Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (10 page)

Menchu’s testimony suggests that, like the Mexican peasants described earlier, Guatemalan highlanders were not seeking to leave their homes to work for pay. It took generations of forced recruitment to create this migration tradition.

Interestingly, human rights advocate Daniel Wilkinson found that the Mayan descendants who live on the plantations today know little of the violence that went into the making of this history. “People knew where their families had come from, but they didn’t know—or didn’t care to recall—much more about what had brought them to the plantations.”
⁹⁰
Wilkinson, like others who study Guatemala, emphasizes the silences that surround people’s understanding of their realities. Decades—or centuries—of genocide and terror have shaped the culture of Guatemala’s highland indigenous communities. People may have few tools to understand the forces behind their oppression, and they have learned over and over that trying to protest or change their situation only invites further repression.

The civil war—or more accurately, dirty war—against highland Maya communities during the 1970s and ’80s was one result of people in the highlands trying to challenge their poverty and dispossession. It led to the destruction of hundreds of villages, and perhaps a million internally displaced and one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand refugees who fled the country, many across the border to Mexico. Others were forced from their homes into model villages under army control.

Thus, historians of the Maya have argued that migration has been a “ubiquitous feature of Maya life” that became central to Mayan history and identity. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, and in accelerated ways since the 1800s, political, legal, military, and economic structures have directly enforced migration or simply made it impossible to survive without it.
⁹¹

“An absent community or family member may be in one of several places: on the coast picking coffee (returning home within a month, with wages); in the capital working as a domestic, merchant, or worker (sending money home to the family, returning periodically or permanently, such as after a stint or a marriage proposal from home); in another
municipio
selling firewood, animals, or agricultural products (returning once or twice a month for business and domestic activities); and, increasingly,
allá lejos
(in the United States), sending US dollars home on a regular basis.”
⁹²
Both in its structural aspects and in its cultural aspects, today’s migration is just a new phase in a process that is rooted in hundreds of years of history.
⁹³

CASE STUDY: GUATEMALANS IN PROVIDENCE

Among the undocumented Mayans of Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia Foxen found a very different conception than what most citizens understand about illegality. Rather than imagining themselves as autonomous individuals making a decision to break the law, they, like Rigoberta Menchu, understand their migration as a requirement imposed upon them by outsiders, which they have no right or opportunity to question.

The coyotes that offer to take them across the border may be considered smugglers under US law, but to the Mayans Foxen studied, they were no different from the labor contractors who had been forcibly recruiting them—legally—for generations. Instead of going to the Pacific coast to work on plantations, now they were being sent to
la costa del Norte
to work in jewelry factories. One woman told Foxen that “the
coyote
is the same as the
contratista
(labor contractor) on the coast: he should know when there is work over there, and should not be sending people if there is no work.” Others told her that they went to Providence “because that is where the
coyotes
sent them.”
⁹⁴
In many cases,
contratistas
themselves became coyotes, relying on their existing networks and standing and just expanding their geographic scope.
⁹⁵
“As did their forefathers centuries ago,” Lutz and Lovell write, “Guatemalan Mayas continue to migrate in order to survive.”
⁹⁶

Once in the United States, understandings and worldviews shaped by their history in Guatemala continue to inform immigrants’ understanding of their current realities. One Mayan in Providence explained to Foxen that “the
migra
here, it is like, as they said, the guerrillas over there. . . . If
la migra
is looking for one of us, we all run, run escaping, it is like the guerrilla.” Likewise in Guatemala, one
campesino
(peasant farmer) told her that “he had heard that the INS had not yet arrived in Providence, though they were said to be close (thus likening them to the army or guerrillas).”
⁹⁷

Foxen also notes a “total confusion surrounding understandings about the legality and illegality of different types of documentation” that stems from the population’s long history of the law being used against them.
⁹⁸
Some of her informants had paid hundreds of dollars to a
notario
for a temporary work permit. These
notarios
often had no legal credentials, but played on a semantic confusion, since in Latin America the term often refers to a lawyer. The
notarios
would file a fraudulent asylum application, which would nonetheless entitle the migrant to a temporary, legal work permit, until their asylum hearing, which would generally result in deportation. Foxen encountered frequent references to people obtaining “
papeles legalmente falsificados
”—legally falsified documents—a further example of the impenetrable character of the law from the perspective of the immigrants.
⁹⁹

Describing his experience as a court interpreter for Guatemalan migrants after an immigration raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, Erik Camayd-Freixas explained that workers there had simply followed recruiters’ and employers’ instructions, and had not knowingly chosen to break any law.

Like their ancestors and their contemporaries, these migrants had simply gone where the recruiters had taken them to work.

A
New York Times
reporter interviewed Guatemalan and other Central American migrants on Mexico’s southern border in early 2013. “Few had even heard about the debate to overhaul immigration laws and possibly open a pathway to citizenship for immigrants living illegally in the United States,” he commented. “Instead, the prevailing force seems to be deteriorating conditions at home.”
¹⁰¹

For at least five hundred years, Guatemala’s highland Mayan populations have been buffeted, or coerced, by the winds of the global economy. They have been slaughtered, displaced, massacred, and enslaved. They have had to leave their homes and their families to do the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest work for the benefit of others. They have been discriminated against socially and legally. For centuries, they have been forced to migrate and suffered poor working conditions and legalized discrimination. Their migration to the United States is only the latest phase of this long history. Their technical illegality in the United States is but a small part of a system that has worked to control their movement and their labor for hundreds of years.

