Smuggler Nation (50 page)

Many Mexican border towns, such as Tijuana and Juarez, became busy vice districts—offering booze, brothels, and gambling to swarms of American tourists—and also illicit liquor trade centers, helping to build up the border smuggling infrastructure.
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After repeal, this infrastructure simply adapted to other smuggling opportunities. At the same time, Prohibition helped establish a much greater, even if still limited, federal policing presence along the border.

Meanwhile, the large-scale smuggling of untaxed goods into Mexico, which had been the backbone of border smuggling in the nineteenth century, continued to grow in the twentieth. Although much of the flow went south, smuggling was not entirely one way. The smuggling of candelilla, a strong natural wax from native shrubs, was a thriving export business in some northern Mexican border states by midcentury, thanks to strict government controls on price and production. Also, the smuggling of animals (especially of parrots, sometimes intoxicated with tequila to keep them quiet) from Mexico into the United States became such a profitable business that feuds between rival smugglers could result in their hijacking one another’s parrot shipments.
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Decades of protectionist Mexican economic policies designed to insulate the country’s industries and generate revenue for the government meant that U.S. border towns functioned as unofficial warehouses and shopping centers for consumer durables, ranging from household appliances to automobiles, waiting to be smuggled into Mexico. The Laredo airport became a busy hub for small planes loaded up with televisions, microwave ovens, radios, and other U.S. consumer goods bound for Mexico. Flying was the fastest and cheapest way to get around high Mexican tariffs; going by land required passing through more Mexican customs checkpoints, and therefore spending more on bribes. By the late 1970s, Mexicans were purchasing so many consumer goods in Laredo, Texas, that even though the local residents earned among the lowest wages in the country, Laredo ranked among the highest cities in retail sales per capita.
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The situation got so out of hand that the Lopez Portillo administration appealed to the Carter administration to help stem the contraband
trade in luxury items, electronics and other appliances, powdered milk, and more, which was estimated to have cost Mexican business $1 billion in losses.
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Only membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1986 and the subsequent liberalization of trade (formalized by NAFTA in 1994) enabled Mexico to substantially end this kind of tax-evading smuggling.
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But just as smugglers who made their living from contraband saw their business drastically shrink because of market liberalization and the economic opening of the border, the lack of liberalization in other key sectors of the clandestine economic relationship—most notably Mexico’s export of drugs and migrant labor and America’s high demand for these exports—ensured that border smuggling would continue to flourish.

The Mexican Migration Connection

As we saw earlier, Mexicans were relatively late arrivals to the story of illegal migration to the United States. It was not until 1929 that U.S. border inspectors even made any real effort to regulate the entry of Mexican nationals. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans fled to the United States during the Mexican Revolution, and an estimated half a million more entered in the 1920s. Mexican workers became the favored source of cheap labor as European and Asian migration dried up. They were considered submissive and disposable: when they were no longer needed during the Great Depression hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants were simply rounded up and deported.

When America’s thirst for cheap labor was renewed in the 1940s as a result of the labor shortages during World War II, Mexican workers were welcomed back. The U.S. Bracero Program, a guest-worker scheme created in 1942, was designed both to ensure a cheap source of labor for southwestern agribusiness interests and to inhibit illegal migration. While in effect, it provided more than 4.5 million individual contracts for temporary employment. The legacy of the program was to institutionalize large-scale labor migration from Mexico to the United States. During the two decades in which the program existed, an interdependent relationship between employers and migrants became entrenched.
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Moreover, many “temporary” workers ended up settling
in the United States, helping to create the permanent migratory networks that formed a bridge and a base for new arrivals.

One consequence of the Bracero Program was that the promise of guaranteed employment unintentionally encouraged illegal border crossings. Large numbers of workers made their way across without going through the cumbersome formal channels of the recruitment process. As migrants streamed north, apprehensions by the Border Patrol jumped from 182,000 in 1947 to more than 850,000 by the end of 1953. In a dramatic effort to impose control, in June 1954 the Eisenhower administration launched Operation Wetback, leading to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Retired General Joseph Swing, who oversaw the operation, confidently announced in January 1955 that “The day of the wetback is over.”
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After the Bracero Program was terminated in 1964, the only thing that changed was the legal status of the Mexican workers; they continued to be welcomed by employers who had come to rely on this cheap and flexible labor supply. Employers had little to fear from the law. In 1952 Congress had passed an act that made it illegal to “harbor, transport, or conceal illegal entrants.” Employment, however, was conveniently excluded from the category of “harboring,” thanks to an amendment (called the Texas proviso) that was a concession to agribusiness interests.
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Even as unauthorized immigration increased rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not matched by a similar increase in immigration law enforcement. Interior enforcement by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the parent agency of the Border Patrol, was almost nonexistent, and border controls remained at token levels. Anemic enforcement meant that illegal entry across the U.S.-Mexico border remained a relatively simple and inexpensive activity: migrants either smuggled themselves across the border or hired a local
coyote
. The sheer magnitude of the clandestine labor flow, however, heightened competition between smugglers to service it, and with the dispersion of the flow from agricultural to urban areas smuggling gradually became better organized. Still, the use of a professional smuggler remained more a convenience than a necessity. Penalties for smuggling remained low. For example, fewer than 50 percent of smugglers caught between 1973 and 1975 were prosecuted, most on a misdemeanor charge.
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Hiring the services of a smuggler generally meant a faster and safer trip across the line and could even include door-to-door service, from the point of departure in the sending community to the point of destination in places such as Los Angeles. This was particularly useful for first-time border crossers. Using a smuggler did involve personal risks (there was potential for theft and physical abuse), but attempting the clandestine border crossing without such help increased the likelihood of assault by border bandits and abuse by authorities.

