Cops, Coyotes and the Politics of Stupidity

How do we solve this problem?

"There is no solution," he said. "Because there is no problem. Illegal immigration is not a problem. It is something else. It is a phenomenon. When faced with something like this . . . Biblical . . . exodus, all we can do is observe. You don't solve a phenomenon, you surrender to it in awe."

* * *

Juanito might have passed through Sasabe. The officers there are rotated around the border -- he certainly might have met my friends from the besieged desert station on his way back to Mexico. You see, Juanito thought he was a U.S. citizen until he got arrested for some bad barrio behavior in California and found out he was a Mexican. His parents had never told him he wasn't born in the United States. Not only did he go to prison, but when he got out, he was deported.

Like all good Americans, he wasn't going to let Big Brother keep him from his San Diego Padres or good jobs or his girlfriend. No, he scraped together all his money, worked like a dog in Mexico and borrowed money from relatives. Being a California kid, he wasn't going to go to any Sasabe desert and risk dying in the brutal Arizona sunlight. He found a friendly coyote in Tijuana and paid him $2,500 for a ride north.

If you believe you're an American, it's not hard to banter with the border guard -- after all, you can talk the talk, quote the hip-hop, complain about the governor and name your street and city. And he got through. And he got his ride north. Way north. All the way to the Canadian border.

He looked around for a job until he found the perfect employer. True, he is undocumented, but his bosses needed to save money, just like anybody else. He works as a gardener at a U.S. Border Patrol station.

* * *

Now consider the strange case of a certain young man enraptured by America's greatest export to Mexico after remittance money: La Jip-Jop, a.k.a. rap. He wanted to become a rapero, and he learned his "rolas" and freestyle technique in Mexico City. But if you're going to be a great rapper, there's really only one place to do so -- the United States. However, "the long lines of legal immigrants waiting for visas" we hear about in the media held no hope for him or anyone like him. That Lou Dobbsian long line of legality is strictly for people with college educations, careers and bank accounts -- not raperos, burger cooks, chicken pluckers or tomato pickers. This young man jumped one of the largely imaginary border fences and made his way through the undocumented underground to Los Angeles. There, he discovered that to be an American hip-hop star, you need to speak English. He enrolled in language school, where he had the amazing good fortune to meet a fellow rapero visionary from El Salvador.

The men studied hard, as their dreams were on the line. And they formed a band that is becoming known on the West Coast. If you knew its name, you could watch their videos on YouTube right now. They're touring, and they're headlining shows. It's the American rock 'n' roll dream for a new millennium. There is one minor catch, though: This young rapero has suddenly realized that if he becomes more famous, he will be found out and deported. It is a moralist's conundrum: If your dream comes true, it holds the seeds of your downfall. What will he do?

* * *

Ask. Seek. You will find that the number of crossers in the Arizona sectors is dropping -- but it isn't hot news to hear that fewer are coming. Why are there fewer crossers? The joke on the ground is that there's nobody left in Mexico. You can look at peripheral stories and form a true picture for yourself -- last fall the Pacific Northwest's strawberry crop rotted because the workers did not appear. Something is happening, America. The paradigm, as paradigms tend to do, continues to shift. Being know-nothings works to the advantage of those few who do know and want us to do their bidding. Perhaps this is what the Mexican consul in Tucson meant when he said to me, "The entire border is ruled by one thing: north and south. And that is the politics of stupidity."

Amen.

luis@luisurrea.com

Luis Alberto Urrea, a novelist and poet,

is the author of "The Devil's Highway."