody knows this, but nobody really likes to think too much about
what it means. What it means is this: unless you’re honest enough to
admit that you think that might makes right as long as you’re on the
winning side, you have to acknowledge that the federal, local, and state
governments of the United States of America, along with all of the
agencies such as the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement contained therein, are illegitimate institutions with no
claim to legitimate authority whatsoever over the territory they
currently govern. If anyone can show me an ethically, logically, or even
legally sound way to disprove this statement, they’re welcome to let me
know, but I’m not going to lose any sleep waiting for this to happen.
It’s important to start by framing the matter this way. Who are these
people that claim to have jurisdiction over native land? What right do
they have to be telling anybody where to go and when? If anyone has a
right to decide who can and cannot pass through the territory that
currently constitutes the Mexican-American border, it’s the people whose
ancestors have inhabited that land since time immemorial, not the
descendants or institutions of the ones who colonized it. Most so-called
illegal immigrants are closer to having a defensible claim to the
continent they’re traversing than most of the hypocrites who condemn and
pursue them.
Now fast forward, for the sake of brevity, to January 1, 1994, the day
that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, and
thousands of indigenous people in southeastern Mexico famously rose up
in arms in response. Calling themselves Zapatistas after the Mexican
revolutionary, these people predicted that this agreement would mark a
final deathblow to their way of life if they failed to resist. Their
analysis of the situation quickly proved exceedingly cogent, their
ensuing project of indigenous autonomy has yet to be defeated, and their
actions sparked an entire generation of resistance to global capitalism:
a whole different story that is thankfully not over yet.
In addition to its ruinous effects on American industrial communities,
NAFTA’s aftermath in Mexican agricultural communities was truly
catastrophic. As part of its preparation for the agreement, the Mexican
government amended Article 27 of its own constitution to allow for the
privatization of communally-held campesino and indigenous land. NAFTA
then permitted heavily-subsidized American agribusiness giants like
Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to flood the Mexican market with
cheap imports of corn and other agricultural products, undercutting
nearly all small-scale Mexican farmers. Exactly as the Zapatistas
predicted, this drove millions of rural Mexicans, many of whom were
already living in desperate poverty, off the land and straight into the
abyss. This in turn set off a massive wave of migration as millions and
millions of people left their homes to find work in Mexican cities, in
sweatshops primarily owned by American corporations in northern Mexico,
and in the United States.
Within the year, the Clinton administration launched Operation
Gatekeeper, a program that massively increased funding for Border Patrol
operations in the San Diego sector of the border in California. The
federal government greatly stepped up enforcement in this sector and
built a fourteen-mile wall between San Diego and Tijuana. Operation
Gatekeeper roughly marks the beginning of a two-decade-running process
of ever-increasing border militarization that has continued steadily
throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. This has meant
that every year there are more Border Patrol agents, National Guardsmen,
helicopters, fences, towers, checkpoints, sensors, guns, and dogs along
the border. Understanding the nature of this militarization will go a
long way towards clarifying what’s actually happening and why.
By all accounts I’ve ever heard, it used to be much easier to cross the
border than it is now. Most people crossed into relatively safer
urbanized areas such as San Diego, El Paso, or the Lower Rio Grande
Valley in Texas. Starting with Operation Gatekeeper, the Border Patrol
made it much more difficult to enter the country in these places; over
the years, it has methodically pushed the traffic into the increasingly
remote mountains and deserts beyond. Many thousands of people have died
from heat, cold, sickness, injuries, hunger, and thirst as a direct
result. At this point, I think, the game is reaching a bit of an
endpoint. The government has pushed the traffic into the very deepest
and deadliest pockets of the entire border, which is where they want it.
This does not mean that the situation is completely static—the Border
Patrol will clamp down on some of these pockets sometimes and ease up on
others—but on the large scale, I think that it is more or less stable.
There have been several interesting byproducts of these changes. Many
people used to come to work for a season, go back home, and return the
next year. That’s much less common now that getting into the country is
such an ordeal. People come and generally stay as long as they can.
Also, most people who crossed used to be men with families south of the
border. There are many more women and children crossing now that it’s no
longer possible for many men in this position to work in the north
without leaving their families behind for good. Finally, with the
increase in internal deportations, there are many more people crossing
now who have lived here for long periods of time and are returning to
their homes in the United States. This latter group faces a particularly
fiendish dilemma if they run into trouble on the way. I have often heard
people whose children live south of the border say things like “I
thought I was going to die and all I could think about was my babies.
