All-time high migrant death rate along US-Mexico border: prevention in immigration reform?

[Judi Lynn]

Last edited Wed Sep 24, 2014, 01:49 AM - Edit history (1)

All-time high migrant death rate along US-Mexico border: prevention in immigration reform?

Posted by Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH of George Washington University School of Public Health & Health Services on March 28, 2013

According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), 477 individuals died along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2012 during their attempt to enter the U.S. That’s an all-time high rate of 13.3 deaths per 10,000 CBP apprehensions. It compares to a rate of 8 deaths per 10,000 in 2010, and 4 per 10,000 in 2005.

The data was assembled by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) in the policy brief “How many more deaths? The moral case for a temporary worker program.” At a time when fewer migrants are attempting to enter the U.S. illegally, the author attributes the escalating death rate to two related factors: (1) the lack of legal temporary visas for low-skilled workers; and (2) the build-up of enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Reading this recently released report reminded me of the policy statement Border Crossing Deaths: A Public Health Crisis Along the US–Mexico Border adopted in 2009 by the American Public Health Association (APHA). It also pointed a finger at the “militarization of the US–Mexico border” for migrants’ deaths.

“The Border Patrol’s policy of ‘prevention through deterrence’ has resulted in the purposeful displacement and diversion of migrants into more treacherous and dangerous zones to cross, such as deserts, rivers, canals, and rugged terrain. …[T]hese border deterrence operations serve to prevent migrants from crossing in well-established urban corridors where they historically have relied on familiar networks for assistance and instead deflect migrants to more remote rural areas where they are exposed to greater dangers and the risk of death, especially in the harsher environments of deserts and mountains. [font size=3] …In their quest to evade U.S. enforcement operations in well-established urban crossing areas, migrants are squeezed into remote areas where they are exposed to the extreme elements of deserts and mountains and suffer dehydration, hyperthermia, hypothermia, and drowning.”
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More:
http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2013/03/28/all-time-high-migrant-death-rate-along-us-mexico-border-prevention-in-immigration-reform/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Walking the Line of Death

Walking the Line of Death
By Virgil Grandfield

Americans call it the Rio Grande — the Big River. Mexicans call it el Rio Bravo, the Angry River. To the millions who secretly defy its deadly currents and quicksand — refugees and dreamers from as far away as Brazil, Russia or China — it is "la Línea de la Muerte" — the Line of Death.

Antonio Zenon Urgia rests on a sheetless mattress and wonders aloud how he should cross the river when his time at this crowded migrant hostel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, runs out. He has three days.

The 39-year-old Honduran construction worker cannot swim and has no money for even the cheapest smugglers under the bridge, where submerged, jagged bars of crumbled old bridge footings devour lives like iron crocodiles.

A Mexican Red Cross paramedic has just given him more bad news: crossing the polluted river will further infect the wound on his swollen left leg and perhaps leave Antonio stranded to die in the immense southern Texas mesquite and cactus thickets across the river.

Antonio burrows under his blanket. "You suffer so much on the journey," he says. "It is hard to recall any of it."

Antonio's three travelling companions gather around his bed and gently help him tell the story of what a person — someone like themselves and millions of other undocumented migrants crossing rivers or fences, deserts, continents or oceans — will endure for a simple dream.

More:
http://www.redcross.int/EN/mag/magazine2004_2/4-9.html

[Judi Lynn]

2. Ghosts of the Rio Grande

Ghosts of the Rio Grande
Brendan Borrell
June 10, 2013

Every year hundreds of immigrants die along the U.S.-Mexico border. Too many are never identified.



The path across the border is littered with bodies. Bodies old and bodies young. Bodies known and bodies unknown. Bodies hidden, bodies buried, bodies lost, and bodies found. The stories of the dead haunt the frontier towns from Nuevo Laredo to Nogales, and even deep within the interior of Mexico down to Honduras, someone always knows someone who has vanished—one of los desaparecidos—during their journey north.

