A Concrete Curtain Shuts America In

NOGALES, Arizona – Tony Estrada spoke hard reality in a soft gentle voice:

“If you haven’t lived on the border, you don’t know what it’s all about. As long as you have a demand for drugs, a demand for labor, people will come across. As long as people need to make a future for their families, they will take whatever risks they have to. It will never stop.”

He would know. Estrada, 80, was a Nogales cop for decades and Santa Cruz County sheriff for seven terms until 2021. He has seen an open friendly frontier evolve into a Berlin Wall. I scribbled notes, nodding as he triggered my memories of mornings in an earlier Mexico.

People who demand a Concrete Curtain miss the point. That won’t stop anyone determined to go over it, under it or around it. Instead, it seals off Americans from a richly human culture with deep family values and a back-breaking work ethic just out their backdoor.

America is hardly “full.” Stonewalling badly needed tax-paying Mexican workers who support families back home drives up U.S. inflation and weakens economies on both sides of the border. Yet visa processes take years in a broken system. Clandestine migrants suffer in the shadows.

Estrada knows all about corruption and violence in Mexico, but he also sees the cause and effect. Cartels supply an insatiable demand for drugs up north. The harder U.S. authorities try to crack down, the more vicious and resourceful their methods. Decent Mexican families pay the price.

I talked to him with Adrien Jaulmes, star correspondent for the bedrock French daily, Le Figaro, who nodded for his own reasons. We’ve both seen America’s “border crisis” play out in variants across the world. If root causes are not resolved, migrant tides will be unstoppable tsunamis.

We had just watched a kid scamper up the 27-foot-high metal panel fence that divides Nogales in two. He warily eyed coils of razer-sharp wire on the American side. Two Border Patrol guys rolled up to wait. “Oh, we’ll get him,” one said, adding with a chuckle: “If he makes it.”

Estrada shook his head sadly when we told him about it. “We don’t use razor wire for livestock, but we do for human beings,” he said. America can control its borders without deliberately cruel methods that only escalate as criminal gangs thwart every attempt to stop them.

In Adrien’s photo illustrating this dispatch, you can just make out the kid at the top, who was likely showing off for friends. Towering barriers in urban areas are meant to force crossers into remote stretches where they face hostile desert under baking heat. Cartels’ coyotes guide them if they hump heavy packs of drugs and only little water. That is a small part of it.

Authorities have found at least 100 tunnels in recent years and can only guess at how many they miss. Estrada concurs with U.S. consular officials I’ve interviewed on the Sonora side. Most drugs and contraband come through ports of entry, secreted in trucks and railway cars. Dogs could sniff out bulk marijuana. Fentanyl sealed in small packages, not so much.

Estrada’s dirt-poor carpenter father brought him and four brothers across from the Mexican side of Nogales when he was a year old. “I never apologize for being compassionate to another human being,” he said. “It’s amazing how some people think they are better than others.”

He was sickened by Donald Trump’s first campaign speech in 2015, a harangue that revealed his jackal-like instinct to go for the gut. Against a red, white and blue backdrop at his gaudy New York headquarters, he ranted about Mexican migrants and Central American refugees.

“They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime,” Trump said. “They’re rapists.” Then with the token “balance” that is a racist’s hallmark, he added: “And some, I assume, are good people.”

Univision directors, outraged, canceled Trump’s Miss Universe pageant. A major Hispanic advertiser told NPR, “With one short speech he tarred the entire Latino culture as being rapists and murderers and terrorists.” Political commentators predicted a Trump wipeout.

But Republicans saw a winning strategy: exploit most U.S. voters’ ignorance of frontier realities.

Growing up in Tucson, I loved what Mexico was in pre-cartel days. I bounced down non-roads for hours to old Spanish missions, waking in villages to the scent of fresh tortillas and bubbling beans. I went to school in Guadalajara and worked on a paper in Mexico City. I knocked back tequila to the blare of mariachis, dined in fancy homes and fished off splendid beaches.

A few ugly moments aside, I reveled in uncommon generosity and warmth to strangers. Much of that remains. But it has been hit hard since 2016.

After barring immigrants from so many places on feeble excuses, Trump seized on Title 42 to block migrants who might be infectious with Covid-19. A quarantine could have mitigated that. When he left office, backlogged hordes swarmed the border. Biden is trying hard to streamline the process despite Republican pressure.

