Tucson, AZ: a partial response to Chuck

This post has roots somewhere else, but I think that it's applicable to our conversations, Mr. Chuck Josephson, my good friend from Tucson. If you've read about my previous posts on Shanti Sellz, you know that NMD is involved in a big defense suit of what they say is the right to provide humanitarian aid. Federal prosecutors claim that such aid--taking debiltated migrants in need of medical attention to hospitals--contributes and furthers the presence of undocumented persons in the states. The argument is that, when migrants are healthy enough to venture out of hospitals, they do. They finish off the journey.

Here we get into a mixed bag of arguments:

What about healthcare? Migrants don't pay for healthcare.

It's true that many undocumented individuals don't pay for emergency health services such as these. According to one source, Pima County (Tucson down) absorbed seventy-six million dollars in treatement costs in year 2000 (that's the only figure that I have off-hand). One third of that cost, however, was attributed to undocumented immigrants.

Argument: Then these people should go to jail. They're costing taxpayers money, and they're helping migrants into the U.S. 

If this is the solution, you might as well arrest the Border Patrol as well. B.P. agents often dump migrants off in hospitals and care facilities, leaving them to absorb the expenses.

Argument: But these folks are the government, not private citizens who might have personal, even ideological reasons for their actions. NMD just wants to bring everybody across the line.

One would hope that NMD volunteers are hanging out in the middle of the desert in the summer for personal reasons. Again, like their name indicates, they want to save lives. One of the things to keep in perspective is this: last summer, NMD volunteers came across approximately 3,800 crossers. They brought sixty-eight to hospitals of churches with waiting medical professionals. Were they to want to bring everyone across the line, they're being pretty damn selective.

Argument: The very fact that NMD is out in the desert contributes to migrant crossing. Migrants know that they have people to help them, so they're that much more willing to make the journey. These groups are contributing to the very deaths that they're trying to prevent.

To be honest, I don't know what these migrants think. I'm going to do some work this summer to see how they feel about the volunteers, if they feel about them at all. My tentative responses is to say that migrants are going to cross anyway, with or without these volunteers.  If, say, volunteers with No More Deaths, Humane Borders or otherwise don't offer water, my guess is that migrants would die with greater frequency than in years previous.