They Call Them Deportees

The officer leans over the window. "Sir. Can I see your driver's license?"

A normal enough, though irritating, scenario for most of us. But from within the cab of the vehicle emanates an unbearable heaviness -- the driver is Mexican, he doesn't speak English. What begins as a routine traffic stop shifts to a search for immigration papers and, for many, a one-way ticket to the other side of the US-Mexico border.

I know this because one Friday night last January my friends Alfredo and Miguel were picked up for driving an unregistered car outside the Supersave discount food store in Española, New Mexico. They were placed for the weekend in what was then called Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) hold at the Santa Fe county jail, and on Monday, before they could even contact the local immigration-rights group, each was given a hearing that lasted less than two minutes, and they were bused to the border.

When government agents escorted them over the Santa Fe Street Bridge to Ciudad Juarez, the time was 10:00 p.m., the temperature, 36 degrees. Having just left a mid-winter warm spell in the north, they were wearing only thin nylon shells for coats. Having just wired most of their week's earnings home to their families in Sinaloa and Chihuahua and spent the rest on groceries, they arrived in Juarez with zero dólares.

Deportation is the predictable result of any arrest for violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. According to the 2000 Census, the United States is home to between 6 and 9 million undocumented people, and while Mexicans represent between 39 and 55 percent of this population, 90 percent of those arrested for illegal entry are Mexican nationals.

Migration from south of the border has flowed in a steady stream for as long as there has been a wealthier nation to the north, but numbers increased dramatically in 1994 after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Touted for its potential to raise the standard of living of Mexicans by providing an explosion of new industrial jobs, NAFTA has actually had the opposite effect.

Work in the corporate maquilas -- factories that popped up to take advantage of lax labor and environmental regulations -- typically pays US $1.20 an hour. According to a study by the Center for Reflection, Education and Action in Hartford, Conn., to support a family of four with such salaries would require five workers.

Also, as US tariff-free, corporate-grown agricultural products like corn and wheat poured into Mexico, over 1 million campesino families were driven off their lands from the competition. Since NAFTA's January 2003 phasing-out of protective tariffs on coffee, 600 farms collapse each day. The World Bank describes Mexico as "one of the most inequitable economies in Latin America"; the average urban dweller subsists on $1.90 a day; in the countryside $1.30.

As a result, every year since 1994 -- by boat, underground pipeline, or desert trek -- increasing numbers of Mexicans have been risking life and limb to enter the United States to find work. As Miguel puts it, he came north because back home people "cannot even afford to buy toilet paper." At this point, the third largest source of national income, just behind tourism and the illicit drug trade, is money sent home by migrants.

And for those migrants who are undocumented, deportation is a daily threat. Miguel has been sent back eight times, Alfredo more than 20. His most spectacular deportation was an INS-sponsored airplane ride from Sierra Vista, Ariz., 229 miles to El Paso, Tex., and then -- as if Juarez, across the border from El Paso, were not far enough from Sierra Vista -- 607 miles farther south to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Upon arriving at the airport, Alfredo called his employer-patron in Phoenix and, using money he wired, hopped a bus to Agua Prieta where he began the journey north all over again.