Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (11 page)

US employers begin by requesting authorization to recruit H-2 workers from the Department of Labor. Once an employer receives authorization, they generally turn to a US contracting agency, which in turn contracts with a Mexican recruiting agency to find available workers. Opportunities for abuse within the system abound.

The complexity of the H-2 program and the gap between the overwhelming demand on both sides and the small number of visas actually available make the program ripe for fraud and exploitation. “Illegality” enters the system in numerous ways, as uncovered by a 2010 United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. In six cases that the GAO reviewed, “employers charged their H-2B workers fees that were for the benefit of the employer or charged excessive fees that brought employees’ wages below the hourly federal minimum wage. These charges included visa processing fees far above actual costs, rent in overcrowded apartments that drastically exceeded market value, and transportation charges subject to arbitrary ‘late fees.’ Workers left the United States in greater debt than when they arrived. In one case, these fees reduced employees’ paychecks to as little as $48 for a 2-week period.” In eight cases, “employers were alleged to have submitted fraudulent documentation to Labor, USCIS, and State to either exploit their H-2B employees or hire more employees than needed. Employers and recruiters misclassified employee duties on Labor certification applications to pay lower prevailing wages; used shell companies to file fraudulent labor certification applications for unneeded employees, then leased the additional employees to businesses not on the visa petitions; and preferentially hired H-2B employees over American workers in violation of federal law.”
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Eighty percent of H-2A and H-2B visa requests in Mexico are processed at the US consulate in Monterrey. The director of the Mexican Oficina de Atención al Migrante in that city has filed complaints about “hundreds of cases of fraud” in which unscrupulous agents charge would-be migrants illicit fees in exchange for promises of access to the coveted visa.
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“In practice, nobody can hope to obtain one of these visas if they don’t use the intermediaries. Otherwise how will they find out about the opportunities that exist?”
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From the perspective of the Mexican worker, working through the H-2 program might be almost indistinguishable from crossing without inspection to work. Both involve relying on shady networks for information, paying exorbitant fees, and working under poor conditions and at wage rates that are frequently “illegal” as well as exploitative.

In 2004, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee or FLOC, a farm-workers’ union in the United States, negotiated an agreement with North Carolina growers that allowed the workers to bypass the contractors. The organization opened an office in Monterrey to monitor the recruitment process there. On September 9, 2007, the director of the FLOC office, Santiago Rafael Cruz, was found tied up, tortured, and murdered. The union suspected that local labor contractors were behind the murder. As FLOC president Baldemar Velázquez explained, “FLOC’s agreement eliminated the extortion of illegal fees from workers by criminal elements. They have been unhappy with the union taking away their goldmine. We disrupted not only the recruiters working for growers in North Carolina, but all the recruiters who recruit workers for all the other states: from Florida and Georgia, through South Carolina and Virginia, all the way up to Pennsylvania and New York.” Labor journalist Dan LaBotz added that “FLOC’s presence in Mexico meant that the racketeers were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in exorbitant fees and bribes.”
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The chains reach deep into Guatemala. Some twelve hundred workers recruited by Mexican agency Job Consultoría paid from $1,000 to $3,000 for supposed access to a visa. In Amatitlán, Guatemala, 370 men and their families attacked local resident Pablo Roberto Valencia in late 2011 when they learned that the money they had given him to pay for their visas had disappeared.
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According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, workers generally arrive in the United States with debts between $500 and $10,000 owed—illegally—to recruiters.
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While these workers do enter with visas that authorize their presence and permit them to work in the United States, the process that connects them with these visas violates US, Mexican, and sometimes other countries’ laws. It frequently involves threats, violence, extortion, and debt peonage. These violations are generally met with impunity, however. In fact, the violations are built into the system itself; they are integral to its functioning and to the arrival of officially legal H-2 workers to the United States.

GETTING TO THE BORDER

Although the majority of uninspected border crossers are Mexican, others are Central and South Americans. Today, Central Americans often travel a perilous land journey from their homes across one or more countries and through Mexico. A century ago, excluded people like the Chinese entered through Mexico, because of the openness of that border.