It’s better for me to go back home than to risk dying again.” I have
often heard people whose children live north of the border say things
like “If I have to risk dying to get home to my babies, then I will.”
As I hope I have made clear, a policy of pushing migrant traffic into
extremely dangerous areas does not at all imply an actual intention to
stop or even deter people from entering the country illegally. This
complex and slightly perverse strategy has numerous compelling
advantages. It allows politicians to look tough for the cameras while
still providing the American economy with the farmworkers and
meatpackers it depends on. It provides ample opportunities to swing huge
government contracts to giant corporations: for example, to Wackenhut to
transport migrants, to Corrections Corporation of America to detain
them, to Boeing to build surveillance infrastructure. It justifies the
hefty salaries of the 20,000 people who work for the Border Patrol. And
it has other beneficiaries, who I will get to momentarily. On the whole,
border militarization is best seen as a massive government pork and
corporate welfare project that is possibly only surpassed in the last
twenty years by the war in Iraq.
The outcome of this policy of has been most educational. Just as it used
to be easier to cross the border, it also used to be a lot cheaper. This
won’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the laws of supply and
demand. Any service will become more expensive if it becomes more
difficult to provide, and the service of being smuggled across the
border has certainly been a case study in this law. Prices rose and rose
as the Border Patrol pushed people further and further from the cities
and established more and more checkpoints that made the journey longer
and longer, until at a certain point there was as much money to be made
in moving people as there was in moving drugs. At that point, the
cartels that already controlled the drug trade recognized an excellent
business opportunity, muscled out the competition, and took over the
game entirely. This dramatically transformed what had been a relatively
low-key affair into a lucrative, highly centralized, and increasingly
brutal industry with tens of billions of dollars at stake. There is no
doubt that these cartels are among the primary beneficiaries of American
and Mexican drug, trade, and immigration policies since the end of the
Cold War.
The rise of the cartels to a position of absolute dominance within a
booming industry led, unsurprisingly, to a mass-based approach and an
extraordinarily inhumane methodology. I have commonly heard them
referred to as pollero networks, which means something like “meat
herders” since pollo is the word for a dead chicken rather than a live
one. This should offer some indication of the degree of care that these
organizations tend to invest in each individual human life throughout
the process of bringing people into the United States. I have seen
groups of as many as fifty people—and heard about groups as large as a
hundred—being driven quite literally like cattle across the desert, with
the sick and wounded straggling behind and trying desperately to keep
up. I have met people who were told that what is always at best an
extremely demanding four to five day journey would take as little as
twelve hours on foot, and countless more who were left behind to die by
their guides without hesitation when they were for any reason no longer
able to keep up.
As a result of border militarization, prices have risen now to the point
that it costs around five thousand dollars for a Guatemalan to be
brought into the United States through the networks, and about six
thousand for Salvadorans. Fees for Mexicans vary widely, but they are
far from cheap. You won’t be surprised to hear that many people who wish
to migrate do not actually have six thousand dollars lying around. The
cartels have developed a variety of inventive solutions to this problem,
often involving kidnapping and indentured servitude. I’ve met people who
spent years working in the United States simply to pay off their initial
fee, some while held in conditions of outright bonded labor. I’ve met
others who made it through the desert and were immediately held for
ransom by the same groups that brought them in. The ones who were able
to raise a few thousand dollars more were allowed to go. The ones who
weren’t able to were beaten for days and then driven back out to be left
in the desert, where within minutes they were picked up for deportation
by Border Patrol agents who clearly had some sort of working arrangement
with the kidnappers. I’m not kidding. It’s scandalous.
As bad as all this is, it still doesn’t fully convey the depth of the
cruelty that has characterized this era of government-sponsored cartel
control. Rape and sexual assault of female migrants is absolutely
endemic at every step of the process of migration. This has been greatly
exacerbated by the actions of the government: by pushing the traffic out
into the middle of nowhere, they have basically guaranteed that in order
to enter the country women have to place themselves in situations where
rape and sexual assault are extremely likely. In addition, the trails
are frequented by groups of armed bandits who make their living
targeting migrants. I believe that some of the bandits are employed by
the cartels themselves, who are simply robbing their own clients, while
others are freelancers taking advantage of an easy opportunity to prey
on defenseless people who are often carrying their life savings in their
pockets. Again, it is primarily because the government has pushed the
traffic into the ends of the earth that these fuckers have been blessed
with such favorable circumstances in which to ply their trade.
