Human Cargo (15 page)

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WHAT DREW ME
to San Diego’s fence initially was a chance remark made one day by Jeff Crisp at UNHCR in Geneva. The fence, Crisp said, was fascinating because it was such a naked, unapologetic example of the lengths the West is willing to go to in order to keep unwanted people out. And he was right: there is something extraordinarily crude, even ridiculous, about these long stretches of wire
and concrete, which look so small and insignificant against the large landscape and arid and stony mountains of the border areas. The fence does not look as if it could really keep anything out. But it was fascinating also, Crisp went on, because the people who come across every day are not all Mexicans. Among them are Turkish Kurds and Iraqis, Sri Lankans and Nigerians, and even Chinese, like the four young men I tried to talk to on the beach at Tijuana. And indeed, when I got to San Diego, I learned that, in 2003, researchers gathering material on the nationalities of those trying to cross the border illegally discovered people from seventy-three different countries in a single period of three months.

The numbers, compared to those of the Mexicans who cross, are very small: perhaps no more than 4 or 5 percent of the total. But they are enough to make an important point about modern migration: like the birds that circle the world in vast sweeps, covering thousands of miles every spring and autumn, refugees and migrants today will make extraordinary journeys in search of work and safety. But unlike the swallows’ routes, which are the same year after year, the journeys made by refugees can last several years, as they wander, apparently without reason, from continent to continent. In offices where people study migration, there are maps charting the most used paths to freedom, with distance covered and time taken. The longest recorded journeys begin in China and end in Surinam, some 15,200 miles on the road, taking between six months and a year and costing between $25,000 and $50,000; Thailand to New York, at 13,500 miles, is not far behind.

Wanting to hear about these travels, wanting to understand the routes and the dangers, wanting to ask how the refugees decided which route to take, and what it was like traveling without possessions and with only a dim idea of the future to shape their days, guided not by their own instincts but by those of unknown traffickers whose honor they could not know to trust, I asked human rights lawyers in San Diego who work with asylum seekers if they would introduce me to some of their clients who had crossed into California from Mexico. The world of these long-distance crossers, as
they are known—people who are not Mexican—who travel from all over the world to cross into the States along this border, is completely different. Unlike the Mexicans, most have come to California not so much in search of work as to escape persecution at home; they were not the economic migrants I originally came to find, but the asylum seekers I knew well from Europe and Africa, people so desperate that any journey, however long and arduous, however dangerous and financially ruinous, is better than likely captivity and torture at home. There are said to be about 11,000 of them in San Diego at any one time, at various stages of the asylum process.

It was from a church group in El Cajon, west of San Diego, that I heard about the Chaldeans. San Diego, like Detroit, Phoenix, and Chicago, is home to a large community of these Iraqi Catholics— descendants of Sennacherib and of Sargon the Akkadian, who ruled Mesopotamia with Babylon as their capital. Modern Chaldeans use the Aramaic language and follow the teachings of Rome. They did not fare well under Saddam Hussein. They were merchants and well educated and, since their religion did not forbid it, ran liquor stores. All were harassed; thousands were arrested, imprisoned, tortured. In El Cajon, grouped into two congregations, are hundreds of Chaldeans who have fled Iraq since the early 1980s and, granted asylum, have settled legally along its freeways and in its suburbs. They say that southern California, with its dry air and sandy soil, reminds them of their native Iraq, and that they are happy here, though many have left relations behind. In their still oddly Middle Eastern living rooms, with sofas and chairs all around the walls, and large floral carpets in the middle, they have placed enormous television sets, on which they watch the news from Iraq. When I went to the Chaldean churches, I found Iraqis who had taken remarkable routes to reach the safety of California, who had walked and driven and taken buses and ships and planes, who had spent all their savings and left behind people they loved, people whom they mourn because they are too old, or too poor, or too frail to follow them to safety. But no journey I heard about was more dramatic than
Salaam’s; his story alone shows what people will do in order to escape persecution.

