Twenty-one
UCSD undergraduates journeyed south of the border last January
to learn firsthand what brings untold numbers of Mexican
migrants north. Led by professor Wayne Cornelius,
director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS),
the students were founding participants in the field research track
of a new interdisciplinary minor in International Migration Studies,
offered by CCIS and Eleanor Roosevelt College.
The research team interviewed more than 600 recently returned and
potential migrants in the states of Jalisco and Zacatecas and found
that beefed-up border enforcement is not a deterrent to illegal
migration. A majority reported they had succeeded in entering the
U.S. on their first or second try although 65 percent said evading
the Border Patrol was now “much more difficult,” and
23 percent had been apprehended on their most recent trip. A majority,
64 percent, knew of someone who had died crossing. Still, 46 percent
of those without papers planned to enter the U.S. in 2005 even
though the riskier crossing had driven up the fees of the smugglers,
known as coyotes.
Statistics don’t tell the whole story though, as the students
quickly discovered. Senior Anjanette Urdanivia, whose parents are
from Peru, says, “The people were no longer subject A or
subject B,
but Maria or Jose.”
Urdanivia was particularly struck by the story of one woman who
had crossed stuffed in a coyote’s car trunk with her pregnant
sister and worried that not only would the two women suffocate,
but the baby would too.
After the long days in the field in Mexico, the students returned
to San Diego, where they processed all the data, analyzed it and
then wrestled it into a book manuscript. That book, co-authored
by Cornelius, will be published by CCIS in the fall and distributed
by Lynne Reinner Publishers.
“The students are not just recycling someone else’s data,” says
Cornelius. “They are making an original contribution in
the field of migration studies and to
the public debate on these issues.”
A second cohort begins its yearlong commitment in the fall. Their
destination in January 2006 is a Maya-speaking town
in the Yucatan.
Field study: Marisol Gutierrez, ’05, interviews a migrant
in Mexico in January 2005. — Inga Kiderra
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