Back home, at least for now

NOGALES, Mexico - Every morning, dozens of migrants gather at a sparsely furnished, Catholic soup kitchen tucked into the hillside just a 10-minute walk south of the U.S. border. Most came from deep in Mexico with dreams of working in the United States but were caught in southern Arizona.

Seated along long wooden tables, about 70 migrants - overwhelmingly men - get a meal that provides some immediate comfort. They talk of their failed journey, walking days and nights across the desert before they were caught and deported.

"I won't cross again," said Brigido Lopez Sixto, 24, from the southern coastal state of Guerrero. Border Patrol agents picked up Lopez Sixto, his wife, Thalia, and their 5-month-old daughter as they made a two-day trek with a "coyote" guide - who was supposed to arrange for them to be picked up in a car and taken farther north. In four days, they were back in Nogales and getting a free breakfast at the soup kitchen.

There have been major changes in the patterns of illegal immigration over the decades. From the early 1980s until late 1990s, Border Patrol agents were typically making more than one million apprehensions annually. Last year, it was fewer than 400,000. Of course, none of the figures reflect the number of illegal immigrants who don't get caught.

A big part of the drop has been the result of slowing illegal migration through Tijuana, which during much of the 1980s and 1990s accounted for about 40 percent of all Border Patrol apprehensions.

When I visited Tijuana in the mid-1980s, there were several thousand migrants waiting on a makeshift soccer field a few miles from the Pacific that served as one of the border staging areas. When the sun set, the crowd rushed into the sparsely populated Southern California hillside. Border Patrol agents caught hundreds of people, but many hundreds more continued north.

In the San Diego sector, there were 628,000 apprehensions in fiscal 1986. But after years of major security upgrades and big increases in staffing, apprehensions are down by 95 percent there.

As immigration routes shifted, the border sector around Nogales became the busiest in the nation - though the pressure there has never matched what was experienced around Tijuana in the 1980s.

About 40,000 illegal immigrants a year are deported through Nogales, according to Mexican government statistics. The border is beefed up with an increased force of agents, sophisticated surveillance equipment, and 18-foot-high heavy steel fences that run for miles on each side of Nogales, making illegal crossings more difficult than ever before.

Security does not address the attraction of U.S. jobs, which often pay 10 times more than similar work in Mexico.

Lopez Sixto said he spent four years as a California farmworker but returned to Guerrero in 2008, thinking that he later could slip back into the United States. He said he now plans to pick crops in northern Mexico, where wages are somewhat higher than Guerrero.

The minimum current wage in northern Mexico is $5.20 a day. In farms around Salinas and Oxnard, Calif., where Lopez Sixto picked fruit from 2004 to 2008, agricultural workers can earn $100 a day.

Although Lopez Sixto's plan to work in Mexican agriculture appears to be a success story for the U.S. efforts to stem the flow of migrants, it may be only a temporary change. With little prompting, he admits that he'd really like to get back to California.

U.S. immigration studies have found that better border security, combined with programs to prosecute illegal migrants in federal courts, have persuaded many deportees not to return immediately to the United States. But many try again to cross illegally within a few years.

A recent study by the University of Arizona's Center for Latin American Studies reported that 56 percent of 1,100 deportees interviewed said they planned to try again to enter the United States.

Jose Luis Cisneros, 36, knows the lure of U.S. wages. His wife worked for years at McDonald's and other restaurants in Georgia. She returned to help him cross the border. They left their 10-year-old daughter with relatives in Nogales before entering Arizona in mid-December.

After Cisneros and his wife were caught, he was quickly deported, though never charged with any crime. But he said his wife was sent to Tucson, where federal trials are held for people who have been repeatedly caught trying to enter the United States illegally. Migrants tried in the federal system typically plead guilty to charges of illegal entry, are jailed for one to six months, and then deported.

"I'd never been across before," said Cisneros, a native of the central Mexican state of Hidalgo. He said he had hoped to follow his wife back to Georgia. "She worked there seven years. Now, I don't know what will happen to her."

The uncertainty is understandable. Jeremy Slack, a University of Arizona research specialist who coauthored the study on deportees, said the federal trial program of illegal immigrants was "highly confusing" and the process of selecting who is tried "remains pretty much a mystery."

Along the border, the Mexican government and several nonprofit groups have set up travelers' aid stations to offer immediate relief. The Jesuits' Arizona-based Kino Border Initiative, which runs the soup kitchen, says its goal is to help build a "humane, just, workable migration between the U.S. and Mexico." At the kitchen, Sister Maria Engracia Robles instructed everyone on migrant rights and how to avoid some of the dangers in Nogales. A sign posted on the outside wall stated that only migrants are allowed to enter - no drug dealers or smugglers.

Although many migrants head home after they are deported, there is always a steady stream ready to try going north.

Elvin Flores Perez, 26, of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, attended the national university for three years and has a solid resumé, listing his e-mail contacts and work history. But he wanted a better life and took the risky land route north. At the soup kitchen, he showed off a knot on his head from being hit with a pistol when he was robbed in southern Mexico.

Flores Perez is certified as a machine oiler in the Honduran merchant marine. He said finding work there was problematic, requiring under-the-table payments to land jobs on Honduran boats. In an interview at the soup kitchen, he said he hoped to work on U.S. ships, although he didn't know how he'd overcome the U.S. requirement that he have legal documents if he found a job opening in the United States. Nevertheless, he said he was ready to brave the trip north.

"All immigrants come with a dream," he told me in December, promising to send me an e-mail when he found work.

Last month, one of his friends in Honduras notified me that Flores Perez had been detained after entering the United States.