Adrien had just covered Biden’s flash visit to El Paso, a sop to critics who claim he is ignoring a problem that he caused. But Biden has dealt with immigration complexities for decades. Like so many other crises America now faces, the sudden influx is his predecessor’s doing.

Asylum seekers are one challenge. America has accepted only about three million from around the world since the Reagan ‘80s until 2016, far less than those forced to flee because of Washington’s needless wars. In 2020, Germany took in 1,210,596 refugees. The United States admitted 11,800.

“Economic migrants” are a different category. They include people seeking a better life but also many more with no choice because of climate collapse, government repression and crushing poverty. In earlier years, most were men seeking jobs. Now many are women with infants. In some cases, women are gang-raped by guides and left to die in the desert.

The International Organization for Migration estimated deaths near the border at 650 in 2021, mostly killed by heat that often reaches 115 degrees in summer.

Estrada believes most Mexicans would rather stay home with their families in societies they know, but they come to America to survive. “They think this is a country that will be fair with them,” he said, “and they will contribute and be appreciated.”

One urgent first step, he said, should be regularizing 10 million or so “dreamers” who came to the United States as kids with their parents from Mexico and elsewhere, then grew up as Americans. Democrats are in favor. Republicans are not.

After that, it gets complicated. The border is now besieged by a category known as OTM – Other than Mexican. Many are from Central America, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti but also from distressed countries halfway around the world.

For asylum seekers, America needs to respect international conventions it championed after World War II. Trained jurists must quickly screen applicants, who need decent living quarters until cases are resolved. For others, Congress should set higher quotas and speed up visa processes.

Biden is making some progress, trying to shorten and simplify screening processes. After the Supreme Court stalled his plan to scrap Title 42, which was used 2.5 million times to turn away migrants, U.S. Customs and Border Protection set up an online process for people with exemptions to schedule hearings in advance.

But Republicans push back hard in the wrong direction. Trump’s approach was to crank up the misery. He purposely separated children, even infants, from their parents. One of his bright ideas, rejected, was to shoot at the legs of people crowding border crossings.

Governors now spend millions to play politics with peoples’ lives, such as dumping penniless migrants clad in t-shirts into freezing weather back east with nowhere to turn for help.

The new sheriff is David Hathaway, a lifelong Nogales cop with similar views as Estrada. He threatened to arrest anyone involved in Gov. Doug Ducey’s three-mile Potemkin barrier of stacked containers if they crossed over from adjacent Cochise Country. That folly cost Arizonans about $200 million to put up and then remove, leaving heavy environmental damage.

Estrada agrees that the United States must control immigration, which at some future point will likely have to be sharply curbed. But if it adheres to principles it preaches, he said, that must be done with justice and humanity.

Many people who struggle to reach the southern border have no papers, he said, and they should not automatically get sent back to despotic governments and gangs that threaten their lives. Diplomacy and economic aid are essential to help people stay put at home.

One logical solution is an updated version of the Bracero Program. Mexicans were allowed in to pick seasonal crops and pay tax on their wages, then return home until the next harvests. That ended in 1963 after resistance from Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers union is California. Later studies found that the absence of braceros (laborers) had little effect on domestic wages.

Symbiosis benefits both countries. Mexicans allowed to cross the border buy in bulk and splurge on luxuries. Before the crackdown, JCPenney’s small Nogales outlet grossed more than any of its big stores. Last year, Mexicans in the United States remitted $50 billion to sustain families back home.

But the problem is political. To the far right, Mexico is more valuable as a scapegoat to fire up ill-informed voters than as an economic partner and a good neighbor. Even legal residents are often branded “aliens” and blamed for home-grown ills.

A brute-force policy to seal the border increases contempt, if not hatred, in the outside world toward an increasingly self-obsessed United States. Many Americans bridle at draconian measures. The Border Patrol stopped using balloons after people objected to being spied on from above their homes.

Estrada says Border Patrol agents are essential to stem illegal crossings and help migrants in trouble. But not 17,000 just on the southern border, many ill-trained and some trigger happy. Funds would be better spent addressing reasons why migrants and refugees head north.

“These people are coming, and nothing will stop them short of planting land mines,” he concluded. “Wait,” he added with a rueful laugh. “Don’t give them any ideas.”