Misery on Both Sides of the Border

 ICE Raid in Los Angeles

The economy that drives financial survival in Mexico… is the United States. COVID-19 is decimating both sides of the border, but up here in gringo land, crowded Latinx communities, where families tend to do everything together, are experiencing infection and mortality rates at four to five times than experienced in white neighborhoods. At least here, we are rolling out what may, at first blush, seem to be a vaccine barrier to contain the pandemic. South of the border, access to vaccines is marginal at best. But COVID-19, which has apparently mutated over 4,000 times, is taking full advantage of nations that have been unable to stem the infectious tide.

In particular, there are four strains of the virus that have emerged with challenging issues. The UK variety is much more contagious and somewhat more deadly, but it does seem to respond to the existing vaccines. The California strain also does not seem to portend vaccine resistance. But both the South African and the Brazilian strains are not so containable. The UK’s AstraZeneca vaccine has been so ineffective against the South African strain that even South Africa has stopped using it. While the mRNA PfizerBiotech and Morderna vaccines might work, they are easily retooled to resist these variants (a process that, with some minimal testing, could be done in two months), those vaccines (like AstraZeneca) that are not based on the new mRNA approach require a much longer retooling. AstraZeneca would essentially be a new vaccine.

Unfortunately, failure in the United States to COVID-test and track its residents in sufficient numbers, which routinely has been done in Europe and the China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan corridor, makes identifying and targeting retooling much more difficult. Big issue, especially with a largely unvaccinated and unlikely to be vaccinated Latin America: The virus has a vast global playground to mutate. The catch is that until effective vaccines get out to virtually the entire world, this nasty pandemic cycle could simply start all over again. It is not just a mission of mercy for the United States to ship vaccines to poor nations; our very survival may hinge on that effort. The world is too interconnected to think we can allow large populations to exist without a vaccine. Herd immunity, particularly when there is significant toxic mutation, does not work that way.

I started this blog, which will ultimately focus on the nature of undocumented immigration into the United States, with medical realities. It is within these waves of roiling infection that the Biden administration is beginning to reverse Trump’s border policies, from DACA to potential naturalization for many of those additional undocumented residents. Do asylum applicants still have to wait in horrific conditions on the other side of the border? What do we do with the children in custody… when we cannot locate their parents? What happens in detention facilities? Where COVID has run rampant in so many facilities. And simply, do we even know how many undocumented aliens reside in the United States? The number I have always assumed is around 11 million, which just might be wildly inaccurate.

“A new study by Yale [School of Management’s Professor] Edward Kaplan and [PhD candidate] Scott Rodilitz, based on data from a long-running survey of migrants who have returned from the United States to Mexico, estimates that the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is 19.6 million, far exceeding widely accepted estimates. 

“The study draws on the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), which has surveyed communities in Mexico since 1982 (and annually since 1987), asking about the history of household members’ migration to and from the United States. MMP data alone cannot be used to directly estimate the number of immigrants in the United States, the authors say, because it is based on a ‘snapshot’ of the population living in Mexico at one point in time… 

“‘The MMP sampling creates a large bias in the data,’ Kaplan says. ‘The observed durations of time undocumented migrants in the samples spent in the United States will greatly underestimate the true lengths of stay taken over all undocumented border crossers, while the trip departure dates observed among those sampled in Mexico will be biased backwards in time relative to the true trip departure dates among all of the migrants.’

“Instead, Kaplan and Rodilitz use the data to create a probabilistic model of undocumented migration between Mexico and the United States, calculating the trip timing and duration most likely to lead to the results seen in the MMP survey.  ‘With a probability model of true migrant trip departure and sojourn time distributions, we can determine what the data in the MMP surveys would look like solely due to the physical constraints that must be satisfied for a migrant to be included in the survey,’ Rodilitz says. ‘This enables us to work backwards from the data and infer the true population flows.’…

“They conclude that from 1980 until 2005, when border security was tightened, most Mexican migrants traveled to the United States for shorter periods; since 2005, fewer have crossed the border but those who do stay longer. According to the model, the total number of immigrants currently in the United States who entered over the border is likely between 9.4 million and 19.8 million, with a ‘point estimate’—the most likely scenario—of 14.6 million. An additional 5 million immigrants are estimated to have overstayed a visa, leading to a total estimate of 19.6 million undocumented immigrants… The estimate is nearly double the frequently cited 2018 estimate of 10.7 million total undocumented immigrants by the Pew Research Center.” Yale Insights, January 13th. 

So many of our essential workers during this pandemic – in food production and processing to sanitation and secondary medical services – are culled from this mass of undocumented workers. Even in pre-pandemic times, there were jobs that could not be filled at any price by anyone other than these undocumented workers. Stoop labor farm labor. Work in slaughterhouses – where explosions of coronavirus infections were/are exceptionally common. Gravediggers. Sanitation and disposal services, particularly in hospitals. Caretakers in nursing homes. Home-based caretakers of those with medical issues or who are too old to care for themselves. 

And contrary to popular belief, those undocumented workers not only participate in the economy, from paying rent and buying food and clothing, they also pay a humongous level of taxes, even though many of them do not even qualify for Social Security benefits. According to the NewAmericanEconomy.org, undocumented workers paid $30.6 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2018 alone, $6.2 billion from DACA workers alone. 

What do you think this country looks like without those workers? I recall a 2004 motion picture, A Day without a Mexican, that provided a startling filmic answer to this question. But knowing that this country would virtually shut down without such workers, how do we provide reasonable border security without disrupting this reality? It is a complicated question, but if we are not to be hypocrites, one we must answer in light of reality, a world we have created for ourselves for well over half a century. There is a reasonable, bipartisan path that can be created without wasting money on a wall that is easily traversed. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and whether you approach these issues from a humanitarian perspective or crass selfishness, our current approach to immigration absolutely fails.