To be fair, I’ve also heard stories of low-level cartel members acting
decently, compassionately, and even occasionally heroically. It’s worth
pointing out that the guias—the people who actually walk the groups
through the desert to the other side of the checkpoints—are at the very
bottom of the pecking order within the networks. Their lives are
considered nearly as expendable as those of the migrants. Working in the
desert has given me some appreciation for the fact that being a guia
would be very stressful. They’re supposed to bring large groups of
people through harsh terrain where there is no potable water, usually
either in the dark or in brutal heat, while being hunted by military
types with guns and helicopters. Their bosses are probably not the kind
of people you want to piss off. It’s hardly surprising that guias are
often unwilling to risk losing their whole group because one or two
people can’t keep up. The whole situation is just guaranteed to bring
out the worst in someone. This is not to make excuses for them, or to
absolve relatively powerless people of their personal responsibility for
doing indefensible things. It is simply to say that most of the guilt
has to be assigned to the powerful people whose actions have created
this nightmare and who profit most directly from it.
Toward that end, it’s important to understand the relationship between
the governments and the cartels. Basically it is this: they need each
other. They share similar interests. Perhaps it is most precise to say
that in the United States the cartels need the government, while the
government makes great use of the cartels. The cartels rely on the US
government to keep the prices of their goods and services artificially
high. The government uses the cartels to justify funneling billions of
dollars to the corporations whose interests they represent. On the
Mexican side, meanwhile, it isn’t realistic to talk about the government
and the cartels as if they are separate entities. There, the government
and the various cartels are fighting for control of the multi-billion
dollar American drug and migration market. This ten-sided bloodbath has
gotten progressively uglier since the Mexican federal government got
involved in December of 2006, ending what had been a longstanding policy
of non-engagement in intra-cartel violence and leading to tens of
thousands of deaths.
Analysts sometime use term “Colombianization” to point out that the
state of affairs in Mexico is starting to look a lot like that in
Colombia. Perhaps the most striking similarity is in the increasingly
sophisticated collusion between elements of the government and the
cartels with which they are nominally at war. These connections run
deep, and the influence runs in both directions. Los Zetas, arguably the
most violent cartel in the country, was founded by members of the
Airmobile Special Forces Group (GAFE), an elite division of the Mexican
military established in 1994 to combat Zapatista rebels in Chiapas.
Around that time, about 500 GAFE personnel received training by the
United States Army’s 7^(th) Special Forces Group in Fort Bragg, NC for
this purpose. Somewhere between 30 and 200 of these operatives then
defected from the Mexican military to become hired guns, went on to
provide security for the Gulf cartel—a well-established trafficking
organization—and eventually split to form a cartel in their own right.
On a local and state level, bribery of police, mayors, judges, and other
government officials by the cartels is extremely widespread. On the
national level, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Mexican
Army and federal government are favoring the Sinaloa cartel—the largest
and richest in the nation—in hopes that they will eventually defeat
their rivals and enter into a stable agreement with the government such
as the ones enjoyed by their counterparts in Colombia.
So there is indeed a great deal of cartel infiltration of the Mexican
security forces. This is common, although less widespread, on the
American side as well. For instance, a large percentage of the drugs
that are brought into the United States are driven into the ports of
entry where they are waved through by corrupt Customs and Border
Protection agents who know what vehicles to look for. In general,
however, the arrangement on both sides of the border is not so crude
that there always or even usually has to be direct personnel overlap
between, say, the Corrections Corporation of America, the Border Patrol,
the Gulf Cartel, and the Mexican Army. What’s most important is that all
of these organizations have interlocking interests, benefit from each
other’s activities, and generally act in a way that keeps the others in
business. This unholy trinity of government, corporations, and organized
crime—three ways of saying the same thing—is a formidable opponent to
anyone who hopes to see the death in the desert end any time soon.
“Vivir para ser libres o morir para dejar de ser esclaves”: Living to be
free or dying to stop being slaves
“You haven’t heard our thunder yet!”
