by Suketu Mehta
“I don’t see the conflict that some others see,” Scott responds. “I go back to the original sin, to the Garden of Eden. There were consequences: they got deported out of the Garden of Eden, and God created a border around it.”
He elaborates: “My understanding of biblical principles is, there’s always consequences for your actions, and you’re not exempt from them. If you want to take another biblical story, of the last days on the cross, a sinner was forgiven, but no one took him off the cross. He still had to pay the price for his transgressions … We carry out our job very compassionately every day, but we didn’t create borders. They’ve been around since the beginning of time, we didn’t create the concept of deportation, so I think it was created in Genesis 3:23.”
It wasn’t Obama, as his critics allege—it was God who was the deporter in chief. And the first illegal aliens were Adam and Eve.
Scott talks about a debate he’d had with a pastor about asylum. “He was pushing, ‘We should be sympathetic,’ and, you know, ‘Your Christian beliefs, you’re supposed to help these people, be compassionate.’ And I pointed out that they are lying. Like, these people are literally coming with a script from a smuggler and intentionally trying to game the system, if you will, by lying.”
Scott also has problems with the way that asylum is granted and who it’s granted to. “Look at the asylum process right now. There’s so many false claims and so much fraud in the asylum. People like Christians trying to flee Syria or the Middle East literally get stuck in this years-and-years-long process, and they’re looked at very, very skeptically, because there’s so much fraud. So people that need the help … people that really have a legitimate reason … they’ve applied, they’ve gone through the legal processes, they’re having to wait years now.” He doesn’t mention Muslims fleeing the Middle East, who make up the vast majority of asylum applicants from the region.
According to Scott, the undocumented can be persuaded to “self-deport.” “I honestly believe that if you tell the majority of illegal aliens, ‘We really don’t want you here,’ they would go home. I really do believe in this self-deporting philosophy, that the reason this problem continues is because our country kind of has this message like, ‘Hey, we want strong border security, but as soon as you’re past the guys in green, you’re good. I want you to cut my lawn, I want you to clean the hotel, you know … I’ll give you a job, I am gonna hide you from immigration.’ We have this split personality.”
In San Diego in summer 2018, in spite of Scott’s efforts, there have been 48 percent more attempted crossings than in the same period the previous year, and a spike of over 77 percent in the past several months. Adam and Eve are trying every day to sneak into the Garden of Eden.
A few months after our meeting, Scott was in the news for ordering the Border Patrol to fire tear gas and pepper spray on a group of migrants who were trying to rush the fence. They were part of the “migrant caravan” from Honduras, which Trump had been demonizing daily for weeks, calling them “stone-cold criminals” as they made their way north from Mexico. He had hoped that the issue would rally his base to come out to vote for Republicans in the midterms. Scott claimed that the migrants were throwing rocks at the Border Patrol officers. The airwaves and newspapers were filled with images of men and women fleeing from the gas, clutching their screaming children, some of whom were still in diapers. What makes life so hellish in places like Honduras that a mother would risk putting herself and her kids through this kind of ordeal?
* * *
After meeting Scott, I go to the other side of the fence, in Tijuana, to visit Marie Galvan, the social director of Instituto Madre Assunta, a Catholic Church–run women’s shelter. She tells me what drives the forty to sixty women and children who show up at her shelter daily. “Violence, threats of violence, from narcos, other armed groups.” When they flee, generally by bus, they are followed. When they get off at junctions to change buses, the armed men are waiting for them, wanting them to pay, with money or their bodies. She’s been at the shelter for twenty-four years. Before, the children didn’t know why they were migrating. Now they do: “Because someone in the family was killed.” She sees this realization in the drawings they make in her art classes: people shot, but also whole families playing together. “They’re not migrating for economic reasons or for family reunification. Right now, it’s the war of drugs; right now it’s the violence. La guerra.”
In 1980, the United States passed the Refugee Act, raising the number of refugees allowed in annually to fifty thousand. That year, 3.5 percent of all asylum petitions filed came from refugees fleeing the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. As the U.S.-exported gang violence took hold, the percentage increased, to 11.3 percent in 2000, 26.4 percent in 2006, and 33.8 percent in 2015. The outflow became an exodus.
Galvan introduces me to Saira, a pretty twenty-three-year-old Honduran mother. She comes into the reception room of the shelter trailed by a smiling fourteen-month-old boy dressed in a green shirt. She’s trying to rejoin her husband and five-year-old son, who are waiting for them in Texas. “I am here to save his life,” she says of her cherubic little boy.
“They killed my husband’s friend. They were together, and my husband saw everything. They killed him with a piece of glass; they cut his neck, and my husband saw the people who did it.”
Her husband worked at a maquiladora in San Pedro Sula in Honduras, but he was laid off when the factory downsized. He found work as an assistant to a construction worker, along with the friend he saw getting killed.
