The Immigration Conundrum - Part II

Why Closed Borders Don't Work?

In the 1970s and 80s most Indian movies used to depict the villain as one who smuggles gold into India. Growing up watching those movies, we all used to think the villains are all unpatriotic goons that are out for themselves. In those decades India had a huge license raj that used to strangle businesses by issuing quotas and licenses for most economic activities, impose huge tariffs on foreign goods (e.g. 150% import duty on foreign cars to protect the local Government owned car industry) in order to centrally manage the entire country's economy. The Indian Rupee used to be propped up by the central bank throughout the 80's and so the exchange rate used to be less than 10 Rupees per US Dollar. Since this wasn't realistic but an artificially maintained value, there was hardly any US dollars available for travelers. I remember how I had to jump through hoops to get my graduate school fee converted into US $ from INR when I came to US for grad school in 1989. In the 90's when India was close to defaulting on loans as it was not able to service interest payments, there was a round of economic liberalization that eliminated these rules and moved to a much more market based economy. All the limits were thrown out and the current floating rate hovers around INR 65 for 1 US Dollar. It seems to be steadily falling or holding steady over the years depending upon whether you factor in high Indian inflation rate or not. However there is no difficulty anymore in converting one currency to the other for whatever needs you may have. This floating of the INR has more or less killed off the black market for conversion. Same notion applies to gold now. You can import what you want after paying some reasonable tax (e.g. 10% when you take in up to a Kg of gold). We no longer see the clichéd gold smuggling villains in movies! 

All over the world, for several decades in the last century building large dams used to be portrayed as visionary projects that will allow the national governments to better manage water. This notion started fading away in the 90's. Though we still have dams, people realized that it is better to let the water flow the way it wants and manage it lightly. Forcing it to go somewhere where it doesn't want to usually have lot of negative consequences that tend to outweigh the benefits foreseen in the long run. 

Human beings wanting to relocate or goods and services that try to meet existing/growing demands are all equivalent to flowing rivers. You can try to arrest and manage the flow. It may work in short term and perhaps in smaller scales. But they find ways to outsmart the managers pretty quickly on larger scales with severe consequences. This doesn't mean that we never ever manage the flow of water or people or goods & services. But letting water flow as it wants and people do what they want as long as it is not harming anyone will be a good principle of management. It will keep the costs of management really low and still let things flourish. 

Radiolab did a three part podcast titled Border Trilogy. You can find them here: part-1, part-2, and part-3. Listening to all three parts will cost you three hours but may give you a lot of insight into why desperate immigrants flee their native countries despite horrendous difficulties they are bound to encounter on their way to safer havens. It circles around the U.S.-Mexico border south of Texas. El Paso is a border city in the state of Texas on the southern end. It is juxtaposed to a city called Juarez on the northern end of Mexico. If you look it up on Google maps you will see how continuous the two cities look with an artificially drawn U.S.-Mexico border line. Ground reality is that it is one continuous habitat that allowed people to freely move across the border for decades.

Hundreds of Mexican workers will cross the border to enter U.S., work during the day in El Paso and return in the evening back to Juarez. Americans will go into Juarez for cheap food and liquor and return back. Because U.S. side is richer than the Mexican side, this used to result in petty thefts often on the El Paso side. Border patrol agents that had the duty to protect the border were largely outnumbered and so they routinely used to stop and question Hispanic looking high school kids in El Paso though they were perfectly legal U.S. citizens.

In the early 90’s a Hispanic border patrol chief named Silvestre Reyes posted in El Paso, implemented what he called Operation Blockade in which he placed a large number of border patrol agents permanently on the sides of the Rio-Grande river that Mexicans used to cross to come to the U.S. side. It initially created some opposition from the Mexican migrant workers as well as President Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno, who complained that this is harsh and inhumane treatment while the administration is trying to pass NAFTA. But when she visited El Paso and spoke to the local residents who supported the operation fully as it reduced petty thefts considerably, she changed her mind and reported back to President Clinton that this Reyes model works well. In an interesting twist, Clinton then used this approach of using a large number of border patrol agents to block Mexican migrants coming into U.S. in California’s southern border as a peace offering to NAFTA opponents to show that while we strengthen trade with Mexico and Canada, we can simultaneously secure our borders as well. This helped pass NAFTA. This hardening of the border is hailed as ‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ and is still being practiced. But this approach has pushed the Mexican migrants to try to cross the border via the Arizona desert, which is much more dangerous for human survival. Since this model went into effect, border patrol has reported that per year they see about 150 dead bodies of migrants who died trying to cross the border through the desert.

