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Fresno State University 2006 Cesar Chavez Week Public Lecture

By Rev. Robin Hoover

It is an honor to be on this campus on this date in this week of activities honoring Caesar Chavez.  My very first political act as a freshman in college in Fort Worth, Texas was to join a picket line in front of a Safeway grocery store on the corner of Berry Street and University Drive on behalf of Texas farmworkers.  That was in 1970.  That was not as exciting as any of the gatherings of 100s of thousands of folks in the last week, but it was exciting for a kid to learn about social justice.

Frank C. Mabee

 

My mentor, the late Dr. Frank C. Mabee, former head of the Texas Conference of Churches and forever champion of the farmworkers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley worked with Caesar Chavez and particularly with Jose Moises who was an organizer from the valley.  Frank introduced me to the Diego Rivera style paintings in the labor halls in the valley in the early 80s.  To be anywhere near the great human struggles of an oppressed people is to be in awe of how God made us.

 

The Bathrooms

 

One day Jose was visiting in Dallas to raise some money.  The meeting was at Frank’s house.  Jose needed to go to the bathroom.

Frank said, “Jose, there’s one in the hall on the left, one in the bedroom on the right, and of course the half-bath by the kitchen.”  Then what Frank said hit him.  He knew Jose had no indoor plumbing in his house and only one spigot in the yard in the colonia where he lived, and it was shared with neighbors.  Frank asked Jose for forgiveness.  Jose said, “It’s OK, Frank, we need white guys like you up here to be open to whom we are so we can effect changes from where we live.”  That made Frank feel better.

It was a nice thing to say, but what we need is not more gracious Mexicans.  The graciousness of Mexicans already exceeds that of the average American by 1000  percent.  What we need is more Americans who know and understand life along the border.  I’m here to help if I can.

From the 1000 colonias from Brownsville to El Paso to the sister cities all along Arizona and southeast California, from Yuma to Jacumba, from Jacumba up and over to the waters off San Diego, there’s much to study.  Political leaders have created an artifact called a border that is 1,962 miles long that creates differences in jurisdiction, authority, power, economics, language, culture, and on and on.    I want to tell you a bit about some of what I have learned.  I will focus mostly on the Sonora-Arizona border.

The Speaker

First I want you to know something about who I am.  Disclosive speakers generate more understanding.  I’ll share quite a bit more than the introduction.  I am a pastor, an activist, an academic type, but I am also a person who has worked in the business world, made payrolls and viewed the border life from several other angles. 

As A Pastor

I am the pastor of a 100-year-old congregation that has a long, rich history of working for social justice.  My church founded the Arizona Children’s home, ministered to both WPA and CCC camp workers during the depression, worked tirelessly with the migrant farm workers near Tucson and Marana, Arizona in the 40s, 50s, and even 60s.  We founded health clinics, founded the 7th chapter of Habitat for Humanity in the US.  During the Central American wars of the late 70s, 80s, and into the 90s, First Christian Church was a sanctuary church. 

Currently, First Church houses the offices, archives, equipment, and fleet of vehicles for Humane Borders.  It also serves as the landlord for the Asylum Program of Southern Arizona and the Lutheran Social Mission of the Southwest’s Refugee Resettlement Program.  Those three ministries make our campus one of the only places in the world where goods and services are provided for undocumented persons, refugees, and asylum seekers. 

As An Activist

I am an activist.  Some casually use that title, but when what you say is news, and when you get written up in every media market on earth, you’re an activist.  I’m not bragging.  I say that because I actually find it amusing.  We simply give water away and tell people where the water is.  I think of it as ministry. 

Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, John Kasich, Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, Jim Lehrer, and al Jazeera think of giving water away as social activism.  When I was on the old Phil Donahue program for an hour in New York, he saw it my way.  He walked up to me and said, “You wouldn’t be offended if I said you’re doing the Lord’s work, would you?”  “No, Phil, that’s the way I see it.” 

As An Academic

I also stand before you as one trained in the academy.  My doctoral degree is in Political Science.  My research was in the politics of faith-based groups working in migration policy.  My Ph.D. dissertation was sort of a handbook, if you will, for the creation of Humane Borders, Incorporated.  I’m a lucky guy.  Few academics get to live out their research endeavors. 

As A Worker

I also stand before you as a former commercial construction superintendent in Dallas, Texas where construction would come to a standstill without migrant labor.  We paid construction laborers $8.00 an hour with benefits as long ago as 1978, and that was a lot of money then.  A Southern Baptist preacher would get these guys social security numbers that didn’t kick out of the system.  When my co-workers came by and asked questions of the guys working for me, they go no answer.  The joke in the office was that I had a crew of really good workers but that they were all deaf.  They weren’t deaf.  They worked their butts off, and I worked too.  I have my scars and injuries from those days to prove it.

Years before as a child growing up in West Texas, I learned quickly that highways weren’t built, crops weren’t harvested, and even oil wells weren’t serviced without undocumented labor.  Many of us laugh when we think about the movie “A Day Without A Mexican”, but let me tell you all that this country would grind to a halt without Mexican labor.  I hope some of that was explained to the average citizen last weekend.