— slogan at a protest against SB1070
The corporate, governmental, and criminal elites that benefit from the
suffering on the border are ruthless and powerful, but they are not
gods. They aren’t the only actors in this drama, and they don’t have the
situation completely under control. People make it through the desert
because they are brave and resourceful, not just because the Border
Patrol lets them. The trails themselves are extraordinary testaments to
human ingenuity, weaving gracefully through canyons and over mountains
with an unerring eye for direction and cover.
There are somewhere around twelve million undocumented people in this
country. One thing that working in the desert has shown me is that they
are not all the same. The migrants are not all angels, or devils, or
victims. They are not passive objects that are acted upon by the world
without acting in return. They are complex individuals who have chosen
to take their lives into their own hands, and I have chosen to take
their side as best I can. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it
doesn’t. Sometimes you beat the man and sometimes the man beats you.
The border doesn’t end at the border, and the hardships that
undocumented people face don’t stop there either. The border cuts
through every city and state; it cuts through many of own our bodies.
The line in the sand is neither the first twist nor the last of the meat
grinder that global capitalism has prepared for people without papers.
After making it across the border undocumented people enter a world in
which they cannot legally earn money; they have compelling reasons not
to call the ambulance, go to the hospital, get health or auto insurance,
drive a vehicle, open a bank account, use a credit card, apply for a
mortgage, sign a lease, or rely on any number of other options that
people with citizenship can fall back on. If for any reason you have
made it a practice to live a portion of your life off the books, you
might be able to appreciate how hard it is to do this full-time in this
society.
Illegal immigration is a legitimate form of resistance to the iniquities
of global capitalism for millions of people worldwide. It may be
indirect resistance, but it gets the goods. This functions in two
principal ways. First, remittances from immigrant workers in the United
States—many of them undocumented—to their families in Mexico totaled
more than 21 billion dollars in 2010 alone. If you add up all the
remittances from immigrant workers in the entire global north to all of
their families in the entire global south, the total starts to look
pretty significant. Even though it’s filtered through a fine screen of
work and exploitation, this money probably represents one of the largest
redistributions of wealth from the rich to the poor in the entire course
of human history. Second, south-to-north immigration, much of it
illegal, is bringing about real demographic shifts in parts of the
global north and particularly in the United States. This shift may
eventually lead to meaningful social changes within this country, which
could contribute to a somewhat more equitable restructuring of the
global economic system, which would mitigate the tremendous disparity in
wealth between the global north and south, which is what drives the
migration in the first place.
It’s certainly not a given that this latter hope will pan out.
Generations of immigrants have moved from the margins into the
mainstream of American society without radically changing its course. In
fact this is exactly how settlers took control of the land to begin
with. Nonetheless, a distinctive feature of American history is that
this pathway has generally been reserved for immigrants of European
ancestry. It has not yet been proven that this country can assimilate or
segregate the current influx of non-European immigrants without
eventually undermining the foundation of white supremacy upon which it
has been built.
This impending demographic change is a cause of real anxiety for some
powerful Americans, as well as many less powerful ones who have not
managed to think all the way through its ramifications. My opinion is
the sooner the better—because I believe that even a partial erosion of
white supremacy in the United States is actually in the long-term
self-interest of most “white” Americans such as myself. You can build a
throne out of bayonets, but you can’t sit on it long. Aside from the
fact that subjugating other people is a rotten thing to do, it’s not a
very safe way to live. It’s extraordinarily impressive that black people
in the United States managed to break free from both slavery and Jim
Crow without resorting to indiscriminate slaughter of white people on a
grand scale. It certainly would have been understandable to do so, and
it arguably would have been justified. I suspect that things would have
been much uglier if there had not been at least a few white people who
were willing to do the right thing. I don’t know if I want to bet that
the billions of people that are being pushed around the world today will
be so restrained when it comes time to pay the piper on a global level.
It seems better to get on the winning side while there still may be
time.
In any case, the wheels are coming off the bus. We live on the same
small planet as everybody else. The way of life we inherited has proven
disastrous for the biosphere and for the long-term prospects of human
survival within it. As others have pointed out before me, my generation
is perhaps the first group of white Americans that not only have an
ethical mandate to turn away from this path but also an urgent
self-interest in doing so. Left unchecked the current arrangement is
guaranteed to cannibalize what is left of our land base within our
lifetimes and leave our children with nothing but the bones.