Many of those missing end up in the South Texas soil. Out on the Glass Ranch, a man named Wayne Johnson stumbles upon a skull, some bones, and a pair of dentures scattered near a dry pond. During a bass fishing tournament at La Amistad Lake, anglers come upon a decomposing corpse near the water’s edge. Late one summer night, a train rumbles down the Union Pacific Line, but it fails to rouse a father and son slumbering on the tracks. For 2012, Brooks County, with a population of just 7,223, reported 129 deaths from immigrants trying to evade the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias, double the previous year. The county judge told the San Antonio Express-News that Brooks had run out of space for John Does in its Sacred Heart Cemetery.

The dead appear in springtime, when temperatures hit the triple digits, their fading T-shirts and tennis shoes strewn about the land like wilted wildflowers. Whether they tried to cross for money, love, or security, they did so knowing they might not make it alive. Their families keep hoping and hunting for answers—if they can. Last May, 22-year-old Aldo collapsed on a South Texas ranch and made one last, desperate cell-phone call to his older brother Alejandro in Houston. But Alejandro can’t drive there to conduct a search because he, too, is here illegally. “More than anything, I would like to know what happened to my brother,” he says, “because if I could retrieve some part of his body to bring down to Mexico, we could give him a proper burial.”

Compared to Arizona, which identifies most of its unknown remains, Texas lets the corpses pile up. Autopsies are rarely conducted, DNA samples are not taken, and bodies are buried in poorly marked graves. Shortly after medical examiner Corinne Stern started working in Laredo, she found a 12-year-old skull from an unknown Hispanic man sitting on a shelf in the evidence room of the sheriff’s office. It was devoid of any information about where it came from or how it ended up there. Mercedes Doretti of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which is working to identify the remains of missing migrants, calls the region from Houston to San Antonio and south to McAllen the “Bermuda Triangle” for bodies.

More:
http://prospect.org/article/ghosts-rio-grande

[Judi Lynn]

3. Ilegal Cuban Migrants Get Immediate Benefits and Services: a Green Card in a Year

Ilegal Cuban Migrants Get Immediate Benefits and Services: a Green Card in a Year

Cuban migrants get preferential treatment from the U.S. government, and it does not matter if the migrant enters illegally or legally. Since 1959, Cubans have enjoyed a status not accorded to any other immigrant group over time. In this work, I examine both the preferences given to those Cubans entering the country illegally or legally, and discuss the types and reasons for the preferences.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Illegal Immigrants from Cuba: Preferential Treatment to get Green Card
Preferential Treatment of Cuban Migrants, Illegal and Legal

On Jan. 12, 2010, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, made the Obama administration’s policy clear: “It is important to note that TPS (Temporary Protected Status) will apply only to those [Haitian] individuals who were in the United States as of January 12, 2010. Those who attempt to travel to the United States after January 12, 2010 will not be eligible for TPS and will be repatriated.”

“In FY 2008, there were 49,500 Cubans who became legal permanent residents( LPRs)--surpassed only by LPRs from Mexico, China, India and the Philippines. Yet very few Cubans have arrived in the United States through the legal avenues proscribed by the INA.”

(Ruth Ellen Wasem, “Cuban Migration to the U.S.: Policy and Trends” Congressional Research Service, June 2, 2009.

The reasons for the differences in the way Cubans are treated from other illegals is the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, Cuban-U.S. migrant agreements of 1994 and 1995, and law added in 1996. The 1966 Act permitted any Cuban who had been in the U.S. for a year and a day, regardless of how they got here, to have their status adjusted to that of a Legal Permanent Resident. Through the use of political power by U.S. Cubans, they have successfully defeated every attempt to repeal the 1966 Act and have been able to add further preferences for Cuban immigrants, whether legal or illegal. It is also a matter of class and resources; Cubans in the U.S. are able to pay thousands of dollars to have traffickers bring Cubans here illegally, to give them jobs, and help them get U.S. government benefits, while most illegals from other countries do not have the same resources or influence. Class and politics matter in immigrants matters, as Napolitano’s remarks vividly point out.

Rather than applying the laws that are set forth in the Immigration and Nationality Act, the U.S. treats Cubans as refugees, thereby allowing temporary entrance into the U.S., and then under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, they can apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship under expediated process designed for them.

