House of shattered dreams: US deports more Mexicans
29 November 2008
Khaleej Times Online
TIJUANA - The double fence that separates Mexico from the United States near Tijuana is just a few hundred metres away from the Casa del Migrante - the migrant's house.
The white church of Father Luis Kendzierski, which sits on a hill and is visible from the city centre, is always surrounded by scores of people.
The men who approach the church have often lived and worked in the United States for up to 25 years before being picked up by police, taken before US immigration authorities and deported to Tijuana.
In the migrants' home there is accommodation for up to 400 men. They can stay there for 12 days and get food and clothing, as well as being enabled to phone their relatives in Mexico, to organize their forced trip home. And then they are taken home by bus.
"For most of them this is a catastrophe. They realize here that their dream is shattered," Father Kendzierski said. "After many years of work in the United States they return, not richer but older."
The United States is not only sealing its southern border with a fence in order to stem the inflow of Mexicans and Central Americans. They have also tightened legislation in order to send back Latinos who have already reached the United States illegally.
Hundreds of thousands of people are being sent back along the 3,000-kilometre-long border. And given that the "traditional" illegal gateways near cities have become insurmountable, migrants seek out more out-of-the-way places over dangerous, mountainous pathways into the United States.
In the first nine months of this year, some 97,000 Mexicans and Central Americans were arrested and sent back from the 120-kilometre stretch in Cochise County, Arizona alone.
"This is a lot more than last year," said Gustavo Morales Cirion, the Mexican "protection consul" in Douglas, Arizona, who is in charge of migrants. In the whole Tucson sector the figure of returnees was as high as 266,000.
In southern California, in San Diego, there are some 25,000 indigenous people from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Most of them are "indocumentados," without papers. But even though they daily face the threat of deportation, over the years they have let down their guard enough to flaunt the rules and celebrate their cultural festivals out in the open.
They need something festive to make up for their dangerous crossings into the US and their illegal labour in the tomato, avocado and strawberry fields around San Diego. US farm owners, faced with immigration crackdowns, say they don't know who will harvest their crops.
With more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the US today, most of them from Latin America, it's a similar story in US construction sites, hotels and many other vibrant branches of the economy.
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