I do not stand before you as an advocate for the continuation of the migration as we have known it.  The old Bracero program was rife with inequities, injustices, and horrors.  Where I grew up, a white man would tell the worker from Mexico, “This is your work.  This is where you sleep.  You eat this food.  You work these hours.  And, oh, by the way, we have sex on Thursday at 2.  If you don’t like it, I’m calling migra.”

Shifting Roles, Voices

As a pastor, I sometimes use language that is not accessible to all.  I will try and avoid that.  When we set up the Humane Borders website, the technical guy was asking, “Do you really want to identify with churches and stuff?  That’s not real popular, you know.”  I said, “Yes, I know, but the church groups are the only ones with enough staying power to keep these kinds of efforts alive.” 

As an activist, I am prone to make some harsh statements, and some of what I will say will offend someone or another this evening.  Sound bites are called that because they are not only small morsels of news, they also pack a punch. 

As an academic type, I will not offer you information this evening that I cannot support with data.  Now the trick to all of this is that you’ll have to discern with which voice I speak during any given moment.

With all of these things in mind, let’s begin.

The Largest Migration In The World

There is an inexorable flow of humanity making its way from the south to the north across the US-Mexico border.  This flow of people is now the world’s largest migration.  More than half of that migration is through the Sonora-Arizona desert.  Let me say that another way.  More than one half of the world’s largest migration is through my backyard.

Characteristically, who is coming to the US has changed over the years that I have worked along the border.  In my experience, it was Braceros in the 60s, and when that program stopped, the migration didn’t stop, so it was just a new underground migration.  Then there was the Central American Exodus.  It was huge.  In about 1990, when the City of Dallas proper had a population of 990,000, there were at least 40,000 people living there who were from El Salvador. 

In 1986, we passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act which began a legalization program in the US, some workplace enforcement, and a slightly beefed up Border Patrol.  This was during Reagan.  During the 90s, under Clinton, the newly legalized people—new citizens—had the rights of citizens, so they petitioned for a couple of million of their relatives.  It is precisely this singular event that leads learned politicians with memories to scream against any kind of amnesty program today.  Others speak of a legal status without citizenship as an alternative. 

In the 90s, the migration began changing as to who was coming.  Clearly, today, it is no longer the poorest of the poor who are coming.  We have attorneys, physicians, university-educated persons coming.  The current migration from Mexico is a brain drain on Mexico.  Some of the most highly incented persons are coming.

Push-Pull Factors

Many factors push migrants toward the US.  Many factors pull migrants toward the US.  Any of the analyses of globalization will lead to a good understanding of these factors.  Nonetheless, it should be said that many decisions made in corporate and governing America drive many of the macro steering currents of this migration. 

Most of the analysis of the migration focuses on economics.  Economics captures some of it, but not all.  A large portion of the migration is social and cultural.

If economic necessity alone were the measure, then everyone would crowd into just a few nations on earth.  We have near economic parity with Ireland, yet we still have a big migration from Ireland, much of it illegal, especially through the overstaying of legal visas, and it is driven by factors other than economics. 

So, on St. Patrick’s Day every year, the ambassador from Ireland comes to pay the President a visit and ask for amnesty.  “The wee little green people aren’t to be given amnesty, but they can surely continue to work,” says the president.  We don’t get mad at the Irish ambassador, but we raise hell with Vicente Fox when he asks in major newspaper ads just for permission to work.

How Big A Migration?

How big is this migration?  Annually, it is not as big as you would think or as big as you would be led to believe in the media.  Numbers are a funny language, so you have to listen attentively to how I am using these numbers and qualifying them.

For all of you who would do research: You can generally get good numbers from at least four sources: The Pew Hispanic Center with Jeffrey Passel does some of the best work.  The US Census Bureau does very good work.  Both the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accountability Office have some slightly different estimating techniques.  There are good data to be found from both the University of Houston and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We used to have a phenomenon called circularity.  Migrants would come, work, go home in cycles.  Follow the work.  Go back to the family, the community, and the church.

Since 1993, both the cost and the danger of going back and forth across the border with regularity has led to many migrants staying here for longer periods of time.  The average length of time a migrant stays in the US grows every year.  So, too, do the costs born by the host communities.  There are still many, many people who illegally cross the border to come here for relatively short periods of time. 

Now for some numbers:  There are about 12 million undocumented persons in the US.  About 7.5 million of those are Mexican Nationals.  Some 43 percent of the 12 million people who are here in the US in undocumented status are persons who came legally, inspected, etc. but who overstayed their visas.  There are obviously fewer Mexicans represented in that 43 percent than one would expect to find because of the quota system and the fact that the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship hasn’t the resources to update the registry.  Said another way, when everyone says, “Come legally!”, just holler back at them, “Show me the line to get into.  I can’t find it.”  On two different occasions, I’ve stood outside the US Embassy to look at the line to come to the US.  Those who come and stand in line are usually just turned away.  Fact.

In one year’s time, the US grows by approximately 485,000 undocumented persons.  Again, 43 percent of those are overstays.  Currently those who are crossing our southern borders are mostly Mexican, probably as high as 82 percent of the total border crosser count.  They are followed in turn by Hondurans, Brazilians, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, in that order.  The rest represent a very small  percentage composed mostly of South Americans, Asians, and folks from the Mediterranean countries. 

