Last Exit to Tombstone

As soon as he spots me taking pictures on the steps of the 3-century-old avocado-and-lemon-colored Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe church, Manuelito makes a beeline my way. A pudgy 30-year-old Tzotzil Indian from the impoverished southern state of Chiapas, standing barely 4 and a half feet tall, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, sporting a Marine-like buzzcut, he smiles broadly, opens a mouth full of front teeth capped with shiny gold stars, and, in very fluent and buoyant English, says, "Hey, friend, come and talk to me. I want to talk to you."

After explaining that he's a father of four who can no longer live off his small patch of land, he excitedly hugs me and says victoriously, "I'm going to the Big Apple, to New York City, baby!" That's one reason, he says, why he's spent all of his free time for five years studying English. And he can hardly contain his joy trying it out on me.

When I ask who he knows in New York and what he plans to do when he gets there, he just shrugs. "No matter, man. I know when I get to the border, I just have to walk between the mountain and the red lights on the antenna. That's the way in. From there I will get to New York." And if you get caught by the Migra? I ask.

Again, another laugh. "No matter. They can catch me 10 times, 20 times. It's okay. I keep trying. I'm going anyway." While Manuelito might be among the more eccentric, and one of the very few among them who speak functional English, his predicament, his story and his hopes neatly sum up what's in the heads and hearts of hundreds of other Mexican men standing around the town square this recent Saturday morning. This alternately dusty and muddy, hellish hamlet of Altar, permanent home to barely 7,000, situated an hour and a half south of the Arizona border and bathed in a cloud of diesel fumes, has become the single most important staging area and launching pad for undocumented immigration into the U.S.

Though the Bush administration spent an additional $30 million last year trying to plug the porous southern Arizona border, the illegal exodus has reached a five-year high. Hundreds of new Border Patrol agents were deployed against the human tide, as were Apache helicopters and even unmanned aerial drones. A controversial program that returned home thousands of Mexican migrants caught at the border ran the length of last summer. In the fall, Arizona voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 200, which demands that state public services be provided only upon proof of legal residence.

None of these measures put as much as a crimp in the immigration crunch, and last year more than 1 million apprehensions were made along America's southern border – the same number as in 2000. But, for the first time ever, the detentions in Arizona totaled more than in all the other border states combined. The bulk of migrant deaths also occurred in the Tucson sector, north of Altar: about 220 – or maybe 250, depending on who's doing the counting – out of an estimated 350 total.

Since the mid-1990s, U.S. border enforcement policy has increasingly squeezed the flow of migrants into the rural and relatively uninhabited – and unforgiving – central Arizona desert. As the Clinton administration imposed draconian lockdowns on traditional border-crossing points near San Diego and El Paso, American immigration officials believed the brutal desert in between would be a formidable and effective deterrent. That theory has been proved irrefutably wrong. The only thing that has changed is a skyrocketing number of migrant deaths. As the daily stream of migrants redirected itself through Arizona, this tiny town of Altar – still invisible on many maps – became the capital of illegal immigration. Indeed, after President Bush – twice in the past year – has issued high-profile statements supporting the enactment of a "guest worker" program, there's been a noticeable spike in the rush to get across the border. With Congress currently considering several pieces of immigration-reform legislation that might "legalize" a certain number of the undocumented, many Mexican would-be immigrants have concluded that now is the right time to get into the U.S. and be in position to benefit from any new federal legislation.