Keep Them Out!

Abstract

Alejandra Díaz de León explores the relationship between violence and border enforcement against illegal immigration. In the years before the US Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, it was relatively easy for Mexican and central American migrants to cross into the United States without documentation. IRCA, however, greatly increased policing and restrictions on movement along the border. Those restrictions, in turn, pushed the flow of migration into more remote, desolate, and dangerous portions of the border. The result was a steep rise in the number of migrant deaths and greater vulnerability of the migrants to extortion, kidnapping, forced recruitment and other abuses in the hands of operatives of criminal organizations and agents of the border patrol. Migrants from Central America (who traverse Mexico on their way to the United States) have become even more vulnerable since the early 1990s, when the Mexican government began cooperating with the United States to halt these movements, subjecting Central Americans to similar problems and exploitation in both countries. As such, violence associated with the US-Mexico boundary spreads well beyond the border itself – reaching as far south as Mexico’s line with Guatemala.