Admittedly, this is complicated. Groups of humans have subjugated other
groups of humans and destroyed their own land bases since long before
the social construct of whiteness ever existed, and it is clearly not
only people of European ancestry who are capable of doing either of
these things. White supremacy is not the only lynchpin holding this all
together, but it is a significant one. At this point in time, I don’t
think we can hope to stop the devastation of our planet without
contesting the structures of white supremacy—or vice versa.
So the answer is not for white Americans to continue to defend the
indefensible at the price of our souls, or to crawl into a hole and die.
It is for those of us who fit that description to think carefully about
where our allegiance really lies, and to find ways to act on it in
materially meaningful ways. Believe it or not, there are examples
throughout history of people who did just this—members of oppressor and
colonizer groups who decided to throw in their lot with the colonized
and oppressed. You can point to white people involved in the Underground
Railroad during slavery, gentiles who sheltered Jews during the
Holocaust, white Americans who took part in the civil rights movement,
white South Africans who resisted Apartheid, Americans involved in the
Sanctuary movement during the wars in Central America in the 1980s, and
Israelis resisting the occupation of Palestine today, among others. It’s
a good story to be part of. Those of us who are positioned to do so
should embrace it and be proud of it.
Our opponents will call us traitors, as if we support another
government. In fact we have pledged our allegiance to something older
and wiser than anything that any nation-state has to offer, and it is
the apologists for the current order who have turned their backs and
lost their way.
Working on the border has shown me time and again that you can’t really
extricate one part of the equation from all the other parts. Once you
start untangling one thread you start to see how it’s tied into the rest
of the noose. The killings in Juarez will not end without structural
change throughout Mexico, which will not happen without structural
change in Colombia and the other cocaine-producing countries, which will
not happen without structural change in the United States, and so on.
You can reverse the order of these statements or add others and they
will still be true. Fighting internal deportations and fighting border
militarization are not two different things. This ultimately has global
implications, but it is especially true in the case of Mexico, the
United States, and their devil-child The Border. Nothing will get better
on the border without things changing in both countries, and the
problems in one country will not be solved without addressing the
problems in the other.
Once, I asked this Oaxacan guy what he thought it would take to end the
death in the desert. “Una revolucion binacional,” he answered without
hesitating. We laughed and laughed, because of course that is
impossible. It was probably impossible for the Egyptians and Tunisians,
also.
New volunteers sometimes ask me what I think a just border policy would
look like. I tell them that there is no such thing; it is a
contradiction in terms. I am not interested in helping the authorities
figure out how to fix the mess they’ve created. Ultimately the only hope
for a solution to the border crisis lies in bringing about worldwide
systemic change that ensures freedom of movement for all people, rejects
the practice of state control over territory, honors indigenous autonomy
and sovereignty, addresses the legacies of slavery and colonization,
equalizes access to resources between the global north and the global
south, and fundamentally changes human beings’ relationship to the
planet and all of the other forms of life that inhabit it. That’s a tall
order! Where to start?
The desert is not the only place, but it is one. The strength of our
work is that there is no doubt we are having a tangible effect on the
lives of individual people who find our water, our food, or us. I know a
number of people I am certain would have died were it not for the
resources that we had to offer, and a number more who made it back to
their families that never would have been able to do so without meeting
us. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back, but to say that it is
possible to start somewhere.
People sometimes lament the fact that it can feel like we are just
serving as a band-aid. This word always aggravates me, because the
stakes are too high and the metaphor is not strong enough. One life
means a lot to the person that lives it. “Tourniquet,” I tell them, “you
mean you don’t want us to just serve as a tourniquet.” Nevertheless, the
weakness of our work is that we are always dealing with the symptoms and
never the cause. I’m not certain that anything we’re doing is having
much of an effect on the larger factors that cause so many people to end
up in the desert in the first place. It can feel like we’re always
cleaning up a mess we didn’t create, like we’re always mending the
damage the abusive drunken stepfather has done to the rest of the
family. It’s better than nothing, but what really needs to happen is for
the abuse to be stopped.
