A complex tragedy at the border

[ilbegone]

A complex tragedy at the border

I disagree with Tovar's conclusion, but there is a lot of truth in this article.

Please read the whole thing before reacting in outraged indignation.

People need to know the full nuanced story of those who die trying to walk into the United States.

John Carlos Frey wants you to be angry about the U.S.-Mexico border.

He wants you to feel such a deep sense of moral outrage that you'll get out of your chair and write a letter to your congressman.

That's why he invited me to the border town of El Centro, to stand in Imperial County's pauper's cemetery, a dusty field dotted with about 900 concrete markers the size of bread loaves.

Each was stamped with numbers or the name "John Doe." Several hundred marked the final resting place of Mexican and other Latin American migrants who've died walking across the desert or drowned trying to cross the nearby All-American Canal.

Frey, a 46-year-old filmmaker, blames the U.S. government for their deaths. In all, some 6,000 people have died crossing the Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California borders with Mexico since 1994, according to human-rights groups. About 500 more die every year.

In his new documentary film, "The 800 Mile Wall," Frey says this tragedy is the foreseeable result of a policy that sealed off urban crossing routes, driving migrants into the desert.

"Doesn't this qualify as an atrocity to you?" Frey asked, after we'd walked to the center of the cemetery on a warm winter day last week.

I thought about Frey's question for a moment and tried to imagine the individual stories that had brought all these people to this sad end.

I've lived in Mexico and I have family in Guatemala. I've been to the urban neighborhoods and the rural villages of adobe and cinder-block where migrant journeys begin. But I wouldn't apply the word "atrocity" to what I've seen, not in the sense that Frey means.

On our long drive to El Centro, he had compared the migrant death toll to horrors that no one would dispute deserve that stark label: genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

"Their deaths are systematic and they're the results of a policy," he said of the border crossers. "And it's not just a few. It's thousands." Some people, he said, think the death toll might be as high as 20,000.

"You wonder how long it will take people to get angry," he said later. "How long did it take in Darfur?"

Comparing the deaths at the border to massacres of Darfur makes for a poor analogy for lots of different reasons. But Frey's hyperbole is understandable. "Maybe it's because I've seen the bodies," he tells me.

Frey's film contains gruesome images and heart-breaking stories. He interviews a tearful Guatemalan man who had to identify his wife's remains at an Arizona coroner's office before being deported.

We meet an artist who gathers the objects migrants abandon in the desert, including the journal of a girl crossing with her family. The girl sketched a picture of the truck that drove her to the border, and the green grass she imagined on the other side.

We're shown the mummified remains of a woman -- we never learn where she's from -- who was traveling to the Bay Area to meet her fiance. We see the long hair flowing from her skull and the bones that have been stripped by animal predators.

Frey told me he's going to take his film on a tour of the United States this year. "I think if Americans knew what was happening here, they would be compassionate," he said. "Maybe I'm naive."

He wants to use the film as a tool to build support for an immigration reform bill in Congress that would allow migrants a safe crossing to the jobs that await them.

That's a laudable goal. But there's something about the way he and a lot of other people see the issue of immigration that deeply troubles me.

As a son of immigrants, I just don't buy the constant portrayal of immigrants in U.S. media as either victims or victimizers.

A number of television personalities have sold the American people on the idea that Latino immigrants are a criminal force undermining U.S. society. In "The 800 Mile Wall" the ill-fated migrants are all victims of forces beyond their control.

"I know that they have free will," Frey said of the migrants. "But I don't know that they have a free choice."

Actually, nearly every adult who undertakes the journey does have a choice.

A fairly typical crossing story, I told Frey, might begin in a Mexican town where a young woman wants desperately to go to college. She dreams of escaping the life of domestic labor that awaits her but can't think of any other way to defy her parents. Or it might begin in San Salvador, with a man who wants to emulate his wealthy cousin in Virginia.

In other words, many choose to go on la aventura, as it's popularly known, because it's the easiest avenue to social mobility. It's not the best choice in the world. It might be desperate or reckless, but it is a choice.

The dead migrants in that El Centro cemetery weren't driven to their deaths by soldiers with guns, as in Bosnia, or by killers armed with machetes, as in Rwanda.

That's why I couldn't say it is an atrocity. It's a complex tragedy born of inequality, yes. The policy that leads people to risk their lives crossing the desert is cruel, yes. But it's a risk people take, often knowingly and often from human motives as universal as restlessness and ambition.

"This is really only a small slice of the immigrant story," I told Frey.

I'd like to think we could build support for immigration reform by telling the full, nuanced story of the immigrant experience in the U.S. But maybe that makes me the naive one.

These are desperate, polarized times. People really should be angry about what's happening on the border. They should see the horrors of "The 800 Mile Wall" and they should ask themselves deeper questions about why people are willing to risk death to come here. And then they should write their congressman.

[Twoller]

You need to post a link to the original article.

I rejoice in our formidable natural borders and that they should take victims from people who would trespass our country. The message should be one of fear and guilt, that they should fear our deserts and we hope they die if they try to cross them to enter the country illegally. May your sun bleached bones be a warning to the rest!

[wetibbe]

John Carlos Frey is a native of Mexico. That is he's Mexican !!!

What else needs to be said about his attitude and comments.

As an American I think the Mexicans should be criticizing their own government instead of whining about not being able to crash the border without passing through designated customs and immigration entry points.

It is supposed to be our Federal Government that is in charge of immigration.

Fact is there are unlimited visas available now for agricultural workers. And of 5,000 other visas made available 3,000 or so went unused in years past.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-carlos-frey

[Don]

Originally Posted by Twoller

You need to post a link to the original article.

I rejoice in our formidable natural borders and that they should take victims from people who would trespass our country. The message should be one of fear and guilt, that they should fear our deserts and we hope they die if they try to cross them to enter the country illegally. May your sun bleached bones be a warning to the rest!

Sounds good to me! Congratulations on figuring out that this is a war for survival.

[Rim05]

They do not want ag visas, they want to crash everything we have of value. Crash and then take over neighborhoods, take over our schools, take over our political offices and insert their fake businesses to launder drug money. Let them stay where they are or face the desert.

[Patriotic Army Mom]

They should work very well with Mr Obama.

[wetibbe]

Originally Posted by Rim05

They do not want ag visas, they want to crash everything we have of value. Crash and then take over neighborhoods, take over our schools, take over our political offices and insert their fake businesses to launder drug money. Let them stay where they are or face the desert.

To be technically accurate there are at least 5 divergent Mexican attiudes about designs and aspirations on the USA. These were detailed by Alan Wall, an American who lived in Mexico up until recently. He is married to a Mexican National.

These divergent Mexican aspirations on our country are disparate to say the least.

Allan Wall Articles
Allan Wall's website

Allan Wall's VDARE.com Blog Articles



American citizen Allan Wall (email him) recently moved back to the U.S.A. after many years residing in Mexico. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here and his website is here.

[wetibbe]

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[Twoller]

Originally Posted by wetibbe

To be technically accurate there are at least 5 divergent Mexican attiudes about designs and aspirations on the USA. These were detailed by Alan Wall, an American who lived in Mexico up until recently. He is married to a Mexican National.

These divergent Mexican aspirations on our country are disparate to say the least.

Allan Wall Articles
Allan Wall's website

Allan Wall's VDARE.com Blog Articles

....

Would it be too much to post some links and not just a text list? And maybe restrict links and citations to the subject at hand.

[Don]

Here are the links:

http://www.vdare.com/awall/

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/author/allan-wall/