Source: Oakland Tribune, op/ed page, 8/27/97
Contact: tribedit@mail.well.com

DEATH at the Border," a study conducted by researchers at the University
of Houston, illuminates the violence at the root of government policies
such as Operation Gatekeeper According to its authors, from 199396,
nearly 1,200 illegal immigrants died while attempting to cross the
U.S.Mexico border. San Diego County had the greatest number of deaths:
194 Immigrants. Another 30 have perished thus far in 1997.

Since the inception of Operation Gatekeeper in October 1994, many of the
deaths in San Diego County have been linked to the Border Patrol's
"channelization" strategy, which effectively pushes entering immigrants
eastward, where they must traverse treacherous mountain terrain. Falls
resulting in injury are common, as are snake bites. Those who set out
without adequate provisions become ill and disoriented, some wandering
for days before reaching their destination.

Other deaths can be linked to Gatekeeper's heightened criminalization of
entering immigrants and the "coyotes" who aid and abet them. Facing
felony convictions and long prison terms five years for the first
offense, 15 years for a second coyotes have resorted to increasingly
desperate means of escaping arrest, thereby imperiling not only their own
lives but those of their human cargo and anyone else who may get in their
way. Since Operation Gatekeeper went into effect, no fewer than six
violent car accidents have occurred in the San Diego area alone, leaving
at least 15 dead and 68 injured.

Gatekeeper's emphasis on criminalization has produced another problem:
There are not enough jails and detention centers to house the
apprehended. In San Diego, there is one federal jail the 23story
Metropolitan Correctional Center that can house 1,300 inmates. The
mounting backlog of Gatekeeper related cases has lengthened the average
stay of its mostly Latino inmates 80 percent compared with a 26.3
percent average In similar federal institutions from three months to
more than six months. This has heightened anxiety among detainee s,
leading to more violence and suicide attempts; the facility's psychiatric
ward is overcrowded. These conditions prompted the recent opening of the
Miramar naval brig, but it closed days later after an inmate revolt.
Detainees still are being held in jails as far away as Las Vegis, from
which they are shuttled by plane or bus to hearings in San Diego.

One consequence of Gatekeeper's obsession with criminalizing the
immigration problem is to siphon off resources from drug prosecutions. On
any given day in San Diego, judges may be looking at more than 200
criminal cases related to illegal immigration. Nevertheless, second and
thirdtime border violators rarely are prosecuted; nor are drug cases
involving fewer than 125 pounds of marijuana. There simply are not enough
prosecutors to try and judges to hear such cases.

Gatekeeper's failure is all the more compelling in light of the Clinton
administration's unwillingness to prosecute largescale employers who
themselves engage in a kind of "coyotism." From the huge agribusinesses
of Southern California to the major meatprocessing plants in central
Iowa, tens of thousands of undocumented workers are satisfying employers'
demands for cheap, unskilled labor. Yet, aside from occasional and
muchpublicized forays into small sweatshops in Chicago or Los Angeles,
neither the Immigration and Naturalization Service nor the Department of
Labor has shown much of an inclination to clamp down on employers.

Gatekeeper's gungho criminalization approach leaves little room for
discussions of alternatives. But it's clear that employers' demand for
unskilled, seasonal and migrant labor in the United States is strong
enough to warrant a comprehensive policy dealing with such. This might
include dual citizenship, which could be based upon property rights as
well as rights that accrue from contributing one's work to the social
collective. This would help to unify Americans and Mexicans in common
cause and spare lives. Short of such discussions, further escalation of
the "war" currently being waged along the U.S.Mexico border, as many are
urging, will produce only more violence. As passage into the United
States is made more arduous, and as the state's criminalization of
strawberry pickers heats up, we can expect a heightening of desperation
and risktaking among Mexican workers. When elected officials cry out for
more money to stop speeding vans overfilled with illegal immigrants, we
must recognize that policies such as Operation Gatekeeper play a role in
fostering the problem. When government spokespersons stand over corpses
and claim coyotes are responsible, we must ask which ones: those who
accept payment in dollars to assist immigrants' illegal passage or those
who accept labor in exchange for a wage in U.S. fields and factories?

(italic)Michale Huspek is an associate professor in the College of Arts
and Sciences at California State, San Marcos.

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