Rebecca Clarren

I have a white bandana that I carry around with me. It’s thin cotton; it offers the smallest of comfort when I cry or sneeze or spill something. However for thousands of immigrant women who weed, prune and harvest fruits and vegetables throughout the West, bandanas such as mine are their singular shield from sun, pesticides and a more formidable threat: sexual assault and harassment from their coworker or boss.

Patricia Zavella, a professor of Latina American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz revealed in a 2003 journal article that bandanas and baggy clothes help women to mask their beauty and figures. Yet very often, these shields aren’t sufficient. I report in High Country News this week [Plowing Under the Fields of Shame] that sexual abuse and harassment of farm worker women is a serious problem.

The abuse - and dismissal - of immigrant women who work in agriculture is epidemic. In a 1997 study, 90 percent of female farmworkers in California reported sexual harassment as a major problem. Ten years later, those who work with farmworkers say that abuse - which ranges from obscene jokes and sexual innuendo to inappropriate rubbing, pinching and even rape - affects thousands of women. Workers in Salinas, Calif., refer to one company as the field de calzon, or “field of panties,” because so many supervisors rape women there. In several recent cases brought before federal court in California, women who resisted advances were fired or suspended without pay.

(Read on …)

Felice Pace

Few in the West are unaware that the federal crackdown on immigration has had an impact on western industries. The March 3rd edition of HCN, for example, included this comment on the situation from Bill Crooke’s essay for Writers on the Range:“There are upsides to the employment crunch (in Cody, Wyo.): It’s harder to get fired, and the increasingly desperate business community has to keep raising wages and incentives.”

Crooke may have been thinking more about the energy boom, but the loss of immigrant labor is affecting wages and employment not just in Wyoming but throughout the West. Even Silicon Valley is feeling the pinch. But the largest impacts are on low wage service industries and agriculture. From California to Colorado and Arizona to Idaho growers are wondering who will pick the fruit, prune the vines and hoe the weeds while motel owners wonder who will clean the rooms and restaurateurs are in search of cooks and dish washers. .

Another western industry which has “suffered” as a result of the immigration crackdown is the ski industry.

(Read on …)

Rebecca Clarren

Yesterday Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced he will waive the environmental review required by 36 federal laws in order to speed construction of an 18-foot high fence along the Mexico border. The two waivers cover 470 miles of the border from California to Texas, plus a separate 22-mile span in a Texas wildlife refuge. The fence, to now be completed by the end of this year, will block illegal border crossers that travel by foot and car. The department has already built 309 miles of fence. As reported today by the New York Times,

Previously, Mr. Chertoff had used his waiver authority three times to overcome environmental hurdles along limited segments of the border in San Diego and Arizona. But as the department strives to meet a deadline of year’s end for nearly 700 miles of fencing, he has now greatly expanded the use of his waiver authority, which was granted by Congress as part of the “Real ID Act.”

“We value the need for public input on any potential impact of our border infrastructure plans on the environment,” said Chertoff in a prepared statement, “and we will continue to solicit it.”

It’ll be a little late for solicitation after we power the bulldozers, build a concrete wall, and install extra cameras, towers and roads. Such actions conducted with no environmental review or public process is shortsighted and arrogant. (Read on …)

Francisco Tharp

When I was a kid, Saint Patrick’s Day meant searching out and pinching the green-less, followed by going to the local Catholic school with my parents to eat corned beef and cabbage. Throughout college I found new false idols: a shot of whiskey and Bailey’s dropped into a Guinness, cheap green Budweiser, and glittery “Kiss Me” shamrocks.

Yesterday, however, I did little more to celebrate the Americanized holiday than wear a green plaid shirt to work (for fear of being pinched), and say things like “Ay, luck o’ th’ Irish to ye’!” (and I probably sounded more like a Hollywood pirate than an Irishman). But throughout the day I did get to wondering–myths and false idols aside–what’s Irish about the West?

Many of the West’s mining towns–like Leadville, Colorado, for example–have a rich Irish heritage as copper miners from Ireland’s County Cork crossed the Atlantic looking for places where a working class could put down roots. But Butte, Montana, a place some call “Ireland’s fifth province” or “The Ireland of the West,” probably saw the greatest number of Irish immigrants west of the Mississippi. The gold, silver and copper mines that have culminated in the nation’s burliest superfund site attracted Irish settlers by the thousands. Yesterday, folks in Butte went all out at their annual Saint Patty’s Day parade (click the Montana Standard’s video link for footage).

