Border Blues: They keep coming and coming, and citizens are at wits' end - undocumented workers

National Review, March 11, 2002 by John J. Miller

'You want to hear about my worst day on the ranch?" asks Ruth Evelyn Cowan. "I lost 10,000 gallons of water because some Mexican broke a valve off one of my tanks trying to get a drink. Another one left a gate open and four of my cattle wandered ten miles away. They're worth about $2,500 apiece and we had to spend hours finding them. And then someone else drove a truck across my land and knocked over a fence in two places." She pauses, exasperated. "All that happened in just 24 hours. But you know what? We have to deal with problems like these every day, and it's been going on for years."

That's life in Arizona's Cochise County, where Cowan believes that she's spent $50,000 undoing the damage done to her property by illegal aliens since 1999. And that figure doesn't include her biggest expense: the enormous amount of time she and her employees have put into the repairs, from fixing cut fences to picking up all the trash left behind by thousands of people streaming across her ranchland.

Cowan knew the ranching life would be difficult when she quit her job as an airline stewardess to take up the family business. But she had no idea how hard, or that something other than drought or low prices would cause so much of the hardship. She was looking forward to rural life in southeastern Arizona. Instead, she found herself living in what fellow rancher Gary McBride calls "the illegal-alien capital of the world."

Nobody knows how many people sneak across the Mexican border into Cochise County; recent estimates put the number between 500,000 and 1.5 million annually. Little towns like Douglas and Naco are now main thoroughfares for people determined to enter the United States without green cards. Their migration has wreaked havoc on not just Cowan's land, but the whole region. Ranchers fight a daily battle against property destruction. The sheriff's office struggles to plug holes left unfilled by the federal Border Patrol. Local hospitals cut services to keep from going broke. And nobody who doesn't live there seems to know -- or care -- about what's going on.

There's nothing especially new about illegal immigration in Cochise County, a dry landscape of scrubland and mountains where Geronimo and the Apaches made their last stand against the U.S. Army at the end of the 19th century. Mexicans have crossed over for generations. But the flow was only a trickle until recently, when the federal government made a conscious decision to let the trickle become a flood. Ever since, the people of Cochise County have drowned in a problem not of their own making.

The Census Bureau estimates that 8 million illegal aliens were living permanently in the U.S. in 2000, up from 3.5 million ten years earlier. As the public clamored for the government to do something about this rising tide during the 1990s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service made a fateful decision for the residents of Cochise County. It chose to increase the Border Patrol's presence at El Paso and San Diego, two popular points of entry, and also to experiment with new enforcement techniques. The strategy worked wonders -- at least for El Paso and San Diego, where illegal immigration fell noticeably; but a balloon that's squeezed in one place expands in another, and the INS essentially succeeded merely in pushing the crossings away from these areas. Illegal immigration didn't really decline at all. Instead, Cochise County became a favorite corridor to El Norte.

One of the channels was the backyard of Cindy Hayostek, in the border town of Douglas. A year ago, she spent a few mornings counting the illegal aliens who jumped her fence. "I figure that 4,000 people were doing it over the course of 12 months," she says. "And that's probably a low estimate."

Hayostek is lucky -- she has only a backyard to worry about, and the local Border Patrol agents have made an effort to keep the aliens from overrunning townies like her. (She says fewer are coming now.) The ranchers who live outside Douglas, however, own thousands of acres of land. It's a vast and empty region -- Cochise County is bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, but only 120,000 people live there -- and a tempting one to disappear into. The aliens generally cross the border in small groups of fewer than a dozen, though sometimes their numbers can swell. They're often guided by professional smugglers called "coyotes," who are skilled at evading the Border Patrol. On a February night, I went out with the Border Patrol and saw agents apprehend a group of 116 illegal aliens between Douglas and Bisbee, about a quarter-mile from the border. One of the men was a sheet-metal worker trying to get back to his job in Los Angeles. Others were bound for Atlanta and New York.

It's impossible not to feel sympathy for these foreigners. After all, they come to the U.S. primarily for jobs -- better ones than they can find at home, and ones that American employers are glad to give them. The federal government isn't especially serious about keeping them out, either. "The aliens face a danger zone that's maybe 20 or 25 miles deep," says Dave Stoddard, a retired Border Patrol agent with extensive experience in Cochise County. "Once they escape it, they're home free. Nobody is going to catch them." By some estimates, the Border Patrol nabs only one of every four or five crossers. Those who are caught go back to their home countries. For the majority this is Mexico, and most of them are just dumped back across the border into Sonora, where they're free to cross again. Anybody who really wants to make it into the U.S. is going to succeed, even if it takes a few tries.