Tighter border, tougher to leave

PHOENIX — When Alejandro Severino crossed illegally into the United States in 1999, there was no going back.

As security tightened on the U.S. side of the border — new barriers were built and Border Patrol agents added — a return to central Mexico to visit his wife and child included the risk he might not get back to his job in Phoenix.

It made easier the difficult decision to have his family join him.

Because it is harder to crisscross the border, studies show that illegal immigrants who intend to stay in the United States for limited stretches may be bringing their families with them — to settle permanently.

Today, Severino and his wife own a four-bedroom ranch house in a suburb, where their son, Diego, 9, attends elementary school. Their story is typical.

"A hundred people come from Mexico to the U.S., but only 20 go from the U.S. to Mexico," Severino said. "If you return, the border is more dangerous now than ever. How will you get back?"

Surveys show that in 1992, 20 percent of illegal Mexican immigrants returned home after six months; in 2000, 7 percent did.

"The net effect of the militarization of the border since 1993 has been to transform a circular movement of male workers to a settled population of families," said Douglas Massey, a Princeton University sociologist. "Once they're here, they hunker down to stay longer."

Massey and other analysts said that if Congress tightens border security again, more illegal immigrants will put down roots in the United States.

"Every time we try to solve this problem, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot," said Dawn McClaren, an economist who studies immigration issues at Arizona State University.

Advocates of greater border security acknowledge it may cause some immigrants to stay in the United States. But they point to census data showing that for 30 years — well before the border was tightened — increasing numbers of people born in Mexico were settling in the United States.

Other factors, they contend, have been more important in pushing the number of illegal immigrants to the current level of 11 million to 12 million.

"Maybe we would have had 10 million" if security didn't cause some illegal crossers to stay in the United States, said Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which advocates tougher border enforcement. "But the run-up [in illegal immigrants] has more to do with a lack in border enforcement and a sense that America isn't serious about its laws."

Data on illegal immigrants are notoriously unreliable, since most don't want to advertise their presence. But several studies show that illegals are staying longer and suggest the increased difficulty in crossing the border is a factor.

The probability of Mexican migrants returning to their home country for any period started to dip after President Reagan signed an amnesty for illegal immigrants in 1986, according to data compiled by Massey and Mexican researchers. But it dropped again after 1993, when the U.S. government began fortifying the border in El Paso, Texas, and San Diego, the most popular points of illegal entry.

The fortification pushed illegal crossers into the deserts of the Southwest. The cost of a "coyote," or human smuggler, to take migrants into the United States has risen from $143 in 1993 to more than $2,000 today. Deaths during crossings soared to a record 460 people last year.

Meanwhile, the number of Mexican-born residents living in the United States jumped sharply after the border buildup began.

Felix Lopez's experience shows why. The Phoenix construction worker easily entered the United States illegally in 1995 but didn't go back to Mexico until his mother died last year. After a harrowing three-day crossing through the Arizona desert back into the United States — during which he said he heard "voices" of migrants who had died during earlier treks — he vowed never to return to Mexico.

"I'm not doing it again," Lopez said of the journey.

In Mexico, entire villages have emptied as women and children join fathers in the United States. Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, surveyed villages in Jalisco in 1995 and again last year. In the first survey, one village had 36 houses abandoned by families moving north; last year the number had grown to 138.