America's Fifth Column - 2

     My experience of what I witnessed that night in Otay Mesa, California in 1983, made quite an impression on me.  I can still remember it vividly more than 30 years later!  I became much more aware, and paid more attention to the existence of the "undocumented immigrants" in America.
     About a month later I arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador to live and work for the next several years.  Having seen what was happening on the California border, I was not surprised to learn that just about all of the illegal Ecuadorian entrants into the U.S. went by way of California, specifically through Tijuana, Mexico.  Anyone with means and a plane ticket would have a visa, so they would enter the U.S. legally, although they may decide to stay on the tourist or student visa with which they entered, and thereby become illegal.  However, vast majority of illegal entrants came by way of Mexico.  These are the ones that could not qualify for a visa so chose to cross the border illegally.
     I was astounded to learn how many Ecuadorians tried each year to enter the U.S. illegally.  Since INS did not keep an accurate figure on other Latin American nationalities, it was hard to tell.  INS classified all none Mexicans as OTMs or Other Than Mexican!  But in Ecuador I learned that at least a couple thousand Ecuadorians each year tried to make it into the U.S!  Ecuador is a small country, and if that many of its citizens were trying to get into the U.S. illegally, think how many Latin Americans over all were trying to get in!  I learned that there was an active pipeline to the U.S. from Ecuador and a thriving community of illegal residents in New York/New Jersey area.  I befriended a rancher who in his younger days made his way into the U.S. illegally by way of Tijuana, and lived and worked in New Jersey for 7 years!  I mentioned it in a story in my book Snap Shots in the chapter called "My Ecuadorian Friends."
     I left Ecuador at the end of my assignment there and arrived in Paraguay for my next tour of duty.  Paraguay's population is even smaller than Ecuador's, yet, there was a thriving illegal pipeline to the U.S., also through Mexico!  Back in the day, if you were a citizen of one Latin American (South or Central American) country, you could travel about freely without a passport, all you needed was your National ID, the cedula, which all Latin Americans had in their possession and all the countries honored.  That law was undoubtedly changed with all of the problems that Mexico has had with illegal Central Americans, but back then you could go all over South and Central America just with your cedula.  So, most of the aspiring illegal entrants into the U.S. simply had to find their way to Mexico, as close as possible to the U.S. border and hire a guide (coyote) to lead them across into the "promise land"!
     During this period, from early 1980s through 1990s, we would return to the U.S. every two years for an extended "home leave," and every year or so for R&R for a shorter period.  Each time we noted that there was an increase in Hispanic population in Washington DC area!  In 1979, along with some of my fellow Californian colleagues, we tried to locate a Mexican restaurant in Washington DC.  After scouring the phone book, we found exactly one Mexican restaurant, although there were a few Cuban joints!  By the 1990s, you could get a decent taco just about anywhere in DC area!
     In 1997 I was assigned to Tijuana, Mexico.  Contrary to what most Americans think, Tijuana is not just a sleezy border town with bars and clip joints and shops that sell tacky velvet paintings of naked women.  Once you get past the tourist area around the Avenida de Revolucion, you are in real Mexico.  But, just as in the rest of Mexico, there are the two extremes, the rich and the poor.  The area around Chapultapec district has houses that will rival anything that San Diego's more affluent neighborhoods can offer.  In fact, some of the houses there are way over the top with armed guards!  Yet, not too far from that exclusive area you will find stretches of ramshackle houses and actual cardboard structures such as used by homeless here in the U.S.  These are the "poor" areas, where the residents came from the countryside, looking for a better living and found themselves in a worse situation, living in hovels and barely surviving with minimal income, if any!
     The vast majority of the residents that live in the "poor" neighborhoods came to Tijuana initially to find their way across the border.  Some never could come up with enough money to pay the coyote to guide them across, others tried and failed, were apprehended by INS or Border Patrol and deported.  A part of Tijuana is a transient town, a place where people come to live until they can find their way to the U.S.!  For instance, I was surprised to discover how many of the blue collar employees, the janitorial and handyman crew employed by the U.S. government where I worked, had at one time or another crossed into the U.S. but were either deported or left on their own! 
     The Mexicans in Tijuana are quite casual about the whole thing and refer the U.S. side simply as "el otro lado" or "the other side," nothing more.  The appearance of the maquiladoras in the 1990s, the various assembly plants and factories, helped the economy in the area tremendously.  It provided jobs where no jobs existed before.  These maquiladoras were mainly Korean and Japanese electronic firms like Samsung of Korea and Sony of Japan, two of the largest employers in the area.  Many who were stuck with no jobs and were unable to get across the border, now had an option to work for a maquiladora, and comparatively speaking, make a decent wage.  However, it didn't take long for all the jobs to fill up and once again there was a backlog of unemployed, looking for jobs or trying to cross the border.  But the people keep coming to Tijuana, not just Mexicans from the interior of the country but Central and South Americans.
     It doesn't take a genius to figure out that until such time as these countries in the south can provide jobs and better living conditions for their citizens, there will continue to be a literal onslaught of people trying to get across the border in to the U.S.  However, most of the countries, beginning with Mexico, are so fraught with corruption and graft that it will be a long, long time before things will improve and there will be less interest in coming to the U.S.  America is the "promise land" to all of these people.  Much of the economy in these countries, countries that provide all of these "undocumented immigrants," get a boost from the money sent back by their citizens living and working in America.  There are instances of whole villages that have undergone rebuilding, reconstruction, with the help of the money sent back from the U.S.  I know of two specific villages, one in Ecuador and one in Paraguay that underwent "urban renewal" with funds from U.S.!  Mexico is dependent on the money that is being sent back from the U.S., so it is unfortunately, in their best interest to allow its citizenry to continue to go to the U.S.  After all, we are providing the jobs and paying the money that they should be doing, so, is it surprising that they are very lax about controlling their population in its migration north?
     Until the situations for jobs and living conditions improve south of the border, the traffic in "undocumented immigrants" will continue.  It will surge or ebb, according to political situations back home or our attempted control of the border, but it will continue.  Our almost total lack of control of the border is disgraceful.  Not only is the human traffic flowing freely, but drugs are landing on our side of the border in incredible amounts, and we can't seem to control any of it.  Being PC has caught up with us.  If we are too strict in controlling our border, building more fences, then we are accused of being like "Nazis" and practicing racial discrimination, etc.  At the same time, the uncontrolled state of our border is called "disgraceful," which it is, and demands are made to do something.  Yet, Washington just sits on the whole issue.  There is some interesting verbiage emitting from our leadership and proposals are made for some unworkable, unrealistic solutions.  But nothing has really been done or seems to be on the horizon!  America's Fifth Column is alive and well and continues to grow.