The dying time has begun in southern Arizona’s borderlands
by Hugh Holub on Jun. 17, 2011, under border issues, immigration law reform, politicsEvery summer when the heat soars over 100 degrees in southern Arizona’s deserts the news is the same….”two dead bodies discovered’….”three dead bodies discovered”.
Last summer 59 bodies were discovered in southern Arizona just in the month of July.
It is estimated that two or three hundred people a year die in southern Arizona while trying to illegally enter the United States. We really don’t know because many bodies are never found.
Why are they dying out there?
The main reason is they are trying to illegally enter the United States and are totally unprepared for what they face…30…40…sometimes 75 miles of walking through heat blasted country.
The story is the same for many of us who live near the border and travel around in the back country…we run across illegal aliens in distress and provide them water and first aid and call the Border Patrol.
The Samaritan Patrol sends people out into the deserts with water and first aid to rescue illegal aliens in distress.
The Border Patrol rescues hundreds of illegal aliens every summer as well.
And every year folks go missing in the desert and family members start posting pictures all over the area. Have you seen Maria?
One of the border aid workers found a discarded backpack with personal identification papers of one missing illegal aliens. We know she got as far as Tubac…but vanished between here and wherever she was going. Another body waiting to be found.
Why people risk their lives for minimum wage jobs in the US is a mystery to many. But talking to the folks we all find out in the desert the stories are pretty much the same. There is no hope back in the home village where they came from and they had to go on the migrant trial or starve.
My guess is virtually all of them would much prefer a legal path into the US…but it can take years for people to get a worker visa. The folks who take to the migrant trails can’t wait years for their applications to be processed.
Two solutions to this annual wave of death are obvious:
–secure the border at the border; and
–create a legal path for workers to come to the United States.
The first solution is being stymied by federal land managers and environmentalists who prefer to protect wildlife near the border than people.
GAO confirms federal environmental laws and federal land managers hinder securing our border
The second solution is being stymied by those who refuse to recognize that there are a lot of jobs in this country Americans simply won’t do…thus there is opportunity for illegal aliens to feed their families by coming here illegally.
If we cannot bring workers through our ports of entry above-ground…they will risk death to get here anyway.
And we cannot stop them from entering illegally if wildlife preserves and national forest lands are exempted from a full court press on securing the border at the border.
Maybe the environmentalists and federal land managers who thwart the Border Patrol need to be given copies of pictures of every dead illegal alien found in our borderlands this summer.
And maybe those who reuse to addres the need for a guest worker visa program ought to spend a day picking produce in the Imperial Valley in July.
Or even better…come to the scene when a body is found.
Maybe that body will be Maria’s.
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June 17th, 2011 on 3:58 pm
Ray-
The dying time has already started in the borderlands. It started with the destruction of the Chiricahuas by our friendly neighbors to the south, and has continued throughout this incredibly beautiful land of SE Arizona. The sky Islands of SE Arizona are the first death.
June 17th, 2011 on 11:53 pm
Oh, whatever! Did you even read his essay? Of course not because you’re stuck in your ideology.
If migrant workers could easily come here legally we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But it takes about a decade (yes, 10 years) to get a visa to come north to work, even though employers are dying to have the help.
It wasn’t undocumented immigrants that started the Wallow fire, and you can’t prove the fires in the Chiricauhuas were started by immigrants either.
June 18th, 2011 on 1:13 am
Funny thing though, if you ever hear a lot of farmers talk (admittedly not all of them, but many) they complain about the higher cost of legal crews. Many prefer illegal workers because they will work for less and suffer poor living conditions more than legal workers and legal crews. My family are farmers, but I won’t wring my hands for most farmers these days. A lot of them don’t want legal workers that can’t be threatened or underpaid; they want slaves.
So then the average voter is left in a no-man’s land between the racially motivated marxists/anarchists like those who headline this site on other blogs, and the liars like Jim Click and George Bush who just want to flood the job market and make it a race to the bottom with American wages and benefits. The remedy has to start somewhere. I say it starts with a secure border and no illegal entrants. We can build from there.
June 18th, 2011 on 7:13 am
A couple points:
The unions also line up with keeping the status quo; putting themselves on the side of Bush’s cronies.
Anarchists, these days, are on the right-wing of politics.
June 18th, 2011 on 7:28 am
“I say it starts with a secure border and no illegal entrants.”
Might as well say it starts with the Pied Piper leading all the undocumented migrants out of Hamelin. Both are equally likely.
June 18th, 2011 on 9:00 pm
Not really, but your sarcasm shows your sympathy with the racially motivated hard left.
June 18th, 2011 on 10:07 pm
Interesting logic. Sarcasm for lefties; the USMC for the dreamers.
June 19th, 2011 on 12:45 am
You must never have been loved as a child. So much hate. Is that where the “Liberal Guilt” comes from? Or is that the well-spring from whence flows your anti-establishment angst?
June 19th, 2011 on 6:30 am
Is that where the “Liberal Guilt” comes from?
Not being a liberal, I wouldn’t know.
June 18th, 2011 on 7:44 am
Phineas, I totally agree with you and Mr Holub. I wish we could change things.
June 18th, 2011 on 8:42 pm
All of these whiners who cry, “We need to create a pathway for legal workers to come here” are totally ignorant of our immigration laws that provide for almost unlimited work visas for foreign workers in the so-called “jobs that Americans won’t do” labor market. There are already 12 or more guest worker programs functioning at the current time that allow for over 1 million work visas for agricultural workers. The problem lies with the businesses that hire them. They are required to pay mandated minimum wages and other benefits, which they don’t want to do. They’d rather hire illegals at a much cheaper rate.
As far as those “ecological environmentalists” that whine about how the Border Patrol might “deface” our national parklands along the borders. I suggest that they get together and come down and clean up the 20 million pounds of crap and trash that illegal aliens leave in our pristine border areas\; not to mention the damage to scarce water sources, broken fences, slaughtered cattle, destroyed water wells and tanks. Illegal aliens trash our border areas far more than the Border Patrol could possibly do by driving along our borders.
July 14th, 2011 on 7:41 am
The ‘jobs that Americans won’t do” is a smoke screen. It should read “jobs that Americans won’t do for slave wages”. Hiring illegals is just a disguised version of slavery. Didn’t we abolish that?
July 22nd, 2011 on 8:19 am
Tony in MO
Where do you get your numbers? some one has gone out in the desert and pristine border areas and weighed the trash, or you just pick numbers from your head.
I would dare say you have never been out there.
No one would damage anything if they were stoped AT the border get the BP with guards stationed within sight of each other along the border and fast response teams for back up, too simple