Immigration and Human Rights
on the U.S. / Mexico Border
Part 2: In Search of Work
Interview with Roberto Martinez
San Diego, California
Roberto Martinez is director of the U.S. / Mexico Border Program, an immigration law enforcement monitoring project of the American Friends Service Committee. In 1992, he became the first U.S. citizen to be honored as an International Human Rights Monitor by the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch. He has been a Chicano civil rights and human rights activist for the past 20 years. This interview was conducted in 1997 in San Diego by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Jobs, Raids and the Mexican Economy
 In Motion Magazine: Why are people moving across the border?
Roberto Martinez: It's still about jobs, though more and more it's also about family unification. People have immigrated, gotten their amnesty, and are sending for their families - wives, children. But it's still the lure of jobs. the demand for jobs. It's just like drugs. If there wasn't such a great demand for drugs in the United States, there probably wouldn't be any drug trafficking. Same with jobs, the United States created the immigration crisis by sending for, inviting, people to come and work here in the United States. There's still a big demand for cheap labor. In California we have a $30 billion agri-business which wouldn't even exist without cheap labor over the years from Mexico, the Japanese, the Filipinos and others who all came here to build agribusiness.
Immigrants built our railroads. They worked our mines.
The U.S. contracted with Mexicans to come to work here in the '30s and '40s and '50s. Then the xenophobia started, the scapegoating, and you had massive raids and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. U.S. citizens and legal residents as well as undocumented were all sent to Mexico in the '30s and '40s and '50s. I was part of that.
In the '50s during Operation Wetback, and even though I'm a fifth generation U.S. citizen, right on these streets around here I used to be stopped on the way home from school, or visiting my girlfriend, or going downtown. The police used to smack me up against the wall and call the Border Patrol -- and they used to try and deport me. At least every other week. They used to take me out of jobs, after school jobs, in restaurants, hotels.. I was part of that in the '50s.
You keep hearing people like Brian Bilbray (U. S. Rep. R-Del Mar, California) or the President say we have to play by the rules. How come they didn't play by the rules? They keep saying this is a country of laws. Where were the laws when people like me were being arrested and they tried to deport me?
Where are the laws now? When U.S. citizens are coming across the border, their documents are being confiscated, they are being forbidden from entering the country. Even though they are born here. Right now, as I speak, we've got three law suits going in north county where police and Border Patrol are breaking into people's homes without search warrants. This is under the pretext of looking for drugs or illegals. Then they beat up the people, mace them, put bogus charges on them Then they have to go to court. Why aren't they playing by the rules?
In other words, we have a double standard in this country. We always have. For Chicanos like me, for 150 years there's been institutionalized racism and violence. And it's still happening. Next year we are going to mark the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (editor's note: the treaty signed by the U.S. and Mexico after the U.S./Mexico War. As a result of the war the northern half of Mexico became the southwestern part of the U.S.). We're still fighting the same racism, the same xenophobia, the same scapegoating.
In Motion Magazine: What's the objective of these house raids?
Roberto Martinez: Searching for drugs and undocumented people. There's parts of Oceanside with big barrios of Mexican people. And a lot of them are undocumented, but they don't know this, they just suspect there might be a house full of undocumented. They lump us all together, we are all suspects. We're all illegal immigrants, criminals or drug traffickers.
If those bills pass we're going to have occupied cities along the border. Where are you going to put 10,000 troops? Plus 10,000 Border Patrol agents. And that's just those two. Local law enforcement is now authorized to work with federal agents. In many parts of the border, like in east county, you can see national guard, sheriffs, Border Patrol all on Hiway 94.
This has already been authorized by legislation.
In Motion Magazine: This is an increase in the use of the military?
Roberto Martinez: A tremendous increase since the 1980s.
In Motion Magazine: Does this correspond with an increase in the development of the maquiladoras?
Roberto Martinez: It's related more to the continued devaluation of the peso. Particularly when Zedillo took over and thrust Mexico into a tremendous depression. There's been a lot of political upheaval, but primarily it's the poverty to the south. We are seeing an increase of people coming from Mexico and other parts of the world.
The value of the peso is going down, while the prices are going up. Salaries are not growing with inflation. People cannot afford to feed their families. We're seeing more and more families coming north. A good measurement is we're seeing ten times more women crossing at the ports-of-entry with fraudulent documents so they don't have to cross through the hills because it's very dangerous there. Women are being raped and disappearing. They are taking to using fraudulent documents.
Under U.S. attorney Alan Bersin's new 1326 program against illegal entry, migrant women are being prosecuted and sent en masse to Las Vegas and other areas where they are spending 6 to 8 weeks before they go to court. There's a lot of pain caused by the separation from their children and husbands. We get calls all the time: "What happened to my wife? She tried to cross the border using fraudulent documents." They hold women for weeks some times before allowing them to call home, or anywhere. It's a very sad part of this whole situation.
This current operation, Operation Gatekeeper, which concentrates border agents in San Ysidro, is forcing migrants to cross further east, a very dangerous area in the mountains. In January alone about 17 men and women died in the cold, the snow and rain. It's creating a whole new human rights problem for us.
We've also been doing a lot of studies on the Mexican side of migrants who have been deported, from Tijuana all the way to Mexicali. More and more migrants are even crossing in the desert. This summer there's been a lot of people dying in the desert because of the push to the east, the militarization.
