(Government of Chiapas)
Last week, the stomach-turning news broke that 513 migrants, crammed inside two tractor trailers, were intercepted in Mexico, en route to the U.S.:
Some of the immigrants were suffering from dehydration after traveling for hours clinging to cargo ropes strung inside the containers to keep them upright as the trucks bounced along from the Guatemalan border, and allow more migrants to be more crammed in on the floor.
The trucks had air holes punched in the tops of the containers, but migrants interviewed at the state prosecutors' office said they lacked air and water. The trucks were bound for the central city of Puebla, where the migrants said they had been told they would be loaded aboard a second set of vehicles for the trip to the U.S. border.
The majority of the migrants were from Guatemala. One man remarked that staying in his hometown in Guatemala was not an option: "a lot of us are Indians, and we can't stay in our homes. There is no work, and there's nothing to eat."
There were also people from Japan, China, and Nepal crammed into the trailers, having trafficked themselves with outrageous sums of borrowed money, probably passing through several different countries. (For an informative but heartwrenching description of what these migrants undergo, I recommend Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives.)
Reading about these horrors in attempts to arrive here reinforces the fact that no one goes through such harrowing experiences simply because they want to flout the law and avoid waiting in the (nonexistent) legal immigration line.
That 513 people (32 women and 4 children) are willing to scrape together $7,000 a piece and cram themselves into a trailer speaks volumes. No one chooses this. Rather, forced by economic desperation and hunger, people are pushed from their homes. The pull is just as strong as the push: an immigrant can make six times more working here in the U.S.
Each time a tragic report like this comes out, such desperation reminds me that our broken immigration system is exacerbating a humanitarian crisis. And once undocumented immigrants arrive here, they are even more susceptible to exploitation, by virtue of being forced to live in the shadows.
My more cynical side tends to view President Obama's recent immigration reform push as simply another move in the election chess game. Whatever the motivation behind this renewed discussion, I hope we can be careful not to view immigration overhaul as solely an economic matter. The millions of undocumented people here are not simply saviors of bankrupt Social Security or a source of young, cheap labor. They are human beings who deserve dignity, and who have been through hell and back.
Also, many anti-immigrant groups like to paint the undocumented population as one-dimensional: simply lawbreakers. But we can't forget that folks who have been forced to go this route often end up victims themselves once they get here. What does a person whose "status" here is unauthorized do in the face of labor violations? Nothing. And many employers take advantage of this. The same goes for many landlords and abusive partners.
So I try to keep this in mind during the immigration debate, along with the fact that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus themselves had to flee to Egypt shortly after Jesus' birth. Following him, I hope I can take the side of these economic refugees, forced into horrifying situations, rather than take the side of fence-builders and exploiters.
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