Apr
7
Across the US/Mexican Border
April 7, 2008 | | 1 Comment
By Wanching (Week 9)
It seems that the US-Mexican border has caught the interest of many photographers lately.
When Irish photographer Richard Moss drove along the border, he noticed a rucksack sitting on the side of the road. He stopped and looked inside, where he found keys, toothpaste, cards for an English language course and a Bible in Spanish. It was then that he realized they were personal effects abandoned by a woman who had crossed the border illegally. For fear of being caught, she didn’t dare to return to collect the things she’d left behind, even though those are presumably most of all that the poor illegal immigrant had. This abandoned rucksack inspired Mosse to work on a photo project tentatively called “Nothing to Declare”. He walked along the border and looked for artifacts left behind when people had to drop everything and ran. The images are striking: toys and a page torn from a children’s book, a bag of marbles, a plastic jar of water, a damaged seat from a car…
The popular video-sharing website Youtube also features a slideshow showing Mexican illegal immigrants being questioned at the border. Other pictures are even more striking images of how they jump over barbed wires to cross the border, step on one another to overcome the tall wall separating their home and what they think is dreamland, or hide themselves in vehicles to escape police or customs search. Another short video shows how kids and teenagers are trying to jump over the fence to reach the other side of the border.
All these images tell us how desperate these illegal immigrants are in sneaking their way into the US, and behind all this is a question of how bright a future would you have to envision before you can muster the courage to risk your life in search of that? These people have literally been dying to cross into the US, and no wall is ever tall enough to stop them. It looked exactly like how Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano put it: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder”.
Despite their desperation and determination, many find themselves end up being poor, exploited, and feeling out of place. The sense of isolation and fear of being caught finally replace the once “great American dream”. They are constantly blamed for snatching jobs away from locals, but most don’t find themselves much better off than they were back at home.
“We’ve replaced steaks with cornflakes. We can’t afford to get sick. Our kids can’t afford health insurance. We hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can’t afford a new one. Our kids can’t buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant. Our purchasing power continually regresses, and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing”, said an anonymous working Mexican illegal immigrant in a recent letter to the editor.
In the article The Hightower Lowdown published in February 2008, editor Jim Hightower rightly pointed out that immigration reform cannot be separated from labour and trade reform. We can’t fix the former without dealing with the other two. The problem is as much a domestic one as an international one. Illegal immigration is certainly one of the natural poisoned fruits of globalization. Once transport and communications are made easier, and information spread faster, waves of illegal immigrants inevitably move from the poor, developing parts of the world to the richer and more advanced areas.
There is also a dilemma at work in most developed countries’ mindset: while the government is eagerly courting well-educated and skilled labour from any partso f the world to ease their shortage caused by an aging population, it wants to tighten immigration rules and border control to prevent immigrants from sneaking into their countries in search of a better life. But the truth is, this mindset has led to an even more uneven distribution of wealth between nations, further increasing the appeal of the “rich neighbour”. Somehow, governments just have to accept that now that globalization has opened the door of their countries to the world, no country can really have it both ways: attracting well-skilled talents and shutting our less-skilled immigrants both at the same time.
So, why don’t we start developing genuine grass-roots investment policies that give Mexicans both an ability and an incentive to remain in their homeland? Rebuilding the middle-class ladder will be the best way to remove the need to migrate from Mexico in search for a “better life”. Instead of risking their life in quest of the “great American dream”, they will then be able to realize their own “great Mexican dream”.
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If capital and goods can move freely in a globalised world, then it does not make much sense preventing labour from moving as well does it?