Many of the most effective types of direct action can end up looking
like some version of damage control. The problem is that it’s easier to
make attainable goals and quantify success when dealing with individuals
than when dealing with a system. I can visualize the steps from A to Z
of how to drop twenty-five gallons of water on a trail. When I wake up
in the morning there is something that I can do that will move me
towards that goal. I have a much harder time visualizing how to get
Border Patrol out of the desert, and a harder time still imagining how
to effectuate structural economic change on a global scale. It can be
tempting to say that it’s better to succeed at what we can do than fail
at what we can’t, but that’s just defeatism. I really don’t want to be
doing these same water drops twenty-five years from now. So what should
we do?
Thankfully, none of us have to do everything. It’s not my job to act
like Moses and set the people free. That’s not how meaningful social
change happens. I can do my best to help, but if the people are going to
get free they are going to do it themselves. I not only don’t have to—I
simply can’t call the shots in other people’s struggles for liberation.
I trust that the millions of people who are most directly affected by
immigration and border enforcement will keep finding ways to combat it.
There will almost certainly be things that white American citizens can
do if we keep our ears to the ground. If my efforts in the desert are in
any way contributing to 21 billion dollars moving from the rich to the
poor, I’m happy.
With that caveat, dear reader, please allow me to address you directly.
The death in the desert is not the only messed up thing in the world.
But it is pretty bad, and it is very close to my heart. I would really
like to see it end. I encourage you to find a way to get involved. I
can’t tell you exactly how to do this. Coming to work in the desert is
one way. There are many others. There are communities of undocumented
people in nearly every part of the country. What is the situation in
your area, and what might you have to offer? There are corporations that
benefit from this whole catastrophe in nearly every part of the country,
as well. What might you be able to do?
It has been suggested that in order to link systemic change with
tangible goals we must find points of intervention in the system where
we can apply power to leverage transformation. These points of
intervention have been described as the point of production, the point
of destruction, the point of consumption, the point of decision, and the
point of assumption. It’s not perfect, but it’s as good a framework as
any to use when thinking about how to intervene in this particular
situation.
What might direct action at the point of production look like? Stalling
the construction of new CCA facilities? What about at the point of
destruction? Finding ways to interfere with BP/ICE operations or
intervene in deportations? What about the point of consumption?
Pressuring businesses to commit to non-compliance with anti-immigrant
laws and organizing boycotts of ones that refuse? The point of decision?
Interrupting meetings or legislative processes? What might direct action
at the point of assumption look like? What lies and assumptions are used
to justify dehumanizing immigrants? How might you be able to counter
them? Do you have other ideas?
Direct action in the context of humanitarian aid in the desert is a
relatively new field, all things considered. There are many tactics yet
to be developed, and many others that have yet to exhaust their
effectiveness. There is still much to learn and much that new people can
offer. Most promisingly, the bi-national, cross-cultural, and
inter-generational alliances that have been forged in the crucible of
the border have yet to approach their full potential. Our ability to
realize this potential will determine the extent of the success of our
campaign to end migrant deaths in the desert, as well as whether that
campaign ever develops into a deeper resistance to the systems at the
root of the problem. They haven’t heard our thunder yet.
The desert is full of places that are sacred to me. There is the last
place I saw Esteban, the place I found Alberto, the places where Claudia
and Jose and Susana and Roberto died, Jamie’s rock, Yolanda’s hill and
Alfredo’s tree. It is overwhelming for me to think that as many of the
stories as I know—as many as anyone will ever know—it is just a drop in
the bucket of all that has happened there. The objects that people leave
behind are a constant reminder of this to me, a physical manifestation
of all of the best and worst that human beings have to offer. I am not a
particularly spiritual person, but the weight of these remnants is
immense and often oppressive. I love the desert. It breaks my heart that
it has played host to such terrible suffering. It gives me some solace
to know that someday—even if it is only because there are no more human
beings left on the planet—there will be no more United States, no more
Mexico, no more helicopters, no more walls, no Border Patrol and no
border. The plastic will break down, the memory of these things will
fade, and the land will finally have a chance to heal under the blue sky
and the merciless sun.
“Las paredas vueltas de lado son puentes.” Walls turned sideways are
bridges.
— graffiti on the south side of the Border Wall, Nogales, Sonora
Allow me to add a couple of words about the Border Patrol. There is no
government job that can be attained without a high school diploma that
pays more than that of a Border Patrol agent. They are generally paid
about $45,000 a year their first year, $55,000 their next two, and
$70,000 and up after that. They are not going around hungry.