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This is a notable combination of two great writers:

Leo Banks, a freelance journalist in Tucson, has tracked down J.P.S. Brown, a 77-year-old border novelist who’s as tough as they come.

Leo, an old friend of mine, writes:

If you ask Brown who he is, he’ll say “cowboy.” He won’t say reporter, Marine, boxer, movie wrangler, stuntman or whiskey smuggler, and he’s been all those things.

If he says writer at all, it won’t be first on the list. But he’s a great writer, probably the best you’ve never heard of.

“People who know literature, and know the Southwest, mention his name right away,” says Bruce Dinges, director of publications at the Arizona Historical Society. “Joe’s the real deal. He’s done what he writes about, and his family has done it for generations. It’s personal to him. He doesn’t write to a market. He writes what’s in him.”

Summation: J.P.S. Brown has had five wives, years in the Mexican Sierra, smuggling escapades, a small plane crash, a poisoning by one wife, heart attacks, a Hollywood movie based on one of his novels — and he’s still writing what he sees.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo wants to ride a single issue — immigration — into the presidency. Now his far-right Republican campaign has a new TV ad that shows a bad guy in a hooded sweatshirt leaving a bomb in a shopping mall.

To watch the ad video, go here.

In the LA Times story, critics call the ad shameless “fear-mongering.”

The ad’s message is: Only Tancredo can protect us.

The question here is: Who’ll protect us from Tancredo?

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

If Colorado — maybe even the nation — has a flashpoint for the immigration debate, it’s got to be Greeley, up in the northern part of the state. Last year, before the national immigrant movement took to the streets in demonstrations, Greeley was launching its own movement, protesting efforts by the Weld County District Attorney, Ken Buck, to get an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement office in the town. Buck made a connection between escalating gang activity and illegal immigration, and said the ICE office was necessary to help his office deal with the problem. Though the ICE office is on its way, he’s still making his case in forums that have really riled up much of the community. Buck’s efforts are hardly unusual in communities across the nation these days; seems like everywhere you look (except on the national scale), new laws are being passed (and then rescinded) to deal with the pressures of immigration.

But there’s something about Greeley that gives the debate there extra vitality, if you will.

(Read on …)

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Today’s New York Times article about more and more people fleeing the cities for the resort towns of the West, and then telecommuting from there, offered few surprises. Most of us who live in the rural West have watched this phenomenon take root and then grow over the years. The Times’ John Leland sums it up:

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — Time was you could tell the urban refugees in places like this: corporate achievers who quit the rat race to open a bed and breakfast or a candle shoppe.

Jim Moylan represents a new tribe in this bucolic mountain town, named for its loud sulfur spring. Mr. Moylan, 59, is a lawyer who specializes in securities and commodities work. When he moved from Chicago in 2003, he did not downscale his career for the small town, keeping his secretary and associates in Chicago and his clients around the country. He conducts his practice by fax and e-mail, just as he did in Chicago.

As a multi-generational native of the rural West myself, I am ambivalent about this sort of thing that technology, mostly the Internet, has made possible. It’s liberating to know that most of us — at least those of us who work mostly from a desk, in front of a computer — can work from wherever we please, as long as there’s a high speed Internet connection and cell phone reception. It increases our mobility, which, whether we like it or not, is part of American culture.

(Read on …)

Microsoft is looking for a few hundred more software geniuses to staff its new development center. The new office will be close to its Redmond headquarters, but not too close: it will be opening in Vancouver, B.C., and Microsoft cites tough U.S. immigration laws as the reason. The company says the kind of talent it needs is in short supply in North America, and it wants to attract highly-trained workers from all over the world, including folks trained at U.S. universities who are unable to legally work here. Although skilled workers can qualify for H1-B visas, there are only so many of those visas available, and according to the L.A. Times:

The demand for H-1B visas for high-skilled immigrants has become so much greater than the supply that almost twice as many applications arrived in a single day as there were slots available for the year — 65,000, plus 20,000 for those with advanced degrees from U.S. schools.

