’It’s not the same’: How Trump and Covid devastated an Arizona border town | US news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/04/nogales-arizona-trump-border-wall-covid
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7192daa3bfdbb8f4d81a87f104c427f3dddd3e71/0_244_4000_2400/master/4000.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali
When Francis Glad was a child growing up in Nogales, Arizona, the US-Mexico border near her home was nothing like it is now. “It was more like a neighbor fence, like you have at your house,” she remembers. “It was very symbiotic. Just people coming back and forth.” But today, a towering 30ft border wall, made of dizzying steel bollards, slices through the Nogales sister cities. The economies of the two Nogaleses have always been intrinsically linked and mutually dependent on cross-border commerce, with residents from each side passing through to do their daily shopping or to visit with friends and family. Years ago, Glad’s mother ran a hotel in downtown Nogales, Arizona, which was almost always packed with businesspeople and tourists. But, she says, the bustle has stopped. In part, Glad blames the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and lies about the borderlands. “Outsiders believe that Nogales is a war zone,” she says, “with ‘murdering, rapist,’ undocumented [people] climbing the border wall like the zombies from World War Z, when it’s far from the truth.” More recently, Covid-19 restrictions on “nonessential” border crossings have turned downtown Nogales into a ghost of its formerly busy self. In a small town with a $28,000 median income and a poverty rate of 33.9%, the slowing of traffic comes with potentially dire economic consequences for workers and small business owners. But even before Covid-19, Glad says, “The parking lots [were] empty. And that was not the case prior to 2016.” Glad moved away several times in early adulthood, but always returned home to Nogales. Every visit back, she noticed changes: new sections of wall. A larger border patrol presence. Today, Glad says that border militarization has changed her community – and the lives of the people in it.
As defined by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, border militarization is “the systematic intensification of the border’s security apparatus, transforming the area from a transnational frontier to a zone of permanent vigilance, enforcement and violence”.Over the past three decades, US administrations have enacted federal policy with lasting consequences for border residents. In 1994, the Clinton administration launched a border patrol strategy called “prevention through deterrence”, aimed at curbing undocumented immigration by sealing off urban ports of entry. Towns along the US-Mexico border were transformed by the addition of walls, surveillance towers, motion and thermal sensors, helicopters and drones, federal agents and roving border patrol checkpoints. Today border peoples are hugely affected by militarization. In some places, rural residents must stop at border patrol checkpoints just to go to the gas station or get groceries. Tohono O’odham tribal members – whose nation is literally severed by the US-Mexico border – report racial profiling by border agents; drone and tower surveillance; and disruptions to their traditional hunting and ceremonial practices. And tragically, militarization created a death trap for migrants, who now must navigate by foot through remote, dangerous terrain in order to cross the border. In the last two decades, nearly 8,000 migrants have been found dead along the southern border, but the real number of fatalities is certainly much higher. Thousands are missing.
#Covid-19#migrant#migration#etatsunis#mexique#frontiere#sante#economie#mortalite#violence#militarisation