Voices from the Border
Careers with Border Patrol. "Good" immigrants. Migration policy under Raegan. Doing away with the idea of a nation-state. Vanessa Johnson on what life is really like at the US-Mexico border.
Earlier this week, we published an essay by Vanessa Johnson where she explores a Pan-American approach to migration.
She writes:
“I propose a Pan-American response that allows for full participation in society. People may live, work, go to school, and travel freely. I propose this as a form of reparative justice, for wrongs committed to peoples across the Americas, as a way of rectifying historical moral injustices…If we are exporting Arkansas rice to Haiti or dumping Iowan corn in Mexico, we can’t then with a straight face believe that we have no obligation to the farmers being undercut or displaced by trade.” Hers is a perspective informed by living on the border for her entire life. We wanted to dive into that. How has the border changed since the 80s? Why did it change? Do El Pasoans feel afraid of the border, the way those on Fox News seem to be?
Hers is a perspective heavily informed by place. She has spent her life at the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. We wanted to dive into that — to break away from the sensational rhetoric of border politics and hear about what life, day in and day out, actually feels like in the largest bi-national community in the Americas. We conducted a follow-up interview with her, which you will find below, asking about how border security has changed over the course of her life, what that change feels like, and how to think about the future.
This interview with Vanessa Johnson was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews. Johnson has a master’s in Latin American and border studies. She works as a musician and writer today.
My name is Vanessa Johnson and I live in El Paso, Texas, which is the largest bi-national community in the Americas, across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. I'm 43 years old. I've been crossing the border since I was three when we moved to El Paso. It's changed dramatically since then.
Can you paint a picture of the border now and how it’s changed?
In 1982, when I started crossing, both Juarez and El Paso were much smaller cities. But even at that time, Juarez was the more cosmopolitan city. It's a city you would take visiting friends or relatives to. We crossed frequently, and there was nothing to the crossing. You didn't need an ID. There was permissiveness on this side – the migrant, the worker, was not a focus of enforcement. There was a lot of irregular crossing in the eighties and the nineties.
Reyes was the head of the Border Patrol and he was the one who started Operation Hold The Line in September of 1993. I think that was the first big shift in our thinking towards immigration – to us in El Paso, we didn’t really think of crossing the border as immigration. Crossing the border is just going from one side of the city or the region to the other to visit your family, to work, to do business, or to go shopping.
When Operation Hold The Line started, they stationed a border patrol vehicle every 100 yards along the El Paso sector, which essentially acted as a blockade to anyone who wasn't crossing at a port of entry, which was a common occurrence beforehand. What happened then?
One, you all of a sudden had migrants crossing in remote regions. The US Border Patrol has recorded over 7,000 deaths from 1998 to 2020 in these remote regions. That's the bodies that are found and identified, only along the Southwest border. We know the real number is much higher. What is shocking to me about this whole start of our border security complex is in 1994, the Clinton Administration implemented this strategy and dubbed it as a “prevention through deterrence” strategy. They actually determined that the death of “aliens” attempting entry was one indicator of the strategy's effectiveness. It's in writing by the GAO [The Government Accountability Office]. They delivered that assessment to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1997, and President Biden was serving as the ranking minority member of that committee. So, that's one consequence – the humanitarian catastrophe that we have seen along the Southern border.
Another consequence is that if it's so hard to get into the US – it requires walking across the desert for days – you're not going to easily return to Mexico. Even if you're just working seasonally, or if your mom dies, you are unlikely to go back. Unintentionally, we've created this much bigger incentive for undocumented people to remain in the country and remain in the shadows.
Third, what we've seen along the border, and you see it in our budgeting, is huge amounts of spending. I mean, our budget for the Department of Homeland Security next year is proposed to be $97.3 billion, which is the agency's largest.
