On the San Diego side of the international border, the Mexican/Chicano landscape features consist of:
The U.S.-Mexico border is porous here, as it is along the U.S.-Canada border. To "secure" the border from illegal immigrants, the U.S. government spent $3.1 billion on Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. These funds were used by the U.S. Border Patrol to hire 464 new agents to patrol the San Diego sector, bringing the sector's total to 2,127 agents in the field. Yet when it comes to patrolling the companies that hire illegal immigrants, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has only 23 workplace inspectors in the San Diego sector -- 13 of them recently added through Operation Gatekeeper. Since 1996, the percentage of U.S. apprehensions of people trying to cross the Mexican border has increased by 9; yet the U.S. border guards assigned here have increased by 60 percent and the number of people who died on U.S. soil while crossing the border has increased 56 percent [Harper Index].
Between 1995 and October 2003, over 2,700 migrants died while trying to cross the border into the U.S., even though the number of Border Patrol agents increased from 4,200 in 1994 to 9,212 in 2000. In southern California alone, Border Patrol agents grew from 980 in the mid-1994 to 2,264 in 1998. The amount of fencing and/or walls along the border increased from 19 to more than 45 miles; the number of underground sensors rose from 448 to 1,214; and the number of infrared scopes grew from 12 to 59. The U. S. General Accounting Office concluded that there is "no clear indication" that unauthorized crossings have declined despite the massive increase in law enforcement resources since 1994.
Optional reading:
1) Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway (south of Interstate Highway
8) which tells the story of 26 men from Veracruz who died trying to cross the
remote, desert area in Arizona along the U.S.-Mexican border.
2) Geographer Joseph Nevins' Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal
Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexican Boundary.
Legal and often illegal Mexican laborers provide cheap day labor (the people in this photo are waiting to go to work) for the wealthy suburbs in the North (San Diego) County. They also produce fruits and vegetables which they sell at farmers' markets -- with very expensive (over $1 million) houses in the background.
Median family income: see a small map or a very large, detailed map. |
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| Asians | ||
| homeowners | Blacks | |
| Draw your own maps for San Diego and other California communities. | ||
| Elites liked to vacation in San Diego already by the turn of the century: in the La Jolla hotel with its stunning cove beaches and seals (view more) and on Coronado island. | ||
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