Border Patrol apprehension data are terrible as far as being able to describe the migration.  In the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol, the same migrant is sometimes apprehended 15 or more times before the Patrol Agent In Charge of one of the stations will call down to the Federal Courthouse to see if someone wants to prosecute this person for repeated entry without inspection violations.  The Patrol will probably report about 1.5 million apprehensions this fiscal year along all borders, similar to previous years, but as far as we can tell, that probably represents only about 850,000 different individuals.  And it remains true that one is statistically 10 times as likely to encounter a person with guns or contraband crossing the Canadian border than the US-Mexico border.

Many of those are either removed from the US through a process called “voluntary return” where the migrant simply signs a piece of paper saying he or she won’t come back.  He gets a happy meal, and is returned to the nearest port of entry.  I refer to this practice and phenomenon as shepherding.  The agent picks up the sheep from this pasture and puts it back in another pasture and says, “Stay there.”  Only, the sheep — and that’s a good image of a person in the scriptures, not a condescending one — comes right back—over and over again, until he or she makes it or gets tired and goes home.  Agents are often just as tired of this as we are.

During summer months, the Border Patrol has been trying to mess up the coyote system by flying migrants back to the interior of Mexico.  Supposedly, it’s voluntary, but what would you say if a big guy in a green uniform with a gun, who got up on the wrong side of the bed, asked you if you wanted to volunteer?  What would you say if you had never ridden in an airplane and knew you could ride the bus back to the border?  What would you say if you were tired, needed to get back to regroup, get some money so you could try again?  Answer?  Yes!  This is a very expensive border control practice, and it just doesn’t work.  It would be a whole lot cheaper to find some retired guys with planes, give ‘em some fuel and let ‘em call in sightings of migrants on hot days.

In our part of the world, somewhere between 12 and 14  percent of the migration is female.  Some 23  percent of the deaths are female.  I’ll talk a lot about the deaths in a bit. 

Reactions To The Migration

There are several general reactions to the migration. 

Government Reaction

The governmental reaction has something for everyone.  It mirrors the general population’s reaction.  Under Clinton, the feds passed the harshest immigration legislation to date.  The so-called IRA-squared law made it easy to send someone home if the government wanted to and made it an aggravated felony if that person returned.  The law was passed as part of an anti-terrorism and effective death penalty law.  Good people, sometimes legislation is just a way of oppressing the people by targeting a group you don’t like or want to manage and showing everyone you mean business.  It seems to me that other nations we have fought have tried this in the past, but what do I know?

On the other hand, many locales loosened up goods and services for migrants.  Other locales, and now whole states, have tightened up the supply of goods and services for migrants.  The presence of migrants in a state creates all kinds of opportunities.  It wasn’t that long ago that the state of Iowa took out a full-page ad in the New York Times saying migrants were welcome.  That is a state that is shrinking in population.

Mostly the government has been quiescent about the migration because, at the federal level, the financial contribution of the migration to the federal coffers has been astounding.  Most states have 25-35 sources of tax revenues including income taxes, excise taxes, sales taxes, and so on.  Depending on locales and circumstances, migrants pay some, part, or all of these taxes.  Employers who have increased productivity generally pay their taxes very well because they fear the IRS far more than they fear the Department of Homeland Security. 

Then, there are these big things called Social Security and Medicare taxes.  For several reasons, many of these taxes are routinely collected by the feds and will never be paid out.  They may be collected using identification numbers that don’t match.  They may be collected but never vested with the required 40 quarters of earnings.  One doesn’t have to be a US citizen to hold a Social Security card, but it would be a whole lot fairer world if these people lived long enough to collect the benefits.  Even among folks who are here for a long time, there is a lower life expectancy among migrants than among the general population. 

Let me say this another way:  There is a financial disincentive on the part of the US government to reform the current system.  Many don’t want to follow the money, so they blame one party or the other of pandering to the so-called Hispanic vote.  We just might see one this year, but history has told us that there is no real Hispanic vote that rises to its potential because Hispanics find themselves attracted to one party or the other and not just one party.

Restrictionist Reaction

Many folks have taken to the deserts, the streets, and the airwaves to express their resentment about the migration.  I want to wax theoretical on this one.  Anti-migration sentiment is epiphenomenal of the embedded social, cultural elements of racism, bigotry, resentment, and indifference.  There is good reason to point to some of the anti-migration sentiment and reaction as vigilantism.

Vigilantism mirrors US Border policies in general.  Regrettably, high-level public administrators and elected officials support these policies.  Saturday, the head of the Arizona state legislature and members of the US Congress will be kicking off the Minutemen border watch 31 miles north of Sasabe, Arizona, on highway 286.  To listen to the rhetoric of Bay Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, Randy Graf, or Russell Pearce is to think we’re back in the days of the Clan.  I’m one of the few Americans who stayed up to watch Tom Tancredo, Republican Representative from Colorado, read into the Congressional Record the racist thesis of Harvard’s otherwise good political scientist Samuel “Mad Dog” Huntington’s book entitled Clash of Civilizations.

At the seams, it argues against migration because somehow or another, it mongrelizes the American race.  Last time I checked, there were 700 Nations in North America in 1492.  Add to that immigrants from every nation on earth and every race and combination, and I defy you to come up with a representative of the American race.  I laugh at Huntington every time I see the T-Shirts worn by Native Americans that says, “Practicing Homeland Security since 1492”.

