Current border policy fuels human rights crisis

Andrew Block Guest Writer

The place: the Arizona-Mexico border. The date: July 11, 2005. The temperature: 110 degrees. At noon, according to the Arizona Daily Star, humanitarian aid workers Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss came across a group of 11 migrants traveling north. The migrants’ stated destination was Memphis, where they planned to find work in a meat processing plant.

Yet three of the migrants showed signs of extreme heat exhaustion, including vomiting and bloody diarrhea. Sellz and Strauss began to transport the distressed individuals to an emergency room, but were stopped five minutes down the road by a Border Patrol agent who subsequently detained the aid workers and migrants in a federal jail. The migrants were deported. Sellz and Stauss are now on trial for “aiding and abetting illegal entry to the country.”

This case points to the dehumanizing and disingenuous nature of U.S. immigration policy. Although Congress has promised to address immigration reform in 2006, the bills on the table indicate that the situation will only get worse. Unfortunately, even at their best, legislators would have great trouble addressing the fundamental flaws with such a policy.

The bare statistics prove that U.S. immigration policy along the country's southern border has had little to do with actual regulation. In 1994, halting undocumented entry along the border became a political rallying point for both Republicans and Democrats. At the time, an estimated 300,000 undocumented persons crossed into the United States. Since then, the government has constructed triple fences, planted heat sensors, and deployed increasing numbers of Border Patrol agents in order to seal traditional points of undocumented entry on its southern border. Despite such efforts of deterrence, the number of undocumented persons seeking entry has more than doubled. Nonetheless, Congress seeks only to continue its strategy of militarizing the border.

As a result, federal policy has made the U.S.-Mexico border the site of a human rights crisis. Border Patrol structures and personnel along the border have funneled migrants to the most dangerous crossing points, including the desert and the Rio Grande. Since 1996, more than 3,000 migrants have died crossing, whereas previously the undocumented hardly faced such a risk. The annual number of deaths has increased each year. Up to 7,000 additional migrants may have perished, but were never recovered by the border authorities.

Moreover, the law also prohibits documented peoples—i.e. U.S. citizens—from empathizing with their undocumented counterparts, even in the cases of most dire need. By seeking a 15-year prison sentence for Sellz and Strauss, federal prosecutors are trying to preclude similar work of other aid workers. The government's moral: if you try to protect migrants’ right to live, you will forfeit your own freedom. The law of the land offers the privileges of citizenship to documented U.S. residents under the condition that they agree to deny the same basic privileges to those without documents.

When the federal authorities deem certain peoples “illegal” and “aliens,” they actively divest themselves of the conceptual power to empathize with the condition of migrants within the context of global economic and political structures that compel migration, even though many of these structures derive from the United States. Indeed, a nation-centric legal system is diametrically opposed to cross-national empathy.

The question remains as to whether documented peoples—i.e. “Americans”—will internalize and accept the efforts of the law to distinguish “us” from “them” in such a severe fashion. If successful, such nationalism will allow “us” to sleep easy, free from grappling how we are implicated in the border deaths of “them.” Yet if we refuse to accept legal language condoning such border deaths, we find ourselves in a position of needing to pursue a human rights campaign for those of us dying on the border. As radical as it may sound, such an effort necessitates opposition to the conceptual parameters of the nation-state.