Bringing the Border War Home

What will Americans pay to keep out immigrants

Glenn Garvin from the October 1995 issue

(Page 8 of 8)

Rep. Lamar Smith's bill (HR 1915) would expand civil-forfeiture law, allowing the federal government to seize the assets of illegal immigrants, those suspected of hiring illegals, and anyone using or creating false immigration documents; add 1,000 new border guards for each of the next five years; and reduce the number of immigrants who can enter legally by about one-third, to 535,000 a year. An amendment offered by Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) would require a "hardened, tamperproof Social Security card" including "a photograph, hologram, biometric identifier, and such other technology as is available to make the card as secure against tampering and counterfeiting as is feasible."

Both bills would establish a national worker registry, linking the databases of the Social Secu rity Administration and the INS; reduce the number of refugees who could enter the country each year to 50,000, about half the number who enter now; and expand the ability of government agents to wiretap suspected employers or smugglers of undocumented workers.

Maybe picturing our brave new life with a national ID card makes it a little easier to imagine the Martinez family's life in Cuba. Or, for that matter, after Cuba. The U.S. Coast Guard ship that plucked Lizbet and her parents from the ocean took them to a prison camp on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. They had plenty of company: 25,000 other men, women, and children whose only crime was fleeing communist tyranny. (In other camps nearby were several thousand Haitians who were picked up as they bolted from their island's nightmarish violence and grinding poverty.) The Martinezes lived in a sweltering canvas tent in the middle of a dusty field that turned instantly into a sea of mud at the first drop of rain.

Though most of the refugees were young and able bodiedwho else would try to float to the United States on a raft?there was no work. Nothing to do but lie on their cots in the heavy tropical heat and dream of how close they'd gotten to Florida. In many ways, nothing had changed for these refugees except the flag flying overhead.

It wasn't long before they were plotting escapes, just as they had plotted escapes from Castro. Some of the men even went to the base commander and asked if they could build rafts in an attempt to float to Haiti. He just gave them a funny look. Others were more creative. When radiobemba spread the word that pregnant women would be moved to Miami, because the camp's hospital tent wasn't equipped to handle childbirth, a wave of romance flashed through the camps, and suddenly maternity clothes turned high fashion.

For men, there was a medical loophole, too, but a grim one. Any refugee with an illness or injury too grave for the base doctors to treat was put on a plane for Miami. Soon the hospital tent was flooded with cases of accidental puncture wounds and broken bones. Some men injected them selves with cooking oil, creating grotesque infections that, in at least one case, led to the loss of a leg. The bravestor looniest, take your picksouls of all were those who squirted Tabasco sauce from the military-provided "meals ready to eat" up their rectums to aggravate their hemorrhoids to emergency levels.

The Martinezes didn't try anything like that. But Lizbet had caught a mild fever at sea, one that she couldn't shake, and after a few days Jorge took her over to the hospital tent. As they waited, several other children came in, just taken from rafts in various states of dehydration and malnutrition. "Their parents must have been crazy," one of the doctors stormed as he moved around among the shriveled, sunburned little bodies.

"Excuse me," interrupted Jorge Martinez. "But we're not crazy. One parent -- if one parent did this, he might have been crazy. But there are 3,000 families with children here. Do you think all 6,000 parents could be crazy? We're just trying to give our kids a future in liberty."

The Martinezes "crazy" gamble on Lizbet's future eventually worked. After the Clinton admin istration belatedly decided prison camps were no place for children, a slow, steady trickle of families began arriving in Miami from Guantanamo. Five months after they were picked up at sea, Lizbet Martinez and her parents reached the United States. They're doing well. Lizbet already speaks English pretty well, her grades are all As, and she's been invited to play violin with the Greater Miami Symphony Orchestra a couple of times. Her mom is studying to pass the American dental boards. At night the whole family huddles over Lizbet's schoolbooks, passing an English dictionary back and forth, puzzling out the mysteries of this new country of theirs.

Pretty soon now, they'll be joined by all the friends they made in the camp. Military command ers at Guantanamo convinced Clinton that trying to detain 20,000 refugees in the camps indefinitely was a sure prescription for riots. By the end of the year, they'll all be resettled in the United States. The flip side of the decision: Instead of taking captured Cuban rafters to Guantanamo, the Coast Guard will hand them back over to Castro. Who has given his solemn promise that nothing will happen to them.

The Martinez family, acutely aware of the precarious status of immigrants in the United States these days, doesn't like to talk politics. But there is no trace of guile or irony in Lizbet's voice when she says that she'd like to send her thanks to President Clinton.

"It is very generous of him to let us come here," she says. "He didn't have to do it. On the boat, when I played 'The Star Spangled Banner,' I didn't know they were going to take us to Guantanamo. We hadn't heard anything about that yet. But even if I had known, I would still have played it. I felt so happy, seeing that boat coming toward our raft. For some people it would be nothing. But for us, it was like being born again. Going to Guantanamo was rough, but we knew we had to pay a price for liberty."

Lizbet and her family knew just how precious freedom really is. The question is, do we?