Like humanitarianism, vigilantism is cemented in law, in the police powers of the general public, in the rights of individuals to bear arms, and in the kind of state initiatives we have seen in the so-called Protect Arizona Now Initiative and similar proposals on the ballots in Colorado, Alabama, and elsewhere.  California had prop 187 years ago, but it is now a movement around the country. 

The negative cultural elements I have mentioned find their way quickly into the use of weapons and to the use of force and violence.  At times, they quickly segue and become intertwined.  Case in point: One Border Patrol agent regularly networks with Chris Simcox, founder of Civil Homeland Defense and the Minutemen.   As an agent, the man already accepts the use of force against migrants, and he encourages citizens to embrace his vision of a border by standing with those who are being prosecuted for taking the law into their own hands.

At the state level, we certainly know how to prosecute in the individual case.  I point to the arrest, conviction, and sentencing of a Phoenix man who murdered a Sikh man whom the murderer identified as an Arab right after 9-11.  I also point to the mentally ill Iraq war vet who came back to Arizona, pulled a gun on 8 migrants at a roadside park, arrested them, and avoided charges himself because we have a county prosecutor in Phoenix, Arizona who mistakenly thinks we’re being invaded and “good citizens” can take the law into their own hands. 

In the collective case -- that is, the more organized expression of vigilantism -- the task is difficult.  It is more insidious, and in my judgment, more offensive, more to be abhorred, and more to be resisted.  However, both have the same moral and cultural roots.

Look for a moment at the most visible vigilante-types in Arizona.  Ranch Rescue was run by Jack Foote, from Abilene, Texas.  He has since hid out.  Purportedly this organization has been most concerned with private property laws and national sovereignty questions.  Private property laws are very different in Texas than in Arizona.  I cite the case of the rancher who shot down a Border Patrol helicopter in the mid 80s without prosecution as evidence of property law differences between states.  The Border Patrol chopper had repeatedly violated the rancher’s airspace, scattered his cattle at the wells, and the rancher had warned them over and over. 

The agents told the rancher he would spend the rest of his life in jail.  The local judge told them to get their downed chopper off his land and not come back.  That said, the same questions of property rights and national sovereignty are of concern to many people living in Cochise County, Arizona, thus the semi-warm reception of Ranch Rescue there.  This paramilitary bunch of weekend warriors has been limited to working on private property.  Funding is opportunistic, that is, those playing soldier pay their own way.  One of the members of Ranch Rescue had a major civil lawsuit against him in Texas for rights violations of migrants.  Casey Nethercott pistol whipped some migrants and was sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  SPLC won.  Casey lost his ranch in Arizona he put up to pay for the judgment against him.  The land now belongs to migrants from El Salvador.  Even though the suit was won, that does not diminish the public sentiment that gives rise to its _expression.

Civil Homeland Defense was run by Chris Simcox, who later became one of the founders of the Minutemen.  He and his followers operate on private property and some Arizona State Trust lands.  His work is again limited to the lands on which he can legally operate.  It is hard to pin down his primary objectives since he re-defines who he is each month.  At the Sundance Film Festival he was all for water stations.  In other communiqués, his organization calls me a liar, traitor, and many other things. 

Funding for these activities are a little more diffuse in the public, usually from participants.  Border Patrol Intelligence reported to me that Simcox has had some funding in the beginning from "outside" groups.  It was never specified just what that meant, but many have speculated he has had ties to FAIR and other anti-migrant groups.  By the way, Simcox was also found guilty of a federal firearms violation. 

American Border Patrol is run by Glenn Spencer.  We Arizonans certainly want to thank Californians for showing him the highway over to Arizona.  This man, in my opinion, represents the most dangerous position because he is a culture warrior.  He sees things from a Michael Savage point of view: everything is borders, language, culture -- the whole mess.  His playground is more diffuse, virtually non-geographical, though he likes to fly model planes around the border and film migrants crossing the border.  He annually raises over $400,000 for his work.  These elements increase his long-term financial viability.

I know the crazy rancher Roger Barnett, Chris Simcox, and Glenn Spencer as well as some of the other unnamed border restriction activists in Arizona.  The Spencer types along with some of the Minutemen are the most to be watched because they can project into virtual or hyper reality and mobilize folks to increase the participation of those who would express his sentiments even if they are thousands of miles away.  Through websites, particularly Spencer’s’, people may be led to various other groups.   Back to racism, bigotry, resentment, and indifference. 

None is happy with the inexorable south to north migration except some employers.  Land owners and managers are not happy.  The Tohono O’odham Nation is not happy.  Law enforcement, elected officials, healthcare providers, environmentalists, taxpayers, rights groups, and faith communities are all unhappy with the migration.  I’ll say more about the players in a minute. 

My political science colleagues who disaggregated California Prop 187 voting behavior back in the 90s, found economic issues to explain more than 50 percent of the variance.  That is significant.  But when they changed the equations around, they also found that race issues explained more than 50 percent of the voting behavior.  That, too, is significant. 

Critical school thinking has long told us that if legal-political order is not accomplished, alternative forms of power will prevail.  That’s a much more complicated and complex variation on the power vacuum theory, and what it means is if government is not taking care of business that can and should be taken care of, other players will step in. 