You have all of these companies who are benefiting from this – 3M, Verizon, Lockheed Martin – you have this whole security apparatus and miles-long walls across the border. There’s too much incentive for anybody to stop doing this. This is a Republican and Democratic problem alike. There's bipartisan support for this “border security.”
And you're asking me – I live a mile and a half from the US Mexico border, and from a port of entry, I don't even know what border security means. I don't know what that means. I'd like for somebody to try to explain that to me. Are we sealing off the border to all migrants, to all drugs, to all people? I've seen the deleterious effects of the war on drugs, which has been going on for 60 years, and now we have the same problem where we've basically declared a war on migrants. We need to start breaking that down and saying, why? Why have we declared a war on migrants? What is the purpose?
And how do you win that war?
I mean, we took in 200,000 refugees under President Ronald Reagan. In 1990, we took in 125,000 refugees. In 2020, we took in just over 11,00, and in 2021 we took in just over 11,000. It's absolutely shameful. We have more refugees right now globally, and other countries taking in over a million refugees. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we have a huge need for a workforce, we have a lot of empty space, and we have a lot of rural and dying communities where refugees would ideally be welcomed, and we're trying to destroy the asylum system. We haven't had meaningful immigration reform since 1986. There's not the political will to do it.
Does it complicate the politics when the community of El Paso is so tied to militarization – in terms of jobs and economy?
Absolutely.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
You know, I go to a swim meet with my kids and I'm sitting next to a Border Patrol agent. I talk to him and he's a friendly guy and he's got a great job. The Border Patrol jobs here in El Paso are some of the highest paying, best jobs you can get. That's true all along the border.
The Border Patrol runs camps for kids, which I would call kind of indoctrination camps, where really little kids go out into the desert and do activities kind of like Scouts or something. For sure there's tension.
There's much less support for open borders here than there was 10 or 20 years ago. Even El Paso has changed, much like the rest of the country has changed.
A lot comes from information that people are being fed, but there is also economic security. We don't have a lot of private industry, so in El Paso, government-industry is consistently the largest and best employer. They have the highest salaries and they have the best benefits.
On an individual level, I'm sympathetic to the person who takes a job with a federal agency – they work hard and they have a tough job. I don't begrudge them for taking that job, but I think we need to look at it from a policy perspective and say, why are we spending $8.5 billion on Immigration and Customs Enforcement? And what could we do with that money if we were to invest that in civil society, not just in other countries like Guatemala and Honduras, but what about in the United States? What could we do for early childhood education to make our country a stronger country? I just don't see any return on the investment in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead, I see a lot of pain and punitive acts toward people who are very vulnerable.
Much like the military-industrial complex and apparatus.
Todd Miller from the Border Chronicle went to the border security exposition in San Antonio. He wrote this article about his time there and ended with an anecdote of a gentleman who asked a panelist a question to the effect of, why would you want a solution if there was so much money to be made in border security? There was this long and uncomfortable silence from the panelists, because there is no answer to that question. We're not looking for a solution to migration problems because the whole industry is a very valuable cash cow.
How can the US work with the rest of the world, particularly in the Americas?
We have to address it mutually. Latin America is notoriously cautious of US leadership because they often see it as meddling in the region – and with good reason. The problem of migration demands a regional response.
I think you could look at Haiti as an example. A lot of Haitians fled after the earthquake in 2010 that left 1.5 million people homeless. They initially fled to Brazil. Then they went to Chile. Many worked for years in those countries, they learned the languages, they worked in labor-intensive jobs like wineries and agriculture, and their presence wasn't regularized in a lot of cases. They faced discrimination. So they've migrated thousands of miles to Colombia, across the Darien Gap, through Central America, through Mexico. They arrive here at the border in Del Rio, Texas last year, and it was just a shocking response — and a very racist response. Clearly, race played a role in their deportation and the treatment that they received.