Meanwhile, Canada’s borders are wide open to skilled workers, particularly those in the tech industry. Microsoft says this, plus Vancouver’s position as a “global gateway,” is its reason for moving north.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson begins the story:

It’s late June, temperatures have reached triple digits and once again, government and nongovernment agencies have launched into the grim summer routine of prevention and rescue efforts aimed at saving the lives of illegal entrants crossing Arizona’s deadly desert.

Since 2000, when border deaths spiked to alarming levels, taking officials by surprise, much has been done to warn people of the risk and to rescue those who try anyway. But, despite the extensive efforts, the number of bodies found each year reveals a harsh truth — none of it is working.

More than 1,000 bodies have been recovered since 2000 in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. The deadly toll has topped 130 bodies a year since 2002. Officials found nine bodies in the past 10 days, bringing this year’s total to 105 so far.

Worse yet, there are likely more out there yet to be found.

Amid the wreckage, many admirable people can be found in the story, beginning with those whom we consider illegals: so hungry for jobs, they leave home in Latin America and risk everything.

Sympathetic Border Patrol agents, and “Grupo Beta, Mexico’s special migrant protection force,” try to keep the desperate hikers alive in the lethal desert, according to the Star’s writer, Brady McCombs. So do volunteers, organized in two groups calling themselves Humane Border and No More Deaths:

(Read on …)

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

For a clear-eyed look at the issues surrounding illegal immigration, check out Immigration in Context: A Resource Guide for Utah. A group of honors students at the University of Utah spent more than a year researching and writing this impartial 87-page guide. To add a human dimension, they lived with families in Michoacan, Mexico for 11 days (for more immigrant tales, see “The Immigrant’s Trail” and related stories).

The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Eric Peterson, a 24-year-old U. senior and Utah native, said sometimes Americans are intimidated by immigrants and make decisions on immigration based on stereotypes, such as the notion that immigrants don’t want to adapt to their new communities.”Both sides suffer from not being educated enough about immigration,” he said. “We wanted to resolve some myths and provide some facts.”

The report covers the history of immigrant legislation, the economic impact of immigrants, and the influence of media portrayals on public opinion, then delves into practical resources. Chapter four lays out the “difficult legal process required for an immigrant, both documented and undocumented, to attain residency.” Later chapters examine racial and immigration rhetoric, provide scenarios for discussion, and list resources for immigrants and those who help them.

Regardless of where you come down in the debate over immigration, you’ll be better informed after reading this guide.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

In the 1980s, a Presbyterian minister in Tucson, Rev. John Fife, and a few other religious leaders founded the Sanctuary Movement — smuggling refugees from Central America across the border and helping them start new lives in this country. Those refugees were often fleeing death squads, but U.S. authorities cracked down on the movement anyway, dragging Fife and others into court on criminal charges.

We haven’t heard much about the movement since then — if it’s been operating, it’s been quiet.

But now churches in five major cities have announced, they’re launching a New Sanctuary Movement. They have humanitarian goals, and it’s another rebellion against our nation’s heavy-handed, blundering, in-total-denial immigration policy. They say they have churches in more than 50 cities ready to participate. The AP story is worth a read.

Since the immigration crisis and the numbers of players have only grown, this Sanctuary go-round could be even more compelling than the last.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

This time of year can be especially beautiful down in the Sonoran Desert along the U.S. - Mexico border. The cactus are in bloom, streams sparkle in lush canyons where birds sing jungle melodies and the long scarlet fingers of the ocotillo in bloom seem to have been dipped in blood.

But there’s quite a bit of real blood out there, too. So writes Michael Marizco in a rather long feature in the most recent Tucson Weekly.

Goat has blogged on some of the killings already, when migrants were ambushed by murderous thugs and bandits. Marizco shows us that these weren’t just isolated events, but rather part of a pattern of violence and murder aimed towards migrants, cops and journalists and breaking out between drug traffickers. An anonymous source tells Marizco:

“The closer you get to the border, two things occur: The border is actually erased and becomes a new territory, and mass chaos exists. This is the primary reason that today’s trafficking has changed from storing or staging at the border. Instead, it makes its trek north and is immediately crossed, causing problems on our side.”

That seems to sum it up pretty well. Marizco also wrote about the border for High Country News last spring. Read those articles here and here.