CHAPTER 3

There are two main ways to become undocumented in the United States. About half of the undocumented population enters without inspection. They may have attempted to obtain a visa and been denied. More likely, they either knew that such an attempt was hopeless or did not even know that such a process existed and didn’t try at all. So they crossed somehow, usually by land but sometimes by sea, through a border that may have been unmarked, invisible, or at least unpatrolled. Thus, they were not inspected by any official from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they entered. This means that while they may have many kinds of identification documents, they have none that specifically authorizes their entry into the United States.

The other portion of the undocumented population entered
with
inspection, usually with a visa of some sort or with a Border Crossing Card. One US government estimate calculates that between 30 percent and 60 percent of the undocumented became so through visa overstays, meaning that though they were initially authorized entry, they neglected to leave in the designated time frame.
¹

Millions of Mexicans obtain tourist visas every year, and the number has been rising steadily, from about 4 million a year at the beginning of the 2000s to almost 13 million in 2010.
²
However, the vast majority of Mexicans who obtain tourist visas do not overstay their visas and become “illegal.” Most Mexicans who are undocumented became so by crossing the border without inspection, and most people who become undocumented through visa overstays are not Mexican.

Under today’s immigration laws, citizens of most countries must request a visa in their home country before traveling to the United States. Europeans, as always, are privileged: the Visa Waiver Program allows most of them to enter as tourists (but not to work) without a visa. Some Mexicans are eligible for Border Crossing Cards that allow them to travel for a specified period of time in the border region. Border Crossing Cards are like tourist or visitors’ visas: they authorize
entry
into the United States, but they don’t authorize the holder to work. People who enter with these kinds of permission can become undocumented if they either overstay their visa or violate its terms in some other way, including, for Border Card holders, leaving the twenty-five-mile border zone. Because nonimmigrant visas are temporary permits with specific conditions attached to them, ordinary activities that are not in themselves illegal can still constitute visa violations. In some cases, there are lies or questionable and illegal activities involved in obtaining the visa itself.

In 2011, 159 million nonimmigrant visitors entered the United States with some kind of legal permission. Thirty-three percent or 53.1 million of them were I-94 card holders, meaning that they either had obtained a nonimmigrant (temporary) visa or were admitted under the Visa Waiver Program. The largest source of I-94 admissions was Mexico, with 33 percent of the total. (The next largest source was United Kingdom, with only 8.6 percent.) Eighty-seven percent of these visa holders had visitors’ or tourist visas that allowed them to travel for business or pleasure. The others held student, temporary worker, or other kinds of visas.
³
Some one hundred thousand were H-2 guest workers, some 80 percent of them Mexican. Most of the other two-thirds of inspected entries were Mexicans and Canadians with Border Crossing Cards.
⁴

For all categories of nonimmigrant travel, then—as visitors or temporary workers with a visa, with a Border Crossing Card, or as undocumented entries—Mexicans constitute the largest numbers. Of the 11.5 million or so undocumented immigrants in 2006, some 4–5.5 million had entered with visitor or tourist visas, and another 250,000–500,000 entered with Border Crossing Cards. The other 6–7 million entered without inspection.
⁵

ILLEGAL VISAS

Although evading ICE inspection points and the Border Patrol is a common method of illegal entry, it’s not the only one. The head of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) explained to researcher Lynnaire Sheridan that before resorting to a dangerous crossing through the desert, migrants could attempt to borrow, purchase, or steal an authentic US passport or permanent resident card. Absent that possibility, they might obtain a false document or alter a document themselves by inserting their own photograph. If they could not access any documents, they might hide in a vehicle and cross at night.
⁶
The professional cross-border smugglers Sheridan interviewed offered a rather similar assessment. They told her that the safest way to cross was to obtain a tourist visa or, if that was not possible, to use a valid visa belonging to a family member. A bit riskier was the use of false or altered documents. The most dangerous method was to attempt to cross without being seen, generally in isolated areas with little Border Patrol presence.
⁷

Sheridan interviewed many families that had crossed illegally multiple times. They corroborated this assessment. They listed their preferred options as, first, crossing with a tourist visa and overstaying it; second, using someone else’s documents; third, using false documents; and last, attempting to cross without being discovered. If the latter was the only option, they emphasized that the more isolated the area, the more dangerous the crossing.

Cost was also a factor. The safest options were the most expensive. Sometimes families would pay more to have their young children, for example, cross with false papers (perhaps accompanying adults with valid documents), while the adults would opt for a dangerous clandestine crossing.
⁸

Another method of crossing the border is with a temporary work visa, generally through the H-2A (agricultural) or H-2B (nonagricultural) programs. (There are other categories of temporary work visas, but most require specific types and levels of skills and don’t apply in most situations.) But with the H-2 program, as with the Bracero Program before it, paperwork and requirements are so bureaucratic and onerous that many employers and potential workers find the program not worth the effort.
⁹
There is also a lot of room for illegal and unfair maneuvering within the H-2 system.