Salaam is twenty-nine and a doctor, a tall, spare, genial man with glasses and the gestures of someone who has always been at ease with his own life. His dark brown hair is cropped short, and his manner is generous and open. Already, in some indefinable way, alter only a few months in America, he looks American; his English has a Californian drawl. Salaam was working as a doctor in Baghdad in the spring of 1999 when his turn came to serve as prison doctor for a month in Abu Ghraib, the vast jail in the suburbs of Baghdad now known throughout the world as the place where U.S. reservists and private military contractors housed and maltreated their Iraqi prisoners. As Salaam was talking, I remembered hearing about Abu Ghraib in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein tortured his opponents in its dungeons, and something of the horror in the voices of its victims, who were confined in flooded underground cells—horror brought to the West’s notice by dissidents who had finally escaped Saddam Hussein’s executioners—has always stayed in my mind.

When he reported for work, Salaam knew little about conditions inside Abu Ghraib. That wasn’t something you talked about in Baghdad in the 1990s. What he saw revolted him; he observed, but he said nothing. But then one day seventy-two prisoners rebelled against the atrocities being committed every day around them. The prison governor ordered that as punishment they should be locked together in a single inner room, some four yards by five, as Salaam remembers it. The prisoners stood, or sat, in total darkness. On the second day, two died; on the third, thirteen. On the fourth, Salaam was ordered to visit the survivors. “I couldn’t get into the room because there was no air. The people inside had become like animals. The floor was sodden with urine and excrement and sweat.” Salaam did what he could: he dragged out twenty unconscious or semiconscious people and gave them oxygen.

The next day, the governor summoned him. Salaam could no longer hold back his hatred and outrage. The conversation did not go well. Salaam was informed that he, too, would now be punished,
and that his next medical job would be to extract the eyeballs of newly executed prisoners, so that the corneas could be removed for transplants. “I was ordered to attend the executions, so that the extraction could take place immediately. I refused. The governor called in a guard, and had me put into a cell.” There Salaam stayed for three and a half months. Because his parents had some influence and his sister was able to put up bail, he was released. “After that, I had to leave Iraq as quickly as I could. I was marked, as a Chaldean and as a dissident.”

As it happened, Salaam’s sister, Rania, was now marked as well. There was no choice but to flee. Rania left directly for Jordan, on forged papers; she was accompanied by their father, since as a woman she could not travel alone. Their relatively well-off parents bought Salaam a ticket and visa to travel to Turkey.

Now the long journey into exile began, eventually to bring not only brother and sister but also their parents and remaining sisters to California. Salaam and Rania knew where they wanted to go: San Diego’s Chaldean community is well known to Iraqis; furthermore, an older brother, I man, was already settled in El Cajon. The question was how, with no genuine passports or visas, to get there.

From Turkey, Salaam traveled, by bus and car, to Turkestan, where he bought another visa, a forged passport, and a plane ticket to Amman. After several weeks, he was reunited with Rania, and the two now found a smuggler willing to traffic them to Mexico, via Guatemala, for $10,000 each. This involved living for a while in a safe house, catching a plane for Guatemala City, and making their way, in the company of a guide and four other Iraqis, up Guatemala’s western coast toward the border with Mexico. The last part was through jungle. At daybreak they reached the frontier, which lay along a river. The water was high and fast flowing. Their guide directed them to the shallowest point and Salaam and Rania, hand in hand, holding tightly to each other, set out, the water swirling around their shoulders. Several times they lost their footing and thought that they would be swept away. But they reached the other side and were taken to a safe house to rest. They had now been
traveling for thirteen days since leaving Jordan, and had nothing but the clothes they stood up in.

In Mexico City, the smugglers abandoned them, but they had tickets for a plane to Tijuana. When the party disembarked, only Salaam and Rania managed to get through the immigration controls; the other four were taken into custody.

Salaam and Rania now took a room in a hotel. Their brother, Iman, arrived, having crossed the border at San Ysidro on his legitimate asylum seeker papers, bringing with him a further $2,000 for each of them to pay a smuggler to get them into California. Very early one morning, Salaam and Rania were driven to the crossing at San Ysidro and told to walk, without looking right or left or pausing for anything, through the checkpoint, past the lines of cars waiting for border inspection, past the immigration controls. It had all been arranged with bribes. They didn’t believe it, but it worked. They found themselves in California, in a parking lot near the border, where a smuggler was waiting with a taxi to drive them to their brother. The next day, they asked for asylum. In the months that followed, their parents and two sisters also reached San Diego. Rania has since married and works as a pharmacist; Salaam is studying American medicine for the qualifications he needs to practice as a doctor in the United States.