Saira doesn’t know why the gang killed her husband’s friend, but she can guess. “When the maras [the gangs] see single boys like that, young men, on the street, they want them to join their maras, to make them bigger.” Her husband had found the construction job through a pastor, and so the whole family started going to church, and bringing the friend, who was not married, along with them. “And they did not like it. They did not like that instead of joining the mara, he was going to church.”
After his friend was buried, the gang started looking for her husband, and he fled to the United States. Two days later, the gang showed up at Saira’s house. “I was alone. They told me to inform my husband that he needed to show up to communicate with them. If not, my son was going to pay the price of my husband being absent.” Tell your husband, the gang members said, that in a few years their boy had to join the gang, or they would murder him.
When her husband fled, their plan was that he would establish himself in Texas, apply for asylum, and then call for her. But after the gang came knocking on her door, she got on a bus and began her journey without telling her husband. It took her three months to get here—a very hard journey. From Honduras she crossed over into the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and applied for travel papers for herself and the baby. She met another Honduran woman also on the run. The maras had visited the woman’s family back in Honduras and told them that they knew she was in Chiapas. “They told them that the gang members weren’t just in one post; they are everywhere.” Hearing this, Saira panicked and fled Chiapas without waiting for her papers.
She was hungry throughout, but a bigger priority was to feed her baby. When she got to Tijuana, she walked into a store to buy food and walked out without her phone. Someone had stolen it. She had no way of communicating with her husband or five-year-old son, to tell them that she and the baby were coming. She has now applied for asylum and has been waiting ten days for her turn to be interviewed. Saira hopes that by the following week, her number might be called.
Saira grew up with a single mother, who now lives in a faraway town. In San Pedro Sula, only her brother and his wife are left.
“Are they in danger?”
The gang didn’t know about them because they didn’t live in the same house as Saira. “But I imagine that now that I am not there, because there’s no one home, they might be asking for us.” She told her brother to tell people that she wasn�
�t related to them, that she’d left and rented out the house. If she’s denied asylum, she can’t go back to San Pedro Sula.
“When you get to America, what would you like to do?” I ask her. “What kind of future do you see for yourself and for your son?”
“That my kids are okay, a place where they can go to school in peace. To have tranquility when I sleep. Not this not knowing if I’m going to get assaulted at home, or someone is going to be killed.”
Saira never aspired to go to the United States. “From a very young age, I’ve suffered and have been here and there with my mother, struggling to make a living.” Finally, she had a house and possessions; she felt she had “accomplished” things: “A family, and my own home, where no one mistreated me. I do not wish, I never dreamed of being there [the United States] and doing the big things like having money.”
I ask her if she’s heard of the family-separation policy. Her little boy, who’s happily playing with my phone and a plastic spoon, might be snatched away from her and thrown into a detention center thousands of miles away.
She has. The other day, another migrant woman was speaking to her in the asylum line and asked her how she could take her chances in crossing, knowing that her child might be forcibly ripped from her arms by the Americans.
“I told her that the love that I feel as a mother is like that: knowing that he might be far away, but that he’s alive, that one day I might see him again.” Because this could be the alternative: “Placing him in a box below the earth and knowing that you’ll never see him again…” Saira can’t continue, and great big tears form in her eyes.
* * *
It is our most elemental drive: to survive, and, having survived, to propagate; and, having propagated, to do anything and everything to make sure that our progeny lives better than we have. It is this, more than anything else, that is the animating force of global migration. If you, living in New York or London, can understand why you want your child to go to Yale or Cambridge and will sacrifice a house or a car to do so, you can understand why a Honduran mother might sacrifice her honor or her life to make sure that her child can live with dignity in the north. She wants what you want: a better life for her kids—or even, more simply, just the continuation of life. And that’s not possible where she lives. Because the rich nations have taken what is necessary for a better life away from her, and hoarded it for their kids.
As attorney general, Jeff Sessions sought to eliminate domestic violence and gang warfare as reasons for a “well-founded fear” for asylum. So if your government puts a gun to your head because of your political belief, you can apply for asylum; but if a non-state actor like MS-13, the criminal gang that is the de facto government in much of Central America, does the same, you can’t.
Oxford University’s Alexander Betts describes much of today’s human mobility as “survival migration.” He points out that the criteria established for refugees, which are from the postwar era, are outdated. Today, environmental degradation, starvation, and gang warfare are as much threats to life as the Nazis were in the twentieth century, but these threats are not recognized in the official definitions of “persecution.” This new kind of survival migration, says Betts, is of “people who have left their country of origin because of an existential threat for which they have no domestic remedy.”
“Come here legally,” demand the haters on Fox News. But 80 percent of people who apply legally for asylum from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in recent years have had their applications denied, so the odds are against people like Saira. By comparison, 90 percent of asylum seekers from the former Soviet Union were welcomed in.