While discussion of migrants is an everyday event, the failure to fully discuss policies of the U.S. toward Cuban immigration is a void that needs to be corrected. While we believe the Cold War is over, there are many who want to keep it alive, if downsized, for political, partisan and policy reasons. On January 15, 2011, we have an example of this tendency in an article in the Wall Street Journal called, “New Prize in Cold War: Cuban Doctors” about the U.S. program to encourage defections of doctors serving in foreign countries. Not only is it an encouragement to lure illegal immigrants--the doctors do not have documents from Cuba allowing them to travel to the U.S.-- but it affects our foreign policy and diplomacy.

The U.S. takes Cuban doctors from third world nations where they are practicing medicine, thereby removing care givers from countries that badly needs them, but it also points up the punitive nature of our foreign policy toward the sovereign nation of Cuba, and an affront to the governments of the countries that host the doctors. But this is only one of a myriad number of policies that give preferential treatment to Cubans of all types, including illegal immigrants, and demonstrate to other nations how blatantly political --and grossly unfair-- the administration of our immigration policies are. Furthermore, in January of 2011, the U.S. announced it would be expelling Haitians who were here illegally, but had been given a temporary reprieve because of the earthquake in that nation. But Cubans who arrive here illegally are given parole ( temporary permission to enter the U.S.), and all types of benefits, as I will discuss later.

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If someone wants to immigrate to the U.S., they must have adequate resources to ensure they will not be a public charge, or they must have someone who does have resources to agree to sponsor the migrant . After five years, the LPR can apply for federal benefits. Legal and illegal immigrants from other countries, of course, cannot be a public charge and gain entrance to the U.S.

But these provisions do not apply to Cubans. As soon as a Cuban enters the U.S., legally or illegally, they are can get benefits if they meet the same requirements as U.S. citizens. They can get SSI for seven years, but was expanded to nine years during FY2009-2011. The maximum the person could get in 2008 was $ 637 a month for a single person, and $956 a month for a married couple. If they get SSI, they are also likely to get Medicaid from the state. If, however, the person does not receive SSI, and the person has children under 18, they are eligible for cash assistance, possibly a monthly payment (variable by state) and Medicaid. They are also eligible for refugee resettlement assistance that are designed to help migrants work toward self sufficiency . Childless females, single males, and couples who meet the requirements for programs but not otherwise eligible, can still qualify for other programs, including medical assistance. And there are other state programs that are separate from federal ones.

An interesting question is whether, with the cutbacks of services by the Federal and state governments, the preferential benefits given to Cubans will continue in the future. We know there is a tremendous outcry over illegal immigrants who are not getting the benefits Cubans get, and there is sure to eventually be questions asked as to why benefits that are being reduced or taken away for U.S. citizens would still be given to Cubans who are not even citizens. Some 4,000 Cubans, for example, receive disability payments and are not citizens, and cannot speak English.

More:
http://politicalanalysis2011.blogspot.com/

[Judi Lynn]

4. Fake Cubans hoping for fast track to citizenship now under scrutiny

Fake Cubans hoping for fast track to citizenship now under scrutiny
By Kim Segal and Sara Ganim, CNN
updated 9:30 PM EDT, Fri August 2, 2013

Miami (CNN) -- All Luis had to do was hand a Cuban birth certificate to immigration officials and he was on his way to becoming a U.S. citizen.

"I started to receive my work permission, I went to the DMV, got my driver's license, I get my Social Security and that was it," he said.

Those are the privileges afforded to Cubans who flee the Castro regime and make it to the United States to seek asylum.

~snip~

Anatomy of a fraud

The scam starts with the purchase of a Cuban birth certificate for between $10,000 and $20,000, she said.

Birth certificates are not yet computerized in Cuba -- they're torn from a book and the information is filled out by hand before being logged into a register. "The documents that they are presenting in some cases are actual Cuban birth certificates which are smuggled into the country blank, and then filled in with fictitious information here," Erichs said.

And while the documents are easily falsified, the benefits they can bring are real.

"There's little doubt that Cubans are treated better than any other group," said Cheryl Little, executive director of Americans for Immigrant Justice. "And that's been the case for decades."

Since the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, Cubans automatically gain refugee status upon arriving in the country and are put on a fast track to naturalization. The minute Cubans set foot on U.S. soil they don't need to worry about being deported, unlike migrants or even asylum-seekers from other countries. They receive a green card after being in the United States for a year and a day -- a much shorter time than faced by other legal immigrants.

More:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/02/us/cuba-immigration-fraud/