SBS Research Highlights Immigration Repercussions

Wednesday, 30 March 2011 19:22

As part of the University of Arizona’s larger Immigration Week, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences held asparsely attended “The Three R’s of Immigration -- Roots, Representations, and Repercussions” event Saturday afternoon.  The event was a symposium designed to show off research by SBS faculty and students and was divided into three parts highlighting research on the roots, representations, and repercussions of immigration.

The discussant for the third segment was Elizabeth Oglesby, an associate professor in the School of Geography and Development.  The speakers included Natalia Armijo Canto, a professor at the Universidad de Quintana Roo; Paola Molina, a Sociology doctoral student; Jeremy Slack, a Geography doctoral student; and Robin Reineke, an Anthropology doctoral student.

Armijo Canto spoke about her research on border security concerns.  She focuses not just on the border between the United States and Mexico, but Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala as well.  She said that some in the U.S. see Mexico as a third, vertical border, and so in order to fix immigration programs U.S. border problems, Mexico’s border needs to be strengthened as well.

Armijo Canto highlighted some of the problems with Mexico’s southern border, especially in the state of Chiapas.  According to Armijo Canto, there are only ten formal entry points along Mexico’s southern border, and no crossing stations within 200 kilometers of the border between the Mexican state of Campeche and Guatemala.  This results in immigrants from Guatemala and other Central American countries entering Mexico illegally through methods like floating across rivers in tires, Armijo Canto said.

She also highlighted the similarities between Mexico and the United States’ problems with illegal immigration, noting that both countries saw a similar growth in deportations of illegal immigrants between 2000 and 2005, and decrease between 2005 and 2010.  This leads Armijo Canto to call for more cooperation and a common response to immigration between the United States, Mexico, and Central American countries.

However, she also pointed out that part of this response needs to be a change in the rhetoric and ways of thinking about immigrants.

“Migration is not a threat, it’s a survival strategy,” Canto said.

Paola Molina presented the results of surveys she did with people in border crossing shelters along the U.S.-Mexican border. 18 of the people she interviewed were apprehended by Border Patrol or other agencies, while eight returned voluntarily.  The majority of the people apprehended were men, which Molina said is due to the “vulnerability” of working higher profile, stereotypically immigrant jobs like construction or agriculture.

All but one of the people who returned to Mexico voluntarily were women, and Molina said they felt “pulled” back to Mexico, despite the risks of not being able to return, due to factors like sick parents.

Eight of the 12 women Molina interviewed said they wanted to cross back into the U.S., primarily because they were mothers and had established households in the U.S.  Several of the women showed concern that children born in the U.S. wouldn’t be used to or able to adapt to life in Mexico.

“Respondents felt they couldn’t return to Mexico because of their Americanized children,” Molina said.

Six of the 15 men interviewed also wanted to try to get into the U.S. again, citing factors like better opportunities for education and quality of life according to Molina.

Molina said that three interviewees who illegally immigrated into the U.S. as children were the most adamant about crossing again, because they viewed it as “going home.”

Molina closed by commenting on how removing “permanent settlers” like the mothers she surveyed who establish jobs and families in the U.S. only perpetuates “circular migration,” as these people will just continue to re-enter the U.S. to return to their lives.

Jeremy Slack, who also worked on Molina’s study, gave a presentation on a survey of border crossing experiences he is a part of.  Because the surveys are still ongoing, Slack focused mostly on the methodology his group is using, but was able to present some preliminary findings of the surveys already.

According to Slack's data, of the 421 people interviewed, 88 percent were male, and their average age was 30.  62 percent said that they had crossed the border looking for work, while 31 percent said they crossed both for work and for family reunification, according to Slack.

72 percent of those surveyed used a guide, such as a “coyote,” at an average cost of $1,659.  32 percent of them encountered bandits during their border crossing, and Slack said that of that 32 percent, a quarter of the people surveyed had been robbed while attempting to illegally immigrate to the U.S.

Slack said although there is a lot of research already being done in the Tucson area of the border, this upcoming project is "trying to get a bigger vision of the different areas of the border."  Although they aren't sure how the information will be published once the project is complete, Slack said part of the plan is to create a digital database of the information and recordings from all of the interviews conducted for researchers to sort through and use.

Robin Reineke focused on migrant death in the Sonoran Desert.  In addition to her academic work, she works at the office of the Pima County Medical Examiner handling missing person reports and unidentified remains.

According to Reineke, the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office has the highest number of migrant or believed to be migrant dead brought in across the entire border area.  Reineke said that between 2001 and 2010, 1,731 bodies were found in the desert and brought to the office.  585 of those bodies are still unidentified, and the office still has 623 unsolved missing person reports.

Reineke was very critical of immigration law and rhetoric in the U.S. and how migrant deaths play into that and are used in the media, and compared the current controversies around illegal immigration to segregation and the civil rights movement during the 1960s.  She also claimed that by not doing more to prevent migrant deaths in the desert, the government is allowing them to occur and in effect complicit in the deaths.

“Deaths on the border are not random, isolated, individual accidents, but like ICE raids, are part of a nationalistic strategy of racial control,” claimed Reineke.

She claimed that the continuation of migrant deaths over the years has lead to a normalization effect and taken away their impact.  She demonstrated this by reading a number of comments from news stories about migrant death in the desert that included dehumanizing and racist language, claiming them to be the results of seeing the deaths as normal.

However, she noted that sometimes negative depictions of migrants and their death is even unintentional, using the example of a picture of a dead migrant in a body bag that ran in the Arizona Daily Star that showed the dead man’s face.  The faces of bodies of other races are almost never shown, Reineke said.

Reineke ended her presentation by calling for increased scrutiny of the issues surrounding illegal immigrants and said that it should be considered the new civil rights movement.

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