I don’t know how to convey the extent of the abuse that I have heard
migrants report at the hands of these jokers. I have heard of agents
beating, sexually abusing, and shooting people as well as throwing them
into cactus, stealing their money, denying detainees food and water,
deporting unaccompanied minors, driving around wildly with migrants
chained in the back of trucks that look unmistakably like dogcatchers,
and on and on. I’ve also heard numerous reports of Border Patrol seizing
fifty pound bales of marijuana from drug smugglers and then either
letting them go or processing them as regular migrants without drugs.
What happened to the weed? Who knows!
Border Patrol is a lucrative business in and of itself, and part of that
business entails exaggerating the danger of the job in order to milk
taxpayers for more money. In my experience law enforcement personnel
generally think that their work is really perilous, and that the world
owes them a sincere debt of gratitude and a fat paycheck. It’s
interesting to note that since the organization’s inception in 1904
there have been 111 Border Patrol agents who died in action, of which 40
were due to homicides. In 2010, out of 20,000 agents, two were killed
and one died in a car accident. It is impossible to know how many
migrants die crossing the border every year, but somewhere from the mid
hundreds to the low thousands is probably a good bet. If you actually
crunch the numbers you will find that Border Patrol agents are also much
safer than roofers, sanitation workers, truck drivers, sex workers, and
any number of other people whose jobs are actually dangerous.
The other thing that any self-respecting Border Patrol agent will tell
you is that they are protecting us from terrorists. This begs the
question of who “us” is. More human beings have lost their lives in the
desert as a direct result of Border Patrol activity than in every
Al-Qaeda attack on American soil combined—quite possibly more than would
have died if every attack that the Border Patrol has had a hand in
thwarting had been successful. The more important point is that as long
as there is such outrageous global inequality Americans are never really
going to be safe.
Many Border Patrol agents come from working class backgrounds and many
are Hispanic. To be fair I will say that I have met some who treated
migrants with respect. I will also say that in fact they do find people
sometimes, that some of those people would surely have died otherwise,
and that some agents can be nice enough people. The fact of the matter,
though, is that it is rank-and-file Border Patrol agents that enforce
the policies that cause all of the problems that I have wasted so many
words trying to diagnose. No matter what they do individually, they will
never be a part of the solution as long as they wear a uniform and carry
a gun. They could put the cartels out of business and end the death in
the desert tomorrow by simply going home.
I’ve heard too many apologies for the Border Patrol—that they are not
the enemy and that they are subject to the same economic forces as the
migrants and so on. I don’t buy it. History is replete with examples of
people who were willing to sell out their own people to save themselves.
There were black slave drivers on the plantations, Jewish police in the
ghetto, native scouts leading the Army after Crazy Horse, and now there
are Hispanic Border Patrol agents in the desert. I’m sorry but I’m not
impressed. I think that when people become willing accomplices in
atrocities, they just don’t deserve much sympathy.
Recently a friend of mine found the body of a woman who died of some
combination of dehydration, sickness, exposure, and exhaustion within a
quarter of a mile of reaching one of our largest supply drops—a place
that I have personally serviced several hundred times in my life. She
had passed through an area where for months a few particularly hostile
Border Patrol agents have consistently slashed our water bottles, popped
the tops off our cans of beans so that they go rancid, and removed the
blankets that we leave on the trails. As a result of these activities,
we have had to move these drops around constantly, and stop dropping at
what would otherwise be excellent locations because the supplies will
almost surely be vandalized. I believe that more likely than not, before
this woman died she either passed a drop that had been vandalized or a
place where there would have been a drop if it were not for the actions
of these agents. I believe that it is very likely that had she found our
supplies she would have survived long enough for us to find her. As far
as I am concerned, the pieces of shit who are doing this are murderers
and her blood is on their hands.
Border Patrol agents really are scared, even if right now they don’t
actually have much to worry about. You can see it in them. I guess
fucking over other people every day of your life must do that to you.
Personally it gives me great pleasure to be able to go unarmed daily to
places that people with automatic weapons and body armor are terrified
to set foot in. I have not made myself an enemy of the people—and in the
long run that is going to keep me safer than them.