Reforms
In Motion Magazine: How would you change the laws?
Roberto Martinez: Two things. First we have to get control of the human rights problem. We need better training of the agents so they won't abuse the migrants. Several of them have been indicted recently for rape, beatings and so on. Fortunately, we haven't had any shootings here since the early nineties.
Secondly, once we get the human rights issue under control we need to revisit our immigration laws. We have three to five million undocumented migrants in the U.S. and we have to look at the whole amnesty issue all over again. We have to find ways that people can cross to the U.S. and work legally. That's something that has to be agreed on by immigrants rights groups as well as by Congressional leaders and immigration authorities. Sooner or later they are going to have to revisit the whole amnesty issue.
They've just finished passing a new immigration reform responsibility act. But all it did is make it harder to immigrate. Now, even if you're a U.S. citizen or legal resident you can't automatically immigrate your family. The question now is one of being able to support your family. You have to be able to make a certain amount of money, 70 to 125% of the poverty level. You can only immigrate your parents. A son or daughter can't be over 21. There's a whole set of restrictions now that are making it twice as hard to immigrate your family members. And yet they talk about family unity.
Also, they've eliminated waivers and due-process. People seeking asylum can be ajudicated right at the border. The INS has offices now at the airports. If they don't believe you, or you don't have a strong case for amnesty or asylum, they just send you back to the country you came from.
There's a wave of illegal immigration because people are desperate to come here to work. Other people are desperate because they are fleeing persecution. There's still a lot of human rights problems around the world. People are going to continue to come here.
Scapegoating
It's estimated that 40% of the people who enter illegally cross through the borders. The majority of people enter the country legally and over-stay their visas. And yet 85 to 90% of the enforcement is at the border.
In Motion Magazine: Why is that?
Roberto Martinez: Because of the rhetoric and because of the distortion of the truth that there's an invasion at the Mexican border of the U.S. It's just a lot of scare tactics that they use to justify increasing the border militarization. And people buy into it.
In Motion Magazine: Immigration is politicized during political campaigns, or whenever there's an opportunity?
Roberto Martinez: Oh absolutely.
In Motion Magazine:How much of that is opportunism, and how much of it is actually related to economic policy?
Roberto Martinez: There have been many studies that show that immigrants don't take jobs away from Americans. They actually contribute more than they take out in terms of services . The enormous economic contributions in the billions of dollars, taxes, federal and state, actually completely offset what ever are used in services. Migrants do use services but not to the extent that they say.
These are campaigns based on misinformation and distortion of the truth. Ofcourse there are counter-studies on the side of the people who want to blame immigrants. The most notorious one is out of Rice University, by a guy named Donald Huddle. He puts one out, then the Urban Institute puts out another one to counter that. You hear both sides, but when you hear (California Governor) Pete Wilson talk, or some of these right-wingers who want to blame immigrants, they use Huddle's study not the Urban Institute's.
But the fact remains that immigrants do contribute to our economy and revitalize our communities. They create jobs for Americans through their entrepeneurship, mostly in small businesses. Opponents to migrants haven't yet been able to show concretely where immigrants displace Americans from their jobs. I've been reading in the papers about the sweeps around the country, particularly in the midwest and they claim they've got to make room for Americans but Americans aren't going to work in meat-packing in Iowa and Nebraska where they make these sweeps.
I used to have an office in Oceanside in the middle "80s. At that time I was working with the farm workers to register people for amnesty. In the same time frame, Howard Ezell was the western regional INS director based in L.A. He ordered massive raids on the farms and at race tracks in Del Mar and Santa Anita. He concentrated on the Riverside county and Orange county areas. He must have had four or five thousand undocumented workers rounded up. He displayed them on the side of the freeway (I have pictures of it) showing this is why we don't have jobs in America and this is why we don't need amnesty. He called it Operation Jobs, and once they were all deported he sent out job notices to replace the deported workers. He sent notices to colleges, unemployment offices, anywhere where people needed jobs. And people came out. They signed up for these jobs.
The first ones to go were the ones who went to work out on the farms, 8 or 10 hours a day, stooped over in the hot sun. They didn't last even a week. The ones at the race-track who cleaned out horse stalls didn't last two weeks. Ezell had to eat crow by making deals with these employers that they could get their workers back and that the Border Patrol couldn't raid those farms and racetracks anymore. You should have heard all the complaints by these employers. Following that, the growers complained to Pete Wilson about these raids on the farms and he had to make a legal agreement that he wouldn't raid the farms during harvesting time. This was all in the media. They need the workers.
I have interviewed farm workers in north county and at the border and they tell me that when they cross in groups the Border Patrol stops them and ask them where they are going. If they say they are going to Los Angeles or San Francisco they put them in the van. If they say they are going to north county to pick strawberries, because they need workers there, they'll let them go. They get to go free. This tells you what a political football immigration is. And that's why the Border Patrol is against having the military at the border. Not only is it possible that the military might replace them, but also they are not going to be able to allow these workers through where they need them here in north county or Salinas, or Fresno. It's a labor issue.
Part 3 - The Needs of Agribusiness
- Soldiers: U.S. and Mexican
- Filling a Need for Labor
- Discrimination in Immigration Enforcement
Published in In Motion Magazine September 14, 1997.
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