What Salaam remembers most about the journey is the sense of responsibility he felt for Rania. The worst moment was crossing the river, with the current pulling at their legs, and the Mexican and Guatemalan soldiers standing on the bridge, within sight, with their guns, but fortunately looking the other way. That was bad, just as it was bad leaving Jordan on a forged passport, knowing that if it was discovered he would be deported to Iraq. The journey was hard for him, but far harder for his sister, who had no knowledge or experience of danger and hardship. As for him, what he witnessed and went through in Abu Ghraib had hardened him, and in comparison, his travels do not strike Salaam as very interesting. It is the past that preoccupies him.

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FROM PRO BONO
lawyers who handle the cases of asylum seekers, I heard about the extent to which “aliens” have been swept off the streets since September 11, 2001. Immigrants and visitors to the United States now face an array of legal and bureaucratic hurdles.
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Shortly after the attacks, on the orders of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the U.S. resettlement program, which in recent years had seen some 70,000 asylum seekers granted new lives in America, was frozen. As I had seen among the Liberians in Cairo, people whose immigration had already been approved were put back into the system for new checks. Families split between different parts of the world pending reunification in the States remained in limbo. The infrastructure of organizations caring for them, such as the International Rescue Committee, began to crumble, as their funding is calculated according to the number of new arrivals. Then arrests of “suspect aliens” started, beginning with Muslims and Arabs. At first, the number of detainees was conscientiously published each week. But when, before many weeks had passed, the figure reached a thousand, the bulletins stopped. All that was known was that foreigners working or studying in the United States, many of whom had been there for many years and had families and children, suddenly found themselves picked up and charged with technical violations of immigration law, such as failing to notify the authorities of a change in their university major. On the pretext that this was the simplest way of holding in custody and interrogating possible terrorists, some of these people have been held for months before being deported. Others have been caught under an ex post facto law, making immigrants who came to the United States lawfully subject to deportation for acts—such as
traffic offenses—that were not grounds for deportation when they committed them.

Another Ashcroft proposal enacted in the wake of September 11 requires visitors from twenty-five predominantly Muslim countries to register and submit to fingerprinting immediately on arrival, and then report back to the authorities after forty days in the United States. Some forgot; others misunderstood or did not take the ruling seriously. In a little less than two years, at least five thousand people are believed to have been arrested and taken into custody, of whom just four were eventually charged in connection with terrorism, and just one actually convicted of “support of unsuspected terrorism.” In this context, what first took place at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba can be seen as an extreme version of the current U.S. hostility toward noncitizens: 650 men and boys—some as young as thirteen—were held incommunicado, without access to counsel, and with no hearing at which to determine whether or not they are in fact “enemy combatants” in the first place.

The attacks launched by George W. Bush and John Ashcroft and approved by Congress on America’s vast immigrant population have not gone unchallenged by liberals among both the Republicans and the Democrats, who regard them as frightening harbingers of an ever greater erosion of civil liberties. As the journalist Anthony Lewis noted in the
New York Review of Books
in the autumn of 2003, paraphrasing Martin Niemöller, the outspoken anti-Nazi German pastor, what is happening today to refugees and immigrants, the “aliens,” could very well happen tomorrow to American citizens, and the fact that there is so little real protest only makes future action against citizens that much more thinkable. The USA Patriot Act has already given government agents the power to subpoena any individual’s records, including a U.S. citizen’s, with a university, library, or telephone company. While people wait for more terrorist attacks and for yet more repressive measures taken in their wake, the emphasis is shifting all the time, away from openness and tolerance and accountability, toward secrecy and obfuscation. Prejudices on the part of certain judges hearing immigration appeals grow more
marked; postponements and adjournments become the order of the day, as do layers of investigation by one government agency after another; the appeals system becomes more meaningless; nothing is as clear as it once was; and human rights lawyers learn of changes in policy not in directives but by reading between the lines of speeches. Nuances have taken on new power.