Before I get off this part of my soapbox, I want to say that contrary to the conventional Liberal/Conservative split, I assure you that vigilante power-expression can come from either side.  Studies have shown that folks who hold memberships in groups against population growth or radical environmental groups are likely to hold memberships in immigration restrictionist groups.

Current federal administrators are bent on re-defining all border issues in terms of national security.  Our junior Senator, Jon Kyl, recently said of those whom I am loosely calling vigilantes that he fully understands their frustrations.  Translation: This senator supports them.  The bill he co-authored with John Cornyn from Texas takes the side of the vigilante argument.  Certainly, the State of Arizona must step in.  We need the power of the legal-political model for change.  Unfortunately, Arizona investigates human rights abuse claims about as often as Utah investigates polygamy.

What is left for those of us who work in transformative faith traditions is to fully engage the moral-cultural model.  Both the legal-political and the moral-cultural model require substantive discourse around level tables for which participants are adequately prepared.

The ill-defined political culture of Arizona and the comparatively small influence of main-line denominations and the peace Protestants make this a difficult challenge.  The immediate burden falls, then, on the less politically active Hispanic voters and activists. 

The required discourse is about alterity: others and otherness.  If we are going to react to others, we need also to look at ourselves to see why we're reacting the way we are and whether we like what we see.  

Enforcement Response

 

Humanitarian Response

Based on all the stuff I’ve shared with you, you can see that I’ve spent more than just a little time studying theological kinds of things, public policy kinds of things, and social science kinds of things around the kinds of stuff you’re looking at.  Read the prophets, and you will find that they spend an awful lot of their time on who has a claim on what, who gets paid what, whose land is whose, how close to the fence line to glean the fields, how to take care of the poor and so on.  Read public policy and especially international affairs, and you’ll find that the US doesn’t stack up too well in a lot of migration issues.  Read social science a bit, and you’ll come to discern that a lot of the truth claims made by the various parties don’t stand up to scrutiny, either.

Now let’s talk about migration as we know it in this part of the world and in this case study.  Again, I paint with broad strokes, but there are some things that you can take to the bank.

First of all, no one in Southern Arizona likes the migration.  No one.  There are some people who benefit from it, but even employers, unions, and migrants all want the laws changed.

Law Enforcement

Law enforcement doesn’t like the migration, because it confuses the mission of the officers among other things.  Some object to the things we expect of law enforcement because they understand themselves to be peace officers and not federal agents.

           

Landowners And Managers

Land owners and public land managers dislike the migration because of the environmental degradation by migrants and law enforcement.  We’ve offered to go out and pick up trash on 500,000 acres of national park lands in Arizona, but the superintendent of the park says, “No, I don’t even let my rangers go out there.”  We’ve countered that we’re in the desert all the time, and we have no problems with folks in the desert.  She says, you might run into bad folks.  We countered again, we wouldn’t know if someone was a drug runner or not.  She countered: “They’re the ones with the AK-47s”. 

Health Care

Health care providers don’t like the migration because of unreimbursed expenses, though we should quickly note and understand that most of the unreimbursed expenses come from humanitarian waivers issued by federal inspectors at US ports of entry and not from migrants who found themselves in trouble in the desert.

Elected Officials

Elected officials don’t like the migration because it pits one group against another.  The migration makes claims upon scarce public resources like education, criminal justice, healthcare, and other kinds of things.  I think Clinton changed many offenses at the federal level to aggravated felonies, not just because it made him look tough, but because locally, folks could get people prosecuted and placed into removal proceedings quickly. 

Faith Communities

Faith based groups don’t like the migration and the immigration laws in general because of the families that get separated and stressed out.  We’re supposed to use immigration laws to focus on family reunification, not anti-terrorism.  It should be noted that even federal officers end up with pretty high prosecution rates for falling in either love or lust with non US Citizens.  We need to be able to separate out some of this stuff.

Human Rights

Human rights groups abhor the migration especially since they have such little recourse and almost no civil rights and little judicial review in the American legal system.  One of the reasons for all of this is that the United States is not a signatory to the basic human rights conventions that other nations consider paramount.  Would that we could celebrate the open society we envisioned at our founding.

This migration that is disliked by so many for so many different reasons, and I’ve only touched on a few of the reasons why no one likes the migration.  The reason I hate it is because it is rapidly becoming one of the deadliest migrations in the world. 

Border Patrol

US efforts to control it have failed miserably.  Since 1993, we’ve tripled the number of federal agents posted to the southwest border and multiplied their manpower by increasing the amount of technology, aircraft, etc. available to them.  We’ve done this with no appreciable decrease in migration.  In fact, the academic community will tell you that except for a couple of episodes that are explained by external influences, the number of people annually crossing the border has remained relatively constant since 1993. 

Impartial Data

The United States General Accountability Office, the University of Houston, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill all report that the same number of people are coming each year and that enforcement has only moved the migration into worse areas to cross. 

About 50 bills are currently in the Arizona Legislature, and each purports to deal with the migration in some way, with rights of citizenship, and such.  But not one of these bills presents itself as good public policy because none of them expand rights of US citizens.  None of them will do anything about controlling the migration.  None of them can do anything about protecting or expanding human rights. 

