Some Background

Why is humanitarian aid necessary you ask?

Well, in the early 1990s, Operation Hold the Line, in Texas, Operation Gatekeeper, in California, and Operation Safeguard, in Arizona, were initiated. Basically, they were policies that dramatically increased funding for border enforcement—the number of Border Patrol (BP) agents increased by the thousands, funding went into technological advances to monitor the border, and an 800 mile wall was to be built along the border. Aside from the physical manifestation of these operations—people, cameras, sensors, a wall—there was a major tactical shift in the way the border was enforced. The majority of resources went to urban areas—San Diego/Chula Vista, Yuma, El Paso, cities that sat right on the border. This served two main purposes.

One, with the extra enforcement around urbanized areas, it gave the general population in the US the sense that a lot was being done to enforce the border, and, more importantly that it was working. It’s willful blindness really—we don’t see it, and we’re not to blame.

Secondly, the expectation of those responsible for this enforcement strategy was that people would move into less urbanized areas to cross from Mexico--that means into desert and mountains—and this desert and these mountains would serve as a natural wall for people crossing and act as a deterrent. It was anticipated that deaths would occur, that the likelihood of injury would increase--which also played into the idea of deterrence.

Estimates range from 3,861 to 5,607 deaths as a result of this new enforcement strategy thus far. There is a link on the right side of this blog that will take you to a map and database of all discovered deaths of people crossing since 2003. I stress 'discovered' because many times, especially in summer, those who die in the desert are not found--the intense heat literally melts their body away, or they are eaten by desert carrion, or washed away in flash floods.

In addition to this--adding insult to death—the expanded border enforcement and this policy of deterrence by death have failed to reduce unauthorized immigration. Between the years 2000 and 2008 the population of undocumented immigrants in the USA increased from about 8.4 million people to almost 12 million. More and more money is put in to the program and all it seems to do is increase the death toll.

A main problem in understanding what’s happening down here, and more, having sympathy for what’s happening, is that many don’t see the people crossing face to face, they don’t understand them as people. Mexicans in general are portrayed as dirty and villainous, and those crossing as criminals. But they are people--no different from you, except that they were born on the other side of the line and their skin might be a little darker.

It's a ridiculous system. We criminalize our neighbors and make them risk--and often give--their lives to come here, to do jobs that would otherwise go unfilled, work that we need done. We force them into lives of fear and hiding, but need them here to keep our farms in business and the cost of our produce competitive, to keep our yards manicured and our offices and hotels clean.
But it's more than their 'work worth'; it's their human worth. They contribute to society, they have families, children to feed and send to school; there is food, music, language, dancing, literature, art, and countless other aspects of life have been exchanged over our southern border for thousands of years with people that we are now criminalizing for trying to work--for crossing over a line and walking for days through the desolation of the Sonoran Desert.

Without getting too off track, these are some of the basic reasons humanitarian aid is necessary in Southern Arizona, and until the U.S. government comes up with some type of immigration reform that does not use death as a deterrent and allows for enough visas as there are jobs to be filled, it will unfortunately, continue to be necessary.