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Me and La Migra

I am carrying through here on my prior post about the Wong family by making visits on Xmas and New Year’s to their rented beach front manse (for one third of San Diego rents) in Rosarita Beach.
[additional-authors]
January 29, 2015

I am carrying through here on my prior post about the Wong family by making visits on Xmas and New Year’s to their rented beach front manse (for one third of San Diego rents) in Rosarita Beach.

I found Northern Mexico rugged but beautiful, the people friendly to a fault.  I ate at a “nouvelle cuisine” restaurant named “Mi Casa Supper Club”  as good as any I’ve eaten at in Southern California, and we bought fish at a beachfront, pelican-populated market in Ensenada that has all the local color of John Steinbeck’s novels.

Yet Mexico is a society desperately in need of infrastructure investment. Maybe it’s the provincial American in me, but I could not help thinking what a few hundred billion in American—and European and Asian—capital investment could do if politics did not get in the way.

The worst of my experience was with “La Migra”—the U.S. border patrol. As best as I can understand it, we have for American citizens returning by car from Mexico, a three-tier system: one expedited lane for those holding a “passport lite” border document, one for returnees with a valid driver’s license or birth certificate, and one with some sort of special medical status. It’s very easy to get confused trying to find the correct lane.

That you have this special “border passport” is apparently a Border Patrol preference, but not an official legal requirement. We know this because many if not most Americans return with just a driver’s license, and are not hassled—unless the border agent is suspicious or in a bad mood.

On my most recent trip with my friend, Chris, driving me back to San Diego, we were sidelined for almost two hours for reasons we can only surmise: because Chris told the truth that he was born in the UK (on an American military based where his father was service as an Air Force medic), or because I only showed a California driver’s license, or because the agent did not like the look of us: Chris is a blend of Chinese and Latino, and I told the agent bluntly that I was born in the Bronx, three blocks from the old Yankee Stadium.

The experience at the interrogation center was like a combination of Kafka and the Keystone Cops. When Chris asked whether we would be given a number and treated in a logical order, he got back from an agent a sarcastic: “Welcome to the real world.”

To the contrary, La Migra seems to be the fantasy land police. The agents mill around endlessly, joking about who took the longest lunch break, and posing for selfies. The idea that these demoralized petty functionaries  could arrest a real world terrorist is beyond laughable.

After a desultory inspection, we were allowed to return to “the promised land.” Fortunately for all concerned, my spastic colon did not erupt, nor did my New York Jewish temper which might have landed me in jail, possibly in a hospital ward.

For many years, I’ve favored a well-paid and well-treated border agents strictly enforcing border security, coupled with a liberal immigration policy. Now, I’m tending towards a libertarian-anarchist position. With neither party in D.C. apparently serious about comprehensive immigration reform, let’s put out of its misery by abolishing it. Homeland Security’s worse-than-useless INS. 

The cantankerous California writer Ambrose Bierce crossed into Mexico at the time of the 1910 Revolution, and was never seen again. Probably his way of saying adieu to the human race. I’m not that misanthropic, but won’t revisit Mexico until La Migra cleans up its act. Unfortunately, that happening is a fantasy.

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