Compare this to Colombia's response to the Venezuelan crisis. You have this countrywide crisis where political and economic factors cause mass chaos and starvation and a lack of basic goods and services. One thing we ask ourselves in international relations is what should our response be? There are tools we can use like sanctions, the temporary protected status of migrants – but I think we need to ask regionally about the Venezuelans themselves.
Most people, we know from research, don't want to leave their country. They're being forced to leave by circumstances beyond their control, and they are much more likely to want to go to a neighboring country, in this case, Colombia, because they're nearby, they speak the language, and they're hopeful to be able to return back home at a future point.
It’s why most Ukrainians would rather be in Poland than the US right now. 1.7 million people from Venezuela are now in Colombia, which is a huge, huge number. That's more than we've taken in forever. And Colombia really had to address this, not just from backlash from their own population, but they saw it as a development opportunity. They realized that there are benefits to migration, and they have the potential to outweigh the costs in the short term. They tried to properly manage that by issuing work, travel, transit, and stay permits so that people had visas, and an ability to work, and an ability to go to school.
You have people instead who are making an effort to settle people and protect vulnerable populations. They're making efforts to reunify families and to protect children and to fight human trafficking. We don't see that in the United States. That's the opposite of our approach. We see the separation of families. We see long-term immigration detention with no access to attorneys, no ability to know when they have a hearing, no ability to access any help.
Working with other countries in this way, is this what you would describe as a Pan-American response?
In my essay, I recognize that the idea of open borders is often seen as a fringe idea, as a liberal bogeyman that would not work practically. I lived in Paris briefly in 2000, before the Schengen agreement, before you had this idea that people would travel and be able to work or live or play or be in any European country. There was this real fear in Europe that the same thing would happen, that everybody in Poland would want to move to Ireland or the UK. It just didn't materialize. It just is not the case – even though they thought of themselves as European and they were part of this union, they still retained their nationalism.
People still have benefits that are conferred to them by a state. And they still want a second citizenship because in a way that's meaningful to them. It's like a second home, but they can retain multiple identities. The idea that we have to have this one size fits all response, that's a very nationalistic response. We're protecting our borders and we're protecting our sovereignty. I like going back to the idea of America as a region, as a hemisphere, and we are one country, that's a strong country, that's a receiving country, that should be part of that leadership solution rather than creating more suffering and more problems.
I like, resent asking people if they feel optimistic – but with your proximity to the topic, not only intellectually or academically, but physically, do you feel like there is a way out of this?
I like to be an optimistic person. I feel like we should have the ability to address this from a political perspective and have leaders who are strong enough to say that this is the direction we should be going. On a personal level, it feels like right now we are not headed in the proper direction.
I crossed into Juarez this past Saturday with my family, a five-year-old, a 10-year-old, my husband, and myself, on foot – and the whole vision was very distressing to me. It's a completely unrecognizable border to someone who would have been crossing the same border 30 years ago.
There are 60,000 migrants in the vicinity, many of whom have fairly recently arrived, with the hopes of crossing once Title 42 was rescinded, which it wasn't. We saw people being deported that night.
This is a completely manufactured crisis. We stopped asylum for two years and now we obviously have tens of thousands of people waiting to cross. The right-wing news looks at this as evidence of a hoard, of a foreign mob, of an invasion. It's a distressing visual, but we have created this problem. We need to regularize movement and understand that migration should be a human right.
In my essay, I address this idea of how do we dismantle the idea of a nation-state? I'm not proposing that we dismantle the nation-state, I'm proposing that we have a broader vision of what it means to allow for travel, and for migration that is regularized and that is open and free, and would be much more equalizing.
Typically, the farther you get away from the border, the more scared people are of the border. The people who live on the border recognize this is like any other place. Juarez is a city like any other city. It's a cosmopolitan, wonderful city, with artists and groups and restaurants and a civil society that's very strong and has risen back in the face of violence over the years. I don't have a dark picture of our cities per se, but I do have a dark picture at the policy level.
You touched on this earlier – but for people who have never been, what was it like to cross the border a few decades ago versus now?