U.S. Border Patrol agents could cover only about 10 percent of the nearly two thousand miles of border, and the arrests they did make were more apparent than real.
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Even though the INS insisted that “prompt apprehension and return to country of origin is a positive deterrent to illegal reentry and related violations,” migrants simply kept trying to cross until they eventually succeeded.
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In reality, both the Border Patrol and the illegal border crossers benefited from an arrest system based on “prompt apprehension and return to country of origin.” For the Border Patrol, lack of detention space necessitated a speedy removal process predicated on “voluntary departure.” And for migrants, a speedy return to the Mexican side was welcomed because it shortened the delay before another crossing attempt.
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Repeated arrests merely postponed entry but helped Border Patrol agents inflate arrest statistics and improve their internal performance evaluations. External reviewers, however, were less impressed. As one government study bluntly concluded: “Presently the border is a revolving door.… We repatriate undocumented workers on a massive scale.… The illegals cooperate by agreeing to voluntary departure and significant numbers promptly reenter. It is not unusual for an illegal to undergo multiple apprehensions and reentries for there are no serious deterrents.”
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A clandestine form of cross-border interdependence developed through decades of large-scale Mexican migration. On the U.S. side, employers (particularly in agriculture but in other sectors of the economy as well) became accustomed to a ready supply of cheap labor. At the same time, the Mexican government came to rely on unauthorized migration as a safety valve for the nation’s unemployment problem. Remittances from migrant workers provided much-needed foreign exchange—amounting to several billion dollars per year—which was especially important because it went directly to lower-income
households. Entire sending communities became economically dependent on such remittances, which also helped fund the northward trip of other community members.

The work opportunities for unauthorized migrants were not only in U.S. agriculture—traditionally the main source of unauthorized employment—but increasingly in urban-based sectors of the economy such as services and construction. As employment options expanded spatially and occupationally, migration became more permanent, less seasonal, and more city-focused, and therefore more visible to the general public. The problem, of course, was that although their illegal status—which made them cheaper and more compliant—was part of what made Mexican workers so attractive to employers, this status reinforced public hostility. And as their numbers grew, expanding beyond the traditional confines of rural agricultural regions in the West, public tolerance eroded.

These changes helped to politicize the issue of illegal immigration in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Years of U.S. congressional debate over what to do about illegal immigration culminated in the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). IRCA introduced employer sanctions for the first time, authorized an expansion of the Border Patrol, and offered a general legalization program (as well as a special legalization program for agricultural workers). Some two million Mexicans were eventually given legal status—far more than initially projected. IRCA proponents argued that this supply of newly legalized workers would saturate the domestic demand for immigrant labor, while sanctions against employers would deter the hiring of illegal workers. This combination, it was hoped, would inhibit further unauthorized migration.

In practice, the new immigration law contributed to the very problem for which it was sold as a remedy. Many onetime immigrants who had gone back to Mexico returned to claim legalization papers. Proof of eligibility was easy to forge with cheap and easy-to-obtain fraudulent papers. And those who were legalized helped facilitate the arrival of new illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, the employer sanctions provisions proved to be mostly symbolic; their main impact was to spark an enormous underground business in fake documents. Since the new law did not require employers to verify the authenticity of the documents, they
risked little by hiring illegal workers. And fraudulent papers, though a necessity for migrants, were relatively inexpensive and not difficult to find.

The immediate political effect of IRCA was to defuse domestic pressure by projecting the appearance of “doing something” about illegal immigration. But the law’s failings and counterproductive consequences also helped set the stage for an intense anti-immigrant backlash in the early 1990s, with the border becoming the focal point of media coverage, political debate, and public outrage. In just a few years, immigration control along the border went from being a low-profile and politically marginalized activity into a high-intensity campaign commanding unprecedented attention.

The anti-immigration backlash was most acute in California, home to almost half of the unauthorized immigrants estimated to be in the country. California Governor Pete Wilson revived his sagging 1994 electoral campaign by blaming the state’s woes on the federal government’s failure to control the border. His most effective tool for communicating this message was a television advertisement based on video footage of illegal immigrants dashing across the border from Mexico through the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego. Against the background of this chaotic scene, the narrator’s voice said: “They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them. Governor Wilson sent the National Guard to help the Border Patrol. But that’s not all.” Governor Wilson then appeared, pledging to do more: “For Californians who work hard, pay taxes and obey the laws, I am suing to force the federal government to control the border and I’m working to deny state services to illegal immigrants. Enough is enough.”
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The dramatic footage of men, women, and children dashing across the border and weaving through busy traffic was broadcast across the nation, providing a powerful focusing event that galvanized public attention. The images were exploited for political gain by Wilson and projected the message that lax border controls were the root of the illegal immigration problem. Left out of the message was the anemic condition of workplace controls and the economic reliance of key sectors of the California economy on illegal labor, including the nation’s largest
agriculture industry. A narrow focus on the borderline itself as both the source of the illegal immigration problem and the site of the policing solution drew attention away from the more politically awkward and divisive task of dealing with employer demand, and acknowledging and regulating a well-entrenched clandestine cross-border labor market.