AMERICA:Heartbreaking scenes are played out daily along America's southern border, as the crackdown on illegal immigration continues
LAEL HIBSHMAN was at home in Rio Rico Arizona, a few miles from the Mexican border, when she heard a child’s voice crying for help in Spanish. Hibshman, a pastor, found a 10-year-old girl with bleeding feet, accompanied by a Mexican Indian woman. It was 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Hibshman brought them water and washed the girl’s feet.
Neither spoke English, but Hibshman was able to piece together their story.
The girl, her mother and brother had attempted to cross the desert, in the hope of reaching their father and husband in New York.
The mother and brother had collapsed in the heat and the girl continued alone to look for help. The Indian woman abandoned her own journey to care for the child.
Although Hibshman explained that they would be deported, the girl wanted her to call the Border Patrol to search for her mother and brother.
“I don’t have an ending for that story,” Hibshman wrote to me after reading my recent reports from Arizona.
“I don’t know if the little girl ever saw her mother and brother again . . . if she was ever able to locate her father . . . All I have is the searing memory of her misery in my heart.”
Scenes like this are played out daily along America’s southern border, even as the crackdown on illegal immigration gains momentum.
On Monday the small town of Fremont, Nebraska, where more than 1,000 Hispanics work in the meat-packing industry, will vote on a city ordinance that would not only ban businesses from hiring illegal aliens, but would also forbid landlords from renting to them.
The rule was drafted with help from Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, who wrote his state’s controversial law SB1070, and Kris Kobach, a law professor from Missouri who was an adviser to the former attorney general John Ashcroft.
The milk of human kindness does not feature in the discourse of anti-immigration activists.
I asked Senator Pearce whether he could find it in his heart to approve the “dream act”, which would legalise young adults who were brought to the US by their parents as infants, grew up in America, and now find themselves ineligible for scholarships or employment.
“No, absolutely not. You don’t reward lawbreakers,” Senator Pearce said. “Blame the mom and dad, not me.”
The US needs to accept some blame for the present situation.
More than 23,000 people have been killed in the Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs. Calderón accuses the US of feeding the war, by importing drugs and exporting weapons.
“It is as though we have a neighbour next door who is the biggest drug addict in the world,” he said this week.
In the 1970s, US companies built factories along the Mexican side of the border, known as Maquiladoras, to benefit from cheap Mexican labour. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans flocked to the border to work in the factories. In the 1990s though, the jobs moved to China and the factories shut down – and the jobless Mexicans tried to cross the border.
Arizona has passed five laws targeting Hispanics in six years.
After the outcry over the draconian law she signed, Arizona’s governor Jan Brewer established a $250,000 fund to “rebrand” the state.
“Our image is great!” an unrepentant Senator Pearce told me. “The majority of Americans support us.”
On that point, the senator is right. A poll published by the Washington Post on Thursday shows that 58 per cent of Americans support the Arizona law, which will take effect on July 29th.
Moderate Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who once supported immigration reform, now oppose it.
“Complete the danged fence,” McCain says in one of his television re-election campaign advertisements. “You’re one of us,” a sheriff from the border zone tells McCain at the end of the same ad.
Joe Penalosa is a Hispanic immigration lawyer in Phoenix who is standing for Congress as a Republican. “I want to bring a voice of reason to the debate,” he said in his office above the immigration court. “If we don’t, we’re going to see Balkanisation – different states with different laws.”
It was Ronald Reagan, the icon of present-day Tea Partiers, who granted the last amnesty to millions of Hispanics in 1986.
“Reagan was a conservative Republican from California, but he was a compassionate man,” Penalosa says.
“Republicans do have a record of trying. McCain pushed. George W Bush sincerely tried. They had Democratic support, but they couldn’t get enough Republicans to join them.”
Democrats from President Obama on down have toughened their language on immigration, they talk about securing the border first, then making sure that illegal immigrants pay a price.
“They’ve got to admit that they broke the law, and pay taxes and pay a penalty, and learn English, and get right before the law – and then get in line and earn their citizenship,” Obama said at a Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House last month.
The Democratic proposal for “earned legalisation” finds favour with moderate Republicans like Penalosa, but to hardliners, it reeks of “rewarding lawbreakers”.
Resistance to accepting any of the 12 million people who are here without documents remains the biggest obstacle to reform.
In the meantime, Mexican children with bleeding feet continue to cry in the desert.