Some say that these bills are epiphenomenal of anti-migrant and anti-immigrant sentiment.  I say that opportunists are throwing rocks at people they don’t know, who typically have better family values than they do, and who have no political representation.  I find it reminiscent of other countries’ early days of violent discrimination and repression. 

Humane Borders Founded

Humane Borders was founded here in Tucson June 11, 2000 as a response to the inordinate number of migrant deaths in our desert.  We need to found it again, because in that year there were only 50 + deaths.  Last year, there were 279 recorded, more than 30 in Maricopa County that went uncounted for a total of more than 300.  There are more than 100 bodies of migrants at Dr. Park’s office.  He’s the Pima County Medical Examiner. 

There is nothing on the horizon to indicate that there will be any fewer deaths this year than in previous years.  Even if comprehensive reforms were enacted tomorrow, we would have to be in the humanitarian business for another two years.  Rules have to be written, people organized, migrants educated and have their trust earned, on and on.  The implementation of the laws will be monumental. 

Law enforcement practices have continually squeezed the migration into the deadliest corridors imaginable, and then pushed the migrants into more circuitous trails with longer exposures to the elements, resulting in a greater number of deaths.  This is immoral, and many of the architects of the plans including Doris Meissner, the former Commissioner of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service agree.  And currently re-defining all border realities in terms of national security is bound to lead to more deaths. 

The borders are broken.  The laws are questionable, punitive, illogical, and counter-productive to the needs of the nation, its commerce, its image in the world, and its most basic core values. 

Humane Borders is an Arizona Social Welfare Organization recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a faith-based 501(c)(4) organization.  Just as a reminder to most of you.  C3s are charities.  C4s are not charities, but they can lobby.  That’s the organizational trade-off.  So I can go and talk to legislators of the US government and try to persuade them to take this or that action, and we do this. 

In season, we operate approximately 72 water stations.  All of them are in Arizona except for about 20 in Mexico.  We dispensed about 45,000 gallons of water last year.  Our sister corporation in California, Water Station, Inc. dispensed probably another 7,000 gallons near El Centro.   We hold federal permits for the stations that are on federal property.  The permits are from the Department of Interior, negotiated with the Department of Justice, and signed by the Solicitor of the United States.  The stations are insured for millions and have lots of requirements for maintenance and servicing. 

We do operate on Arizona State Trust Lands. 

We hold county permits and rights of entry for some water stations, and we receive $25,000 annually in funding from Pima County Government.  In addition, we receive some in-kind support.  The City of Tucson owns some 250,000 acres of well properties west of the city, and we operate stations on strategic lands in both the Altar and Avra valleys. 

Our organizing principle was quite simple.  Death in the desert is wrong.  We asked who wanted to talk about it?  We’re going to do the following things.  You can help….

Support comes from around the world from 17 different denominations; Buddhists, Jews, Roman Catholics, theologically left-leaning mainline Protestants, and six theologically right-leaning denominations. 

Our positions are quite clear: We advocate for:

 

  1. A legal status for folks who are here.  Law enforcements is never going to remove 12 million people, and it’s simply un-American to continue to keep these people living in the shadows of a settled life. 

  2. Legalized work opportunities for people who want to come here.  We have thoughts about guest worker programs, and the devil is in the details. 

  3. Economic development in countries of origin.

  4. Incentives for visa-compliance, which have never been a part of US immigration law history. 

 

Bond Proposal

I propose that when a migrant comes to the port of entry to enter the US with a migrant worker visa, he or she puts up a bond at the port of entry in his or her name. The economists can figure out how much this bond would be, but it is logical that it be tied to the average cost of crossing the border. Clearly, migrants are willing and able to expend some funds. And, obviously, this would take money out of the human smuggling rings. As the migrant begins to work, he or she is paid a modest hourly stipend in the wage structure. Again, others can propose a number, but the stipend would be at least higher than the existing 51 minimum wages in the US. This would keep unscrupulous employers from paying migrants less than the minimum wage or from breaking covenant with those sheltered workers in our society with whom we have a collective social contract such as persons with disabilities.

The amount of the stipend, and perhaps some of the wage, accrues by electronic transfer to the migrants' bond account every pay period. Since an average wage earner works some 2,000 hours each year, simply multiply 2,000 times the hourly stipend or total contribution, and the annual contribution to the bond can be calculated. At the end of the visa period, the migrant is compelled to make a choice: go back to the port of entry, pick up the bond which is now worth thousands of dollars, and leave the US or go underground. If the migrant does not comply with the visa and pick up the bond within the specified time, the money is forfeited to law enforcement. Since the migrant does not enjoy the full benefits and legal protection of citizenship, law enforcement would for the first time have access to the IRS records that would lead law enforcement to at least the last reported employment and residence of the migrant so that visa compliance could be obtained. 

While this may seem harsh, the social costs of the migration could be addressed, visa compliance could be addressed, the smuggling of humans could be addressed, deserts could be protected, and the necessary return to the migrant's country of origin would significantly enhance economic development and education. Additionally, any proposals that do not consider law enforcement components and funding proposals will not meet general public acceptance.

