Illegal immigration to US flourishes in desert

RANCHO EL COCHIFEO, Mexico, July 31 (Reuters) At the remote Ugly Piggy cattle ranch on the US-Mexico border, dozens of Mexicans doze by an abandoned chicken pen in the searing desert heat, waiting for nightfall to cross illegally into Arizona.

Every day, thousands of people come to isolated farms and villages in the Sonoran Desert to slip into Arizona, despite searing summer heat and a huge US security crackdown.

Immigration experts say the latest initiative, a 38-mile 61-km ''virtual fence'' of towers, radars, cameras and sensors about to come into operation along the border near Tucson, will not make a significant difference in the number of illegal immigrants entering the US Southwest.

''They will just change routes,'' said Arturo Obregon, head of the Mexican migrant protection agency Grupos Beta in El Sasabe, a town used by immigrants as a starting point for the 72-km journey across the desert.

He has seen no overall decline in migrant numbers recently due to increased US border security.

''I will get through, mentally I feel unstoppable,'' said Jose Magarino, 25, waiting to cross the desert and wearing a Rambo T-shirt saying: ''No Man, No Law, No War Can Stop Him.'' Following the failure of President George W Bush's immigration reform proposal in Congress last month, US policy is centered on tighter border security rather than giving immigrants more options to find jobs legally.

The government has raised its Border Patrol deployment to around 13,500 agents now from fewer than 4,000 in 1993, and traditional crossing points in border cities such as Tijuana are sealed with huge metal fences.

The Border Patrol is catching fewer undocumented immigrants, especially in the Yuma area of Arizona, where numbers fell by 68 per cent between Oct 1 and June 30.

That might suggest the number of illegal immigrants is dropping, but it is not clear whether tighter security is really keeping them out.

''We would like to believe that less apprehensions mean we are controlling our borders, but it is not an exact science,'' said Ramon Rivera, a Border Patrol spokesman.

UNDETERRED Latin American illegal immigrants are willing to risk heat of up to 49 degrees Celsius in the cactus-studded desert -- where snakes, scorpions and black widow spiders prowl -- to enter the United States in search of higher wages and a better life.

Academics say the number of apprehensions has fallen because illegal immigrants already in the United States no longer regularly go back and forth to see their families in Mexico and Central America due to the tough enforcement.

But those entering the United States illegally for the first time are undeterred.

''It doesn't matter how difficult the terrain, people keep coming. Only something outrageous will stop them, an electrified fence guarded by soldiers across the entire desert,'' said Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith from the University of Arizona.

Some migrants, like Elmar Lopez from Chiapas in southern Mexico, who walked for 14 hours through the desert with his wife and two young daughters before being caught by the Border Patrol, have no plans to try again and will go home.

But many others are not put off.

''The problem is that for every 10 people who are caught crossing the desert, another 50 are coming up from Mexico and Central America,'' said Amado Marcelo Cuello, a Red Cross volunteer in the northern Mexican town of Altar.

The US government says it will have ''operational control'' of the border by 2013 by extending a high-security fence and using more ''virtual fence'' technology.

Reuters RJ RS1020