* * *
On the Tijuana side of Friendship Park, a photographer named Maria Teresa tells me how she found the gap: she was watching a girl standing close to the fence, weekend after weekend, talking to her boyfriend on the other side; and then one day, a ring appeared on her finger. How did it get there? Maria Teresa wondered. Then she found out how, and she points it out to me now: there’s a semi-hidden place where a section of the mesh ends, next to a supporting pole, big enough for part of a whole palm to slip through, four fingers all the way up to the knuckle.
Maria Teresa introduces me to Luis, a thirty-four-year-old man from Sinaloa, who’s come to introduce his parents and his two little kids from an earlier marriage to his wife Cynthia, a robotics student at the University of California, San Diego, and a Dreamer, who is pregnant with their son. They’ve been together for a year and got married five months ago. Luis is from one of the most violent areas of Mexico, and he’d crossed over in 2000, “to live in peace and to work.” Gradually, he built up his own construction business in L.A., until two months ago, when he went to get his driving license. The next day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him and summarily deported him, over his protestations that his application for a green card was already in process.
Cynthia had crossed when she was eight. Three years ago, she was sexually assaulted in the United States and has started the process of getting a “U” visa, which is given to victims of violent crimes who can help put the perpetrators behind bars. But that will take three years at least, with no guarantee that it will be successful. She can’t cross over to Mexico, and so she’ll have her baby without Luis present, even though the boy’s going to have the same first name.
This is the second time Luis has made the twenty-four-hour drive up from Sinaloa to meet his new bride. For the first time, Cynthia’s meeting the whole family in person. Luis’s little girl reaches up to touch the long pink nail that her new stepmother pokes through the mesh.
Luis and Cynthia speak on the phone every day. But it doesn’t substitute for this face-to-face meeting, this kissing of pinkies.
“You know, there’s a gap where you can touch more,” I tell Luis, with my newfound knowledge. They follow me to the gap. Luis thrusts his hand through the gap, where it meets his bride’s hand.
“Oh yes!” Luis exclaims in English, his whole face bathed in delight. “It’s nice!”
They stay like that for a while, holding hands. Then Cynthia starts crying. And Luis raises his arms, mimes pulling apart the ugly iron fence between him and his wife with his bare hands.
3
ORDINARY HEROES
Before you ask other people to respect the borders of the West, ask yourself if the West has ever respected anybody else’s border. How often has the United States gone over the southern border or into the Caribbean or Southeast Asia? How often does it keep doing so, going over the borders of Iraq or Afghanistan? The United States has not acted lawfully with other nations, including the Native American nations on its soil, through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How can it now expect the human victims of that enormous illegality to obey the laws of the United States and stay home or wait thirty years for a visa to rejoin their families?
I am not calling for open borders. I am calling for open hearts.
The migrants are no more likely to be rapists or terrorists than anyone else. They are ordinary people just like those who haven’t had to move. But the ordeals they’ve had to face in their journey, and the sacrifices they make for family—both for their children in the new country and the parents and siblings they support in the old—have made them into ordinary, everyday heroes. The false stories of the populists, their fear-mongering, their bigotry, can be fought only by telling a true story better, so that it isn’t lost in a fog of numbers and arguments and counterarguments.
Wherever there are immigrants, there are stories; because of their dislocation, they have a need for recollection. When I arrived with my family in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1977, the area was filled with phone centers where people would go to call their families in other countries. They had booths or cubicles where men and women stood or sat on a chair, and spoke into a phone, and, often, wept. They were talking to their wives, sons, fathers, whom, if they were undocumented, they would not see for ten or twenty years while they we
re working to send them money. There were always promises: I’m coming back soon; we’ll bring you over as soon as I’ve made enough money to pay the coyote; Americans are good people, and the government will soon give me a green card because I work so hard, and then I can come back to see you.
The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story. Of the arduous journey here, the snow on the streets, the rude immigration agent or the kindly social worker; the lights of the Eiffel Tower or the cold reception from the cousins with whom he’s staying. The frequency and nature of this storytelling have changed over the ages as technology has evolved. My friend Abdelkader Benali, a Dutch Moroccan writer, tells me about the kissa. Before calling cards made international calls cheap, Moroccan migrants would mail a cassette tape back to the family, in which the migrant would record his kissa, his tale of the new land. The whole family would gather to listen to side A, which would be about work, the weather, money, politics. Then there would be a general throat clearing and the room would empty out and only the wife would be left. She would turn over the tape and listen to side B, which would be filled with declarations of love and longing, and a little bit of lust.
* * *
Yes, migrants do lie; sometimes they lie to their own people, because they have to justify the migration. A Central African French teacher in the New Jersey schools named Jean-Gratien tells me about Rwandan immigrants in northern Europe. The state gives them money to buy things such as furniture. But they buy the cheapest furniture and save up the money for a round-trip ticket home, and for props for a story they want to tell back home. They wait for the summer vacations, and buy an expensive suit for themselves and the most impressive shoes—boots made of crocodile leather, say. The airports of Europe, in the summer, are filled with these returning African migrants, garbed in extravagant shoes.