As you can tell from this proposal, we’re not open borders advocates.  That group is best represented by the Wall Street Republicans who have for 30 years on the Fourth of July publish an editorial calling for open borders so they can enjoy their dream of a flat labor market. 

We are not restrictionists because we believe that it is not only our moral and religious duty to welcome the strangers and treat them like family, we believe that this nation is enriched by the blessings of migrants. 

We are a group that exists to create a humane border, one that doesn’t kill people as a consequence of policy choice. 

While we’re keeping one eye on the law, I’ll tell you just what I told David Aquilar, the Chief of the US Border Patrol when he sat in my office in September of 2000 —- and this is the kind of sound bite that comes from a pastor, activist, academic -- “If I can’t give a cup of water in Christ’s name, we have a bigger problem in this country than immigration.”  He didn’t have a problem with that.  He agreed. 

What’s buried down in this disclosure?  Quite simply, it’s the fact that what Humane Borders is doing, is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.  Freedom of Speech applies in this case.  Freedom of Assembly applies.  Freedom of Religion especially applies.  The Chief knows what happens when Con Law comes up against statutes.  Paper covers rocks; that paper is protected from scissors by every officer of the law who took an oath to protect and defend it. 

From a normative perspective, borders should mean something.  Borders involve differentials of authority and jurisdiction.  I like to tell the story of car insurance as an example.  In Texas, you are insured as a driver.  In Arizona, much to my surprise, the vehicle is insured no matter who drives it.  And, in Sonora, Mexico, you’re basically guilty until you can prove you are not.  You were driving, after all. 

We have chosen to politicize the US-Mexico border in recent years.  We could go enforce laws somewhere else if we wanted to.  For instance, the border between Mexico and the United States is 1,962 miles long.  That’s roughly the same as the border between Texas and New Mexico plus Oklahoma, plus Arkansas, and finally, Louisiana. 

On any given day, with interstates 10, 20, 30, 35, and 40 connecting the various states, if the police stats are correct, there are more drugs, more guns, more rapists, more murderers, more abducted people, more wanted people, more sex slaves, and so on crossing the Texas border with other states than crossing the US-Mexico border. 

When I was the age of most of you, we always cited how free we were in the US and how we didn’t have to have papers and didn’t have to stop at internal checkpoints like they do in the Soviet Union.  We’re not far from it here.  Neither the market nor the government can give you a simple answer. 

The free traders in Arizona want you to be able to drive through the Nogales port of entry with a semi full of tomatoes at 75 miles per hour.  The nativist, sovereignty folks want everyone stopped, digitized, possibly given an enemy, and possibly fumigated. 

I ask in terms of people looking for bad guys, what is the difference between the borders between states and the nations?  The difference is that the crooks crossing the state lines are our crooks.  The last bumper sticker I saw when I left Fort Worth, Texas in 1990 said, “Sure LBJ was a crook, but I miss him.” 

And, of course, those crossing the borders might be terrorists.  All that said, let’s talk a bit about that before we all walk lockstep with the Minutemen in the Altar Valley.  In US history, at least half of what would qualify as true terrorism has been fully home grown.  So, I ask you how does someone know one is not hiring a terrorist when contracting for landscaping services or when leaving a tip for a maid at a hotel in Las Vegas?  One doesn’t know.

Imagine the consternation of law enforcement when we ask them to sort the two groups out and police them in a just way.  I’ve stopped in the desert when Border Patrol agents are out with a large group and asked them if they wanted water, food, or phone.  “No, but go over to mile post such and such.  There’s a group of 30 or so over there.  Tell them we’ll be by in about 45 minutes or so.  Thanks.” 

When I testified to Congress about the migration, I argued for moving the migration back to the ports of entry where everyone would be documented, inspected, checked for health status, etc.  Only then would we be able to change the assumptions of the law enforcement officials looking for terrorists.

If we moved 98 percent of the migration back through the ports of entry and the urban areas where it was in the 80s, then the assumption of the officers would be if they found a foreigner in the desert, it would be someone here with improper intentions.

From about ’93 when Congress nearly eviscerated interior enforcement of immigration laws until September 11, 2001, we were in one kind of thinking.  Now, we’re in another.  Most of the interior workplace enforcement is triggered by competitors complaining about unfair competition, especially after bidding wars for lucrative contracts for large jobs. 

Since September 11, 2001, we currently are choosing to make our frontier and our border co-terminus.  This is a new kind of thinking for us, though scholars of war have led us down this path before.

So now, we demonize the migrants.

We criminalize poverty in the Americas. 

We blame nearly everything we can on migrants.

We have candidates running for office in Arizona who have nothing to say in public except that everything single thing wrong in Arizona can be blamed on migrants. 

Most everything that we blame on migrants turns out not to be true when rational, competent authorities investigate.  For instance, the Congressional Budget Office reports to us that there is no evidence that migrants drive down wages in the aggregate.  Generally speaking, when a business or even a sector enjoys lower wages, it will, in turn invest in capital and generating more jobs which generally will go to those with greater skills, knowledge, and ability, generally citizens who are well adapted and educated.  It’s sort of a truism in this case that creating jobs on the lowest level, no matter the wage, generates jobs and wages on all levels. 

Of course, the pastor in me, says, the big issue, then, is whether or not there is an appropriate entry level.  Do all persons get to participate?  Who are the coaches?  Who are the referees?  Who determines the rules in the game?

