I’ve avoided writing up the last day of my hike. It was a fine and lovely and uneventful walk. I retrieved my last water stash, followed a gully up and through the Diablo Range and down again and back to the Arch Canyon trailhead.
Between the Diablo and Ajo Mountains
Pleasant and uneventful, but also deserving of a reckoning. It was the only leg of the hike in which I escaped the constant reminders – that is, the trash – of desperate people fleeing north. They all came at great risk. Some didn’t make it, and spent their last anguished hours of existence here, in places where I blithely hike along. How do I deal with that?
I resent having to ask that question. Organ Pipe Cactus NM is public land, set aside for the enjoyment and edification of all. I have every right to be here, every right to wander this desert to my heart’s content. It’s my land. I resent having to worry if the lights I see moving along the washes at night are a threat. I resent having to find campsites that are hidden away from illicit pathways. And I really resent the skeins of trash that sully and defile this land – my land. It feels like a big “fuck you”, a palpable mark of disrespect from uninvited guests.
I have the luxury of feeling that way because I don’t have to worry about feeding my family. I am safe, well-fed and comfortable. None of the migrants who drop empty water bottles in the desert came here for fun. They were just trying to survive, