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Scars
The impacts of crossing the border
"In the desert, we are all illegal aliens."
- Luis Alberto Urrea in The Devil's Highway
IT IS A MASS MIGRATION, and it leaves its mark. For more than a decade, they have poured across the border in numbers too staggering to assess. They have pounded thousands of miles of trails into the desert floor, eroding and denuding with their fearful footfalls. They have deposited more than 25 million pounds of trash in the form of backpacks, water bottles, toiletries, clothing, food and human waste. They have transformed congressionally designated wildernesses into places made yet wilder by wanting and waiting humans.
"I have seen incredible damage to our fragile desert ecosystems done by illegal aliens evading apprehension," says Bonnie Swarbrick, public information officer for Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, a narrow strip of protected land in southern Arizona sharing 4.5 miles of the Mexico border. "I have seen first-hand how this beautiful and pristine landscape has been torn up by vehicle traffic and intertwined foot-trails. Yet the federal government still allows the destruction to continue."
At the height of the wave of illegal immigration across Arizona's desert in 2006, Buenos Aires saw 3,000 migrants move through the refuge each day. These travelers left 500 tons of trash every year. There were well over 100 individual, distinct crossing points on the refuge's short stretch of border. The landscape became dangerous, and 4,500 acres of Buenos Aires was closed to the public as a security measure.
Now there is a border fence along the refuge's international boundary. New impacts are reduced, but old scars - both trails and trash - remain. And they likely will for decades to come.
HER SCARS WILL REMAIN for decades to come.
We will call her Sophia.
At the age of 19, she chose to leave. She had to. She was married to a man who violently beat her. She tried to escape to her family, but they viewed divorce as a sin. She tried to escape within her homeland, but her husband always tracked her down. The border would be a barrier. The border was deliverance.
She crossed the desert at night with the aid of a "coyote" - a man paid to shepherd migrants across the borderlands. Scars from old beatings were joined by new barbed-wire incisions. And the coyote's hands made their way across her own borders and boundaries as home disappeared on the horizon. To protest would mean becoming intimate with his gun, to become like the bones and bodies scattered along the trails they walked.
So she endured. She believed in this painful liberation. After three attempts, she arrived to a house in America. But the lonely wilderness still stretched ahead.
The coyote was paid for her delivery.
For two months, up to 10 men a day - mostly gringos - entered her bed, illegal immigrants crossing the lines of her heart. She had no idea where she was. She prayed for death.
And then she got sick. A venereal disease ravaged her body. Thus useless, she was blindfolded and dropped at a gas station. Relatives were called to pick her up.
Though freed from slavery, her illegal status forced her to remain underground. She could not seek treatment for her disease. It burned through her young body like wildfire, extinguishing her hopes for children. Her dreams are now transformed. She frequently wakes from nightmares. She cannot say whether her long journey was worth it. But she cannot go back.
This is Sophia's story.
This is the profile of a criminal in our midst.
"We try to put numbers on a story that is, at base, a story of the heart."
Luis Alberto Urrea in The Devil's Highway
ESTIMATES FOR THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE residing in this country illegally range from 7 to 20 million. Because of their criminal status, they must remain in the shadows, and counting ghost figures is not an exact science. Many of this indeterminate number have crossed the inhospitable deserts on their journey. Urban crossing points in California and Texas were effectively closed in the late '90s, thus funneling migrant traffic through the wilderness.
It was an unintended consequence.
Fred Elbel has been involved in population and immigration issues since the mid-90s. He has held leadership positions in groups such as Support U.S. Population Stabilization, the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform, and the original Minuteman Project in Arizona. His website, desertinvasion.us, is home to heartbreaking photos of a landscape under siege.
"As an environmentalist, I have seen the destruction caused by hordes of illegals invading our country," he says, also pointing out that the influx of foreigners continues to push our country's population well beyond the land's carrying capacity. It's not just an issue of desert destruction. Immigration itself - the sheer numbers - is an environmental concern.
"The United States is the most generous immigration country in the world. We take in more than one million legal aliens each year - more than all other countries combined - let alone illegal aliens who come in at incredibly high rates," says Elbel. "It would be wonderful if we could take in everyone on the planet who wants to live here, but undoubtedly billions would come if allowed the chance. We simply cannot fix the world with our generous immigration policies."
Currently, only 66,000 temporary visas are available annually for low-skilled laborers. Thus, gaining legal entry into the country is unobtainable for the millions seeking to escape poverty and abuse. So they break the law. They cross the wilderness. They leave their mark. Their decisions bear consequences.
In escaping old scars, they generate new ones.
However, beyond the numbers - of migrants, of trails, of trash, of money sent back to Mexico - exist stories and hearts and hopes. Beyond the numbers, there is Sophia.
How can we possibly label her a criminal?
And who is in greater need of defense: the scores of people like Sophia, or the land that must bear their burden?
"There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet."
- Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, professor at University of Arizona
MEN AND WOMEN have always migrated, be it for reasons of God or greed, need or conquest. And no matter our intentions, we always leave a trail behind us.
Our baggage - both literal and figurative - leaves a mark.
"We had to throw away everything we had except our provisions and a change of shirt and our blanket," wrote Oscar Fitzallen, an 1853 emigrant to Oregon.
Is this any different than the story we see at trash-covered layover points on the immigration trails today?
In the mid-1800s, emigrants swarmed across the continent to escape economic collapse, debt, disease and a lack of hope. The West called the weary home. In 1841, the trickle of travelers on the pioneer trails totaled 69. By 1850, that number had swelled to 55,000. Along the way, they abandoned belongings, denuded the Plains, extirpated the predators, and brought the number of wild-roaming bison from 40 million down to 6,000.
Such is the impact of new beginnings.
Meanwhile, the Altar Valley, inside Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, once was rolling grassland teeming with pronghorn and quail. Now, because of a century of settlement and grazing, the grasses, pronghorn and quail have all disappeared. And the efforts of Bonnie Swarbrick and others to return the land to its once-fertile state have been hampered by a new wave of hopeful dream-seekers.
"I love the Altar Valley because of its beauty, its wide fenceless expanses of rippling grassland flanked by majestic mountains. The night is filled with coyote yips and millions of stars," says Swarbrick. "But I actually envy other refuges in which staff can devote most or all of their time to fulfilling the refuge mission . . . With the added burden of border issues, it is impossible to balance these issues."
However, places like Buenos Aires along the wild borderlands have a voice. They have guardians and champions. Their scars are spoken of and ameliorated.
What of the other voiceless desert dwellers? What of the migratory creatures who understand the law and flout it in the name of sustenance and healing? Who speaks for the shadow-dwellers whose status necessitates silence?
Who heals their scars?
ROSA ALSO SOUGHT TO ESCAPE domestic violence. The coyote told her that it would only take a few hours of walking to cross from one country to the next, that stories of longer journeys came from inexperienced guides. He promised. She believed.
She walked for 48 hours. Food and water were withheld from her even as they were proffered to men in the group. She arrived in the U.S. delirious, disoriented, and broken. The other young women in her group were in a similar condition. In this way, they were made to be more docile entrants into the sex trade.
Her faith held the wilderness of insanity at bay. Barely.
Her scars continue to hold her story.
After a month of undocumented men in her bed, she was kicked out of the brothel. She was 27 years old, and more valuable younger girls had arrived to take her place. If she told anyone of her experience, her captors threatened, her family in Mexico would meet death. Including her little boy.
Fear silenced her for three years.
She stayed in the United States for a month, enough time to earn the money to return home. She feared every day for the safety of her son, and the weight of her time as both criminal and victim was too much to bear alone.
Like the deserts she crossed, her heart held the impact of trespass.
Meanwhile, the desert holds her 8 pounds of trash - the average that each immigrant drops - and the stories of her invisible wounds.
"We human beings are like little birds. We fly wherever there's food."
- Juan Francisco Loureiro, proprietor of a migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico
"We owe it to our future generations to stabilize the population of the United States, and this necessarily means halting illegal immigration and reducing legal immigration," says Elbel.
I understand his stance. I understand the issues of carrying capacity, overpopulation, limited resources and how immigration affects them. I understand that there are simply not enough new beginnings available to succor all the Sophias and Rosas of the world. I understand it is not our role to save the downtrodden.
And then I also think of the words carried by the Statue of Liberty, and how our once-upon-a-time sentiment is still necessary - if not possible - today:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
For time immemorial - perhaps from the crossing of the Bering Strait onward - North America has witnessed migration toward opportunity. Lines on the map have always found fluidity on the ground. But in a world of ever-scarcer resources, we are more highly attuned to the problems of such mutability. Hence the vitriol of the immigration debate today.
However, in the midst of such rhetoric, is there room for individual stories? For the tales told by scars? Is there room for empathy in a world of scarcity?
What is the carrying capacity of our hearts?
ILLEGALLY MADE IMMIGRANT TRAILS in the desert are known as ghost roads. Their travelers endure the unspeakable - and make pacts with death - as they walk them. And then arriving in this country as shadows - as ghosts themselves - the migrants are held in an existential bardo. Unlawful and exploited. Speechless, with so much to say.
I now think of all the men and women who have crossed Buenos Aires in recent years. I think of how many prayers must have been uttered in the Altar Valley. I think of the cruel communion with loss such a journey offers. I think of Sophia and Rosa.
And I understand the concerns of land managers, Minutemen and politicians. Ghosts though they may be, immigrants require sustenance. And it comes at the expense of our native-born children's limited resources.
I have no answers, no remedy for human- or landscape-scale scars. Just a heart carved deeper by the sorrows of strangers. I now carry their stories - and a new perspective on the desert trails that carried them.
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