Another issue: health.  To listen to Lou Dobbs and his friends, you’d think that all migrants are vermin infested people driving down both the quality and availability of healthcare in the US.  The migrants who enter the US are healthier than the general population. 

The costs of healthcare are a completely different matter.  In 1954 when Congress mandated that federally licensed hospitals would have to provide free indigent care, the assumption was that the need for indigent care was evenly distributed around the country. 

This is certainly not the case along the border.  But the users of the healthcare who drive up the cost are not migrants, they are the persons who are paroled into the US by Customs and Border Protection inspectors at the ports of entry who issue humanitarian waivers for persons who present themselves at the ports in need of emergency medical care.  Every year, one senator or another, and several members of congress introduce bills in Congress to reimburse healthcare providers along the border for expenses that are not covered by first or third-party payers such as insurance.  What needs to happen is that every time a waiver is signed, it automatically becomes a voucher for reimbursement by the federal government, appropriately through Health and Human Services, but hopefully through Department of Homeland Security, so that we can understand that they’re not just about guns. 

Globalization is one of the big engines of this current migration.  Read some history, and you’ll remember that Sears and Roebuck was the monster corporation killing all the mom and pop companies 100 years ago.  Now it’s Wal-Mart.  Welcome to globalization. 

In the words of my friend at Notre Dame University, Professor Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the fathers of Liberation Theology, arguing against globalization is like arguing against electricity. 

There are also cultural arguments that lead to lots of myth constructions.  Today migrants learn the English language two generations sooner than they did in the first two decades of the 1900s.  If one is bent on the so-called culture wars issues, measure CD purchases and iPod downloads to see if what the folks arguing about English First is really true.

Race is an enormous part of this equation.  I tell people that if the migrants dying the deserts of Arizona were Swedish hookers, Congress would probably be doing something about death in the desert. 

Here’s another inarguable point about race and migration.  Some 43 percent of the undocumented persons in the US—according to government statistics, census data, and the Pew Hispanic Center—are persons who came here legally and overstayed their visas.  That means they were inspected at one time.

We finally changed our race-based immigration policies in 1965 to policies based on countries of origin.  Statistically, it’s almost the same thing.  A lot of the anti-immigrant behavior we see on the border where I live and in the media from all over the country is exhibited by people left behind by globalization who have chosen to blame everything on people of color. 

Let me tell you a personal story.  In the 90s, I was a doctoral student, a pastor, and a contractor.  I had a roofing crew tearing off the roof of an expensive, split-level home in West Texas.  Border Patrol agents ran up my ladders with their hands on their guns and carded everyone on the job.  Every one of my men were born in Lubbock, Texas.  That’s nothing to brag about, but they were not here illegally.  They were brown.  They were roofing.  Must be undocumented.  The owner of the house came out to see what the fuss was about, and the Border Patrol agents were apologizing to the white man for disturbing him.  They were acting on a tip that there were some undocumented persons working here.  The agents left.  The only person who was undocumented, was the white man who owned the house.  He was from New Zealand.  He was a professor who had overstayed his work visa. 

There is a major, comprehensive immigration reform in America’s future, and it will not be focused on national security first any more than our current enforcement out in the desert is focused on national security.  And the irony is that when we get comprehensive immigration reform, we’ll have better security than we now have. 

Fences

We will look back with revulsion on how we’ve treated the migrants entering this country, and a future President will be apologizing to other nations and nationalized citizens for not observing human rights conventions and pursuing policies sooner that remove death from the immigration equation, remove the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and provide an image of an open society to the rest of the world in a way that makes the rest of the world want to be like us instead of fearing us. 

Border Enforcement Not Working

Border enforcement is not working.  That’s unfortunate because I’m the first to tell you that there are bad guys coming across the border.  There’s human trafficking, sex worker trade, and border banditry.  There’s guns and contraband going across the border every day and night. 

But if we’re talking just about the migration, we need to figure out something else because what we are doing doesn’t work.  Just west of Tucson is the Altar-Avra Valley corridor for instance.  On the border at the head of those two valleys is the small community of Sasabe.  21 miles south of the border is a checkpoint where Grupo Beta stops every vehicle, counts the people, and warns them of the dangers that lie ahead.  The daily count that is taken between about 9a.m. and 5p.m. is more than 4,000 migrants.  Since January 1, more people have successfully come through the Arizona-Sonora Border in the area where I live than actually live in the city of Tucson.  Tucson has about 650,000 people.  Sure, the Border Patrol apprehends up to 18 percent of the migrants on good days in some corridors, but any agent will also tell you that any persistent migrant will make it into the US.  One of the reasons why is that we reward them with jobs. 

We have created the conditions that cause most of the migration to come our way by signing unfair trade agreements, by displacing people from the land through short-sighted land management practices, water pollution, and other environmental problems. 

Now, we’re trying to say that we shouldn’t hire the people.  We should enforce employer sanctions.  That’s not in our self-interest.  These people are highly motivated, highly incented and often highly skilled.

Some senators and congressmen are currently in back rooms, on the senate floor talking about these things.  Few are talking about the human costs associated with these immoral policies that no rational mind would have ever chosen following any ethical model I can think of.

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