While the number of Mexicans crossing illegally has declined in recent years, the number of Central Americans has been steadily increasing. The economic crisis in the United States meant that some sectors, like construction, that had traditionally attracted Mexican migrants, were not hiring. Some experts have also suggested that increased deportation rates, violence along the border, and a declining birthrate in Mexico have contributed to a slowing of Mexican crossings.
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In Central America, though, economic stagnation and horrific levels of violence, especially in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, have meant that the numbers crossing into the United States continue to increase. Somewhere between 150,000 (according to the Mexican government) and 400,000 (according to advocacy organizations) undocumented migrants were entering Mexico each year as of 2010, mostly from Central America.
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In 2011, 46,997 non-Mexicans, mostly Central Americans, were detained at the border; in 2012, the figure more than doubled, to 94,532.
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While still much fewer than the 188,467 Mexicans detained during the 2011–2012 fiscal year, the trend was clear: the number of Mexicans was decreasing, while that of Central Americans was increasing.
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Although in even smaller numbers, South Americans also cross the border by land, first traveling by plane to Mexico. In Montevideo, one travel agency offered a choice of a tourist visa and a ticket to New York or a ticket to Mexico and a connection to a coyote who would arrange an illegal land crossing, depending on how much the traveler was willing to pay.
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Similarly in Brazil, travel agents sell package deals that include airfare to Mexico City, a guide to Tijuana, and a coyote for crossing the border. In New York, Maxine Margolis found that only 3 percent of Brazilians in her sample had crossed the Mexican border, but in Framingham, Massachusetts, another study found that 43 percent had. Wealthier Brazilians were more likely to be able to obtain the tourist visa, while those who were poorer and less educated were more likely to have to resort to the Mexican route.
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When US consulates in the Dominican Republic began to reduce the number of tourist visas they granted, informal visa brokers began to offer their clients other, more expensive routes. Migrants were sent to Puerto Rico by boat or to Mexico to cross the land border. A market sprang up in forged or false papers. Samuel Martinez noted that while Dominicans saw some modes of entry as preferable to others, the relative illegality was not their prime concern. It was just how the system worked: rich people got preferred access to visas; poor people had to pay huge sums for the same privilege. “‘Legal’ and ‘illegal’ modes of entry are viewed by Caribbean people more as bureaucratic obstacles to circumvent than as immutable law,” he concluded.
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Eugenia Georges’ research on emigration from the Dominican Republic noted the same pattern of poorer immigrants having to take more costly and dangerous routes. In the town she studied, richer residents—those who owned land or businesses—could usually get tourist visas and fly directly to the United States, since, as property owners, they could convince US consular officials that they would return home after their tourist excursions. Poorer, landless Dominicans had to resort to the more expensive, riskier, indirect route via Mexico.
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In the case of Central Americans, almost all of those trying to migrate are poor, and their journey through Mexico is a perilous one. In 2001, Mexico—under pressure from the Bush administration—began to implement what it called “Plan Sur” to secure its southern border, while Guatemala countered with “Venceremos 2001” to control exit traffic from its own country. The militarization of this border mirrored what had begun a decade earlier on the US-Mexico border, and the results were also similar. Official statistics showed migration numbers slowing. But migrants and human rights organizations pointed out that these statistics were deceptive. Many migrants shifted away from the newly enforced and militarized checkpoints into more remote areas. As crossing became more difficult and more dangerous, it also became more criminalized, as gangs, drug traffickers, and professional smugglers became involved.
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Deportations also rose, but much more slowly than the migrant stream. Between January and November 2010, the Mexican National Institute of Migration (INAMI) deported 49,143 Central Americans: 19,876 Hondurans, 8,263 Salvadorans, 20,354 Guatemalans, and 646 Nicaraguans.
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Another 40,971 Central Americans were detained in Mexico in 2012.
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Many Central Americans attempt to cross Mexico by stowing away on the freight trains that run from Chiapas on the Mexico-Guatemala border up to Mexico City and then on to the US border. The journey can take days or weeks, as migrants slip from train to train. Up to fifteen hundred Central Americans attempt to board
La Bestia
or the Beast—also known as “The Train of Death”—every day. Thousands have been killed or maimed in the process.
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Because migrants carry money for their trip and because most of them have relatives working in the United States who are helping to pay for them and can be extorted for ransom money, the kidnapping of migrants has become a regular occurrence on their trip through Mexico. In just six months between September 2008 and February 2009, the Mexican National Human Rights Commission uncovered cases of almost 10,000 migrants kidnapped.
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From April to September 2010, the commission found 11,333 kidnapping cases. “This figure reflects the fact that there have not been sufficient government efforts to lower the rates of kidnapping affecting the migrant population,” the commission declared. Most of the cases discovered by the commission were Hondurans (44.3 percent), followed by Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and small numbers of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, and Ecuadorians.
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Although various social actors—including Mexican police and other government officials—participate in kidnapping and extortion networks, their modus operandi is similar: migrants are captured and tortured to force them to reveal contacts in their home country or in the United States. The kidnappers then call these relatives or friends and demand payment, threatening to kill the migrant if they don’t comply.
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The majority of kidnappings take place along the train route or on the trains themselves.

Kidnapping is only part of the story. A Mexican church-based human rights coalition decried a broad spectrum of “human rights violations committed by public servants and federal, state, and municipal police. This criminalization of undocumented migration sets the stage for physical, psychological, and sexual aggression, and human trafficking.”
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The emergence of the Zetas cartel in 2002 greatly worsened the situation just as the numbers of Central American migrants passing through Mexico was increasing. According to Mexico’s Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime, “its main activities include extortion and sale of protection services, carrying out assassinations, holding and selling drugs, piracy, gasoline sales, and the capture and ransom of hostages.” According to victims, the Zetas are the main perpetrators of migrant kidnappings.
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As the flow of Central American migrants increased, so did cases of kidnapping, especially after 2007.
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In one notorious case, in August 2010, seventy-two migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Brazil were victims of a massacre as they passed through Tamaulipas on their way to the border. Their captors—members of a drug gang, possibly the Zetas—demanded that they pay ransom or agree to work as couriers. When the migrants refused, they were slaughtered. A lone survivor managed to reach a nearby military base and tell the story of what had transpired. A year later, a young member of the Zetas confessed to the crime.
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In another massacre, in May 2012, forty-nine mutilated bodies of supposed migrants were found dumped along a highway near Monterrey. “Because of the number of people, it appears that they could be passengers from a bus full of illegals; it could be a case in which organized delinquents [i.e., drug cartels] were extorting the coyote, since they have now taken over this illegal business,” a Mexican government representative explained.
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