Researchers curious about what happens to people when they die in the harsh merciless desert weather did some research. Anthropologist Jason de León took two freshly killed pig carcasses and dressed them up with clothing, shoes & cap resembling typical migrants. With motion sensing cameras planted from multiple directions, his team placed one in a shady area and one in the open sun. Their expectation was to watch the bodies of these two dead pigs for one or two years to see how they deteriorate. They were stunned when the cameras got triggered within an hour to show the carcasses getting attacked and eaten by vultures! While the details are fairly gruesome, they found that in about a day or two, most of the flesh was consumed and within a span of about seven days the skeleton remains were being taken apart bone by bone by vultures that flew away with individual pieces and picked them clean. Thus, all it would take is just one week for a person who dies in the desert to be erased completely without any evidence of their bodies ever lying around in the desert sand. This goes to show that probably a lot more than 150 people (whose bodies are being found) die in the desert each year, perhaps in the thousands.

A 30 year old woman named Maricela is one such migrant who died in the desert trying to cross the border to come to the U.S. despite her brother in law who lives in the U.S. dissuading her from taking up the journey. Before vultures took care of her remains, Jason De León’s team found her deteriorating body in the desert and traced who she was and why she took up that journey as explained in part-3 of the podcast series. Understanding her story may provide a personal insight with emotional connections as to what kind of circumstances force such migrants to take up that journey enduring such unfathomable misery. Looking at abstract numbers and tables will make it easy to detest all those “illegal aliens” swarming in to take over what don’t belong to them. Learning about people like Maricela will make it a lot more difficult.

No one wants to investigate this phenomenon carefully to find the exact number people getting killed since “Out of Sight – Out of Mind” mode will leave the authorities feeling better! We can call such a hardened boundary a secure border. But if we step back, we will realize this is inhumane and is not really working as advertised/understood.

Alternately see this article or listen to just the first part of this podcast episode that talks about people who are doing the legally right thing in a refugee camp in Kenya. They are forced to make a choice where both options available to them are bad.

The article and podcast talk about a 44 year old refugee named Khairo Hassan who lives in the Kenyan refugee camp and is deep in debt since she can’t find work or aid available to her to feed her kids. She was forced to flee Somalia in 2010, after an Islamist group named al-Shabab had taken over her town, Dinsor. Her husband was shot dead in the street. After living in this camp for more than seven years, her only option to get out of the debt is to accept an UN offer to repatriate her back to Somalia. You may know very well that it is a war torn country in the horn of Africa with no government. If she agrees to go back, UN will give $150 each for her and her two daughters.

There used to be one very small escape hatch for such refugees. It is to go through a multi yearlong vetting process to get selected to be relocated to the U.S. That route is a hard one since only couple of hundred refugees used to get selected each year while there are several thousand such refugees in that one Kenyan refugee camp itself. But even that trickle has come to a full stop as the Trump administration has cancelled that program. It is not much better with other countries around the world either since no one is keen on helping these refugees resettle in their countries. Perhaps Kenya is the most generous country in this picture since it at least allows this refugee camp to exist!

She is about $400 in debt, money she borrowed from a store in the camp run by another refugee to feed her kids. So, she takes the offer, gets the $450, and promptly pays the $400 within 30 seconds of receiving the money to that lender. She does board the raggedy military plane back to Mogadishu. Another woman who went back just like her few months back died recently in a bomb blast there. So, Khairo Hassan leaves not knowing how she can eke out a living in Somalia since it is in tatters or can even survive the violence for the forthcoming years with her daughters. But she knows fully well that it will not be possible for her to get the refugee status back now that she has given that up voluntarily. Even the store owner that takes the $400 from her is not a villainous thug but a young Somalian guy, who is also in debt and is thinking he might have to do the same thing in the next month or two since he can’t see a path forward for himself in Kenya. They are all still doing all they can to take the legal route. What would you and I do under such circumstances?

Take a look at this 3 part documentary by BBC called India’s Frontier Railways available for free on YouTube. It might change your views on borders in few other ways totally different from the podcasts and articles mentioned above.

(Continue to Part III)