History of the Southern Border

December 9, 2007

By Bill Ong Hing

Professor of Law

University of California, Davis

bhing@ucdavis.edu

I was asked to give an historical presentation in El Paso on November 29, 2007 at the conference: “Building a New Vision of the Border: a Conference on Border Policy." Here are my remarks:

History of the Border and Immigration Policy

[Note: These comments were adapted from the book, Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Temple Univ. Press 2004).]

On a different September 11—the one in 1998—the body of a man was found floating in the All-American Canal in the Imperial Valley of southern California. The next day, Saturday, September 12, another man, who had been in a coma since August, when he was found in the valley’s desert with a core body temperature of 108 degrees, died. On Sunday, the Border Patrol discovered the body of Asuncion Hernandez Uriel in the same desert. Some of her group stayed with her, but she died of heat stress. The same day, the decomposed body of Oscar Cardoso Varon was pulled out of the canal. In all, the bodies of four migrants attempting to cross to the United States from Mexico were found that weekend.

Unlike the reaction of the American public to the horrors of September 11, 2001, no outrage or sympathy was expressed after the weekend border deaths beginning September 11, 1998. One could point to a difference in scale—some 3,000 on September 11, 2001—but try more than 3,000 in the border situation; 3,000 deaths at the border that were avoidable. When deaths resulting from these strategies—with names like Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Safeguard, Operation Blockade—started being reported, the Border Patrol was not surprised. Its 1994 strategic plan recognized that pushing migrants to cross through remove, uninhabited expanses would place them in “mortal danger.” When the strategy to move the undocumented foot traffic to the east of San Diego as part of Operation got underway, a Border Patrol supervisor said, “Eventually we’d like to see them all out in the desert.”

How did we get to this shameful place in the name of immigration enforcement? The sordid history of the southern border and immigration policies is not something of which Americans can point to with much pride. Consider this chronological scan:

1821. Mexico declares independence from Spain, taking control of what we now regard as the entire southwest: California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada...