6,000 people died crossing US-Mexico border: rights group

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Agence France-Presse

Latest Update: Thursday 1/10/2009 (October 1)
October, 2009, 12:02 AM Doha Time

6,000 people died crossing US-Mexico border: rights group
AFP/Washington

More than 6,000 people were killed trying to cross the US-Mexican border illegally in the past 15 years, the American Civil Liberties Union said yesterday.

The ACLU urged the North American neighbours to declare a humanitarian crisis in the area, protect human lives and change policies that have led to an increase in the number of people who die trying to make the illegal move.

“The current policies in place on both sides of the US-Mexico border have created a humanitarian crisis that has led to the deaths of more than 5,000 people,” said Kevin Keenan, Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego.

“Because of deadly practices and policies like Operation Gatekeeper, the death toll continues to rise unabated despite the decrease in unauthorised crossings due to economic factors,” he added.

The ACLU data were from the Mexican foreign ministry. It says 6,607 people died trying to cross the border since 1994. US Homeland Security officials have put the figure at 3,861.



Read more: http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no...

[XemaSab]

1. What is the suggested solution?

[DissedByBush]

7. I have a 100% solution

Quit trying to cross the border illegally.

A lot of people every year get killed doing stupid and illegal things. My sympathy level is generally not too high for them.

[Ter]

8. Not to cross illegally?

[proteus_lives]

31. 2 parts.

We need to crack down on businesses who employ illegals and beef up the border patrol.

It would also be nice if the Mexican government could pick up the slack on their side of border. (I know, when pigs fly.)

[madokie]

40. I suggest we start making an effort to purchase items made in the Americas

north and south rather than from china for starters. If we promote purchasing south american products the number of jobs there will have to increase and with that there would be fewer people feeling they have to cross the border to find work.

[TankLV]

63. Stop trying to cross ILLEGALLY?!!!

Stop trying to CROSS!!!

It's really quite simple...

[AlphaCentauri]

66. Yeah!!!!! blame the poor

by the way has anyone considered stop eating vegetables that are not picked by Americans?

[EFerrari]

69. That's right, you idiots. Just stay home and STARVE to death legally.

The nerve of some people, wanting to survive.

[virgogal]

2. And about 225,00 have died in alcohol related accidents in the same

time period.

Life is chancey,at best.

[JonQ]

3. Terrible news, let's solve that

crack down on employers here, and beef up the security on the border. Let's get that death toll down to zero.

[Stumbler]

4. Who cares? They're brown people...

Wake me up when the next blond girl goes missing for a couple of hours.

*sarcasm thru & thru*

[Orrex]

23. Nice post, Lou Dobbs

[Name removed]

5. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[subsuelo]

9. so much ignorance regarding the conditions that created this crisis n/t

[Kali]

15. I hate reading these threads on a somewhat progressive website.

lot of ignorant, probably racist, selfish, "I got mine" quasi-puke attitudes when it comes to the southern border.

[XemaSab]

17. I like Hispanic people

but there is no easy solution here.

[Orrex]

25. One partial solution would be to punish the companies that illegally employ them

Every now and then you hear about a company getting raided and 30 or 40 Mexicans being forcibly repatriated, while the company suffers a $1000 fine or something similar. In other words, a relative pittance.

Companies that knowingly employ* immigrants in violation of labor laws should face extraordinarily harsh repercussions, with repeated violations resulting in, say, the arrest of whoever hired them illegally.

* By "knowingly employ" I mean "to employ a person without performing reasonable due diligence to confirm that the person is indeed eligible for employment."

[EFerrari]

26. There is a good one and it starts with "repeal" and ends with "NAFTA".

[Gormy Cuss]

48. +1

The "illegals problem" would disappear if Latinos could earn a living at home.

[EFerrari]

28. That's a pretty kind assessment. n/t

[AlphaCentauri]

67. It's hard to distinguish between "progressives" and freepers when the topic is latino immigrants

same arguments, same goals, repulsive of course

[reorg]

10. wow, that's 60 times the number of those who died trying to cross the GDR-FRG border

between 1961 and 1989, including accidents.

Which has always been considered one of the more, if not the MOST atrocious crime by the regime of the former GDR.

[prostomulgus]

11. Open the border ... that's the only humane solution.

US oil corporations have been raping the Mexican environment for decades leaving it shattered and incapable of supporting a modern economy. US manufacturing corporations have driven down wages to pennies/hour. US drug laws have sparked a civil war between the Mexican government and drug cartels resulting in thousands of innocents being murdered. After all of the destruction that this country has brought to Mexico, we should let into the country any Mexican who wants to come work and live in the US.

If this really is a free country, people should be able to leave OR come in freely.

[MellowDem]

12. Bullshit...

Complete and utter bullshit. If you want a real humanitarian crisis, open the border. See what happens when corporations suddenly have a large and cheap labor pool that it doesn't have to treat like human beings. It's already happening on a smaller scale here

The reason Mexico has the problems it does is because of fucking Mexico. All your claims could be reversed to blame all the problems America has on Mexico. Indeed, some on the right already use this strategy. Mexican illegal immigrants have driven down wages to pennies an hour. Mexican drug laws and a corrupt government have allowed drugs to be funneled to the US from South America, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans. The Mexican government's own lax environmental laws are to blame for their environmental problems, and their poor environmental policy leaks over the border in many areas. After all the destruction that Mexico has brought to the US, they should let in any American who wants to come and work and live in Mexico.

If Mexico really is a free country, anyone in the world should be able to go there and fuck shit up.

[boppers]

22. "illegal immigrants have driven down wages to pennies an hour"

Really?

You make pennies an hour?

Or maybe that's just hyperbolic bullshit?

[WriteDown]

46. No...

The illegal immigrants make pennies an hour. Thus the effective wage to be employed at that kind of job is pennies an hour.

[MellowDem]

57. Just hyperbolic bullshit...

that was an obvious way of pointing out other hyperbolic bullshit.

[EFerrari]

38. Well, not they can't be reversed a la Fox News.

Mexico has never fixed an election here.

Mexico has never determined our economic, environmental or drug policy.

And Mexico already has to deal with hundreds of thousands of economic refugees our policies in Latin America and the Carribean create -- so that part of your wish is already true. People from all over the region do go there because as bad as it is, it's still better than Guatemala or Colombia or Peru.

[MellowDem]

58. Yeah yeah...

I mean, potentially you could blame anything on the US or vice versa. But I definitely could argue that Mexico has been a huge factor in determining our economic, environmental and drug policy. They have a big influence on our country.

[EFerrari]

59. You could blame anything on the US and I suppose people do that

all the time. However those influences on Mexico are very real and they're nowhere like reciprocal here. It's not a relationship of equals in any way.

[timo]

14. us oil? or pemex?

last I checked it was pemex!!

[pampango]

42. Opening borders with poor countries only works in Europe, don't you know.

When the EU admitted Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, it opened the borders of the 25 existing EU member countries to people who had a lower per capita income than Mexicans have.

It is interesting how the cultures and histories of the US and Europe affect how progressives feel about open borders. European progressives, who have been more successful in transforming their societies, see a long term benefit, in terms of shared peace and prosperity, in gradually and systematically expanding open borders and free trade to the countries that share their continent. With the US' history as a big country with abundant resources and relatively isolated from and immune to military and economic events in other countries, it is not too surprising that some American progressives tend to look at peace and prosperity as domestic issues that we can solve by ourselves if foreigners will just leave us alone.

In this view - keep the immigrants, particularly the undocumented ones, out. They all depress our wages, again particularly the undocumented ones, because they increase the supply of labor. (The benefits from immigration, in this view, are limited.) And slap tariffs on foreigners' goods. Trade cannot be fair with developing countries because they pay their workers too little nor with developed countries because they have national health care or better market regulation or better social safety nets which gives them an unfair advantage.

The result is that open borders with relatively poor countries is a European solution and not something you are ever going to see in the US. (If the EU had asked for advice from some American progressives, that advice would have been to build a wall between the EU and Bulgaria/Romania, then go after employers who hire those that sneak around that wall, and to slap substantial tariffs on imports from those countries since they pay their workers about the same wages that Mexican workers get.) For better or worse, European progressives have chosen to go a different route.

[TankLV]

64. I just knew some asshole would say that stupid shit...!!!

Congratulations!!!

[Flaneur]

13. Those Mexican emigrants are responding to macroeconomic forces.

Ross Perot once said that with NAFTA, that giant sucking sound you heard was jobs going south. But impoverished Mexicans are also being impelled by economic necessity and the logic of survival to head north.

I can understand people being unhappy with the slight downward pressure on wages because of Mexican immigration, but some of the responses on these threads are downright cruel and churlish. These are people who risked arrest, deportation, or dying in the desert for a chance to get to the US. They're not doing that on a whim.

[Kali]

16. thankyou

I shouldn't have clicked on this thread. So many buying the corporate/repuke bullshit is depressing.

Crazy how those damn Mexicans are causing all of our problems innit?

[Fleshdancer]

19. I agree

Post a thread about 6,000 <insert your favorite animal here> and the responses would be far more humane than what I see on this thread. It makes me wonder what brings people to a place called "democratic underground" in the first place.

[EFerrari]

29. DU has a contingent of posters that always take the wingers' view on anything to do with

Latin America. It's really quite appalling.

Forget that our State Department openly supports the oligarchy in Mexico and that come election time, we'll send a team down there to make sure they win.

Forget NAFTA throwing thousands of people out of work in the ag sector and globalization in general taking even more jobs out in a range of industries. Forget that most of these people don't want to leave home in the first place and certainly not to come up here to White Sheet Central where they're treated like shit in even shittier jobs.

Forget they get ripped off just to get here and then because they're poor, paperless and vulnerable, they have to pay more for everything from milk to medical care.

Forget that they have to live in a state of constant vigilance and every day risk being picked up with no notice to their families sometimes for months and months.

We should just forget all of that and give Lou Dobbs his own forum here. And even then, they wouldn't be happy.

[boppers]

35. EFerrari, we've crossed swords a few times, and I agree, and disagree.

DU has lots of perspectives, but I'm glad you're here.

[EFerrari]

36. DU has helped alleviate my profound ignorance on many topics

but especially on Latin American issues. I appreciate that.

[boppers]

37. It's done the same for me on Latin America topics.

Viva DU!

[boppers]

18. One solution:

http://www.humaneborders.org /

Death by dehydration is horrible.

[Kali]

30. that is not a solution

it is a feeble bandaid (one that may save lives so I support it, but just a bandaid nonetheless)

[boppers]

32. Okay, maybe it's not a comprehensive solution.

Most of the folks involved, though, have links and knowledge into many other legal, and possibly illegal, solutions.

Keep in mind that the "Underground Railroad" to free slaves... was a crime.

Just like the systems to free fellow Americans, north and south, from their slavery, are often considered criminal.

[QC]

20. Maybe it's time to overthrow the Mexican oligarchy.

We seldom hear about their role in their country's misery.

[EFerrari]

27. Or how our government helps them steal elections from the reformers.

But if the posters to this thread want to bash economic refugees that their tax dollars help make, who am I to stand in the way of their considered cluelessness.

[marshall]

21. How were they killed?

Were they killed by border agents? Some kind of booby trap? Drug hits?

[boppers]

33. Most die of heat/dehydration.

Either walking in the desert, or crammed into a shipping container, the main killer is a lack of water, or a place to cool down.

[Romulox]

24. People who defend open borders and coddling of illegal employers share some blame. nt

[boppers]

34. How many american natives approved your, or your family's, immigration?

My parent's families came over without approval in 1764 (mother) and 1904 (father), never getting paperwork from the landowners.

How about you? Are you native, or an illegal immigrant?

[Romulox]

45. My ancestors can here much later than yours, and they had papers...

of indenture.

You aren't particularly disproving my original post, at any rate.

[WriteDown]

47. I'm a Native.....

Need help packing?

[boppers]

68. Perhaps.

Thanks for "getting it".

Dunno where I should move to, though.

[snot]

39. Consider the possibility

that the main purpose served by borders is to enable corps. to control migrations of labor, resources, and wealth -- that is, among other things, to keep us tied to certain lands like feudal serfs.

I don't believe able-bodied people should receive benefits they don't help pay for. But subject to that limitation, I believe humans have a fundamental right to travel and live wherever the heck we want to, and that the oligarchs benefit a heck of a lot more from the restrictions that prevent that than the rest of us do.

[Jamastiene]

41. This thread reads like the minutes of a KKK meeting...

Or the transcript of a Republican Party meeting.

[Kali]

43. hey!

long time no see

there are a few still trying to speak sense to the shitty attitude but yeah I think a lot just don't look at these threads anymore - too depressing to see the arrogance

[zonkers]

44. And I say its more.

[Romulox]

49. And yet DU's "activists" still decry workplace enforcement...

It's a mere coincedence that all of this "compassion" coincides so neatly with the interests of big corps, I'm sure.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[EFerrari]

50. "Workplace enforcement" isn't a solution to any of the underlying causes

and it doesn't work. It's cosmetic only and meant to make people believe something is being done.

Edit: It is, however, profitable for the prison industry and people like Darth Cheney.

[Romulox]

51. So...no borders, no OSHA, no FLSA, no child labor laws, no FDA oversight...

NONE of it works! Let's just leave our immigration and workplace safety policy to Agricorps!

[EFerrari]

53. You're putting words in my mouth and I already had breakfast.

[Romulox]

55. So define your position. You said workplace enforcement doesn't work, but...

I've never had an employer refuse to pay me overtime.

[Romulox]

52. PS: Don't you see how excusing the corporations that exploit people promotes exploitation?

[EFerrari]

54. I'm not excusing anything, only pointing out that dealing will

undocumented immigration at the work site is not a real solution.

I translated for workers who worked all month and were deported on pay day before the checks came out. No illusions here about how the corpo-fascists exploit these people or us, for that matter.

[Romulox]

56. It's hard to respond to this without knowing what you think WILL work.

If we cannot control who employers employ (including children, btw?), then how can we control the conditions under which they employ them?

[EFerrari]

60. Well, we really can't control those things very well, can we?

The solutions come at the policy level which means, it's paid for by the same corporations that you rightfully say exploit these workers (and us workers). That's how we got NAFTA and all the other FTAs that have wreaked havoc on countries like Mexico. That's how Mexico got its last elections stolen away from the reformer and for the guy that was up to his eyeballs in the corpo pocket.

We should have workplace enforcement but that will never work completely because the agencies that enforce that stuff are too easy to pay off, because some people make more money arresting workers when it's the employers who need arresting and so on.

We have to turn around our Latin America policy and I don't see that happening. It's too lucrative for a few people for things to be exactly the way they are now.

[defendandprotect]

61. "Humanitarian crisis" . . . certainly looks like it -- !!!

[defendandprotect]

62. k i c k

[SpartanDem]

65. So now the ACLU wants us to drive them across now?

Rather than blame who's responsible, those make whose the decision to cross ILLEGALLY and companies hiring illegal immigrant the ACLU would just rather have us turn a blind eye

[EndersDame]

70. Yeah They Are Only Illegals so it is OK if They Die a Horrible Death

[New Dawn]

71. Kick for truth.