The process is much less friendly. That's an understatement. There's no encouragement for crossing. The CBP, who manages the bridge, wants the lines to be long. They want the experience to be difficult. They want people to be nervous. They have you line up and the dogs go around and sniff you. They've started what's called metering – which is where CPB officers stand at top of the bridges to preclude anybody from actually setting foot on US soil until you've shown your ID. Saturday night, when I came back with my family, I actually had to show passports for all four of us at the top of the bridge prior to going into the Customs and Board of Protection. If you did not have papers, they wouldn't even allow you to set foot on that side because then you would be able to claim asylum. That is relatively new here.
For the past few years in El Paso where there were literally people waiting for their number to be called to claim asylum. The bridge was lined with people who were sleeping there, families, and young children in very cold weather and in very hot weather. You see people, families, crossing in large groups crossing the river into the US trying to get Border Patrol's attention, forcing them to process them irregularly because the wait was so long. Juarez is a dangerous city for migrants – they're being preyed on and robbed. We weren't dealing with as much 10 or 20 years ago.
So much chaos pushed back onto Mexico. It’s odd to think that if these people could afford to fly it’d be a much nicer experience. Customs at LAX isn’t so antagonizing. If you can get here and overstay your Visa it’s a much friendlier path than trying to cross on foot at the border, apparently.
Yes. It is that. A lot of what we're doing does not fly under international law, but that hasn't stopped us so far. You're right, like elites, we have the ability to travel. I can travel to any foreign country. I can get a visa. I can overstay a visa. I could do that. Global capital has the ability to transcend borders. We make it very easy for our Iowa corn to go into Mexico, or for our Arkansas rice to go into Haiti.
In the United States, we have created these categories of “desirable immigrants” – the farm workers and the dreamers, and the tech moguls. The undesirable ones are everyone else – people with darker skin, indigenous people, and people fleeing violence without resources. We have to do our best to eliminate those categories and see the ability of travel and migration as a fundamental right.
Have you found any way of being persuasive in this argument?
I think a lot of it is in education. I work with an organization called AVID, Advocate Visitors in Detention, that has lobbied, based on testimony and our documentation of abuses that have occurred in immigration detention facilities, against detention centers. We’ve focused a lot of attention on New Mexico, and we have been able to shift some things.
Lawmakers are shocked when they realize that they're pouring billions of dollars into these detentions where people don't have enough food or air conditioning or heat or medical attention. Within the state of New Mexico, lawmakers have outlawed some for-profit immigration detention. For me, immigration detention is something that people from the left or the right should be able to get behind the abolition of. It makes no sense. It's basically just punitive, and it's very expensive. But, again, you're coming up against the money. You're coming up against the fact that these are very, very profitable businesses for people. And those people are very strong lobbyists for the politicians who are voting on their budgets.
It just comes back to money, over and over again, and it’s so trite and unsatisfying.
Countries are becoming more authoritarian, and, around the world, immigrants have always been easy targets. There's a fantastic book, by Harsha Walia, called Border and Rule that came out recently. It looks at global migration in the context of our current capitalist systems. She compares Canada's system, which is a system that everyone always points to as ideal, where they take rich people and the poor people are in a system of temporary permanence, and compares it to the Kalafa system of slavery in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, particularly. The idea of saying we're going to bring somebody here, but then they have to work for this agricultural company – that just doesn't work in the long run.
One last thing – all of a sudden we said, we have this crisis in Ukraine and we will open our borders to Ukraine. We say we'll take a hundred thousand refugees. I mean, the population of all of the countries in Central America is the same as Ukraine – 44-45 million people.
Why couldn't we absorb the entire population of those countries if we needed to? There's no problem on our part with resources. Part of my frustration is that we are in this extreme post-capitalist phase of minting a new billionaire a day, and we have so many resources and so much wealth, and yet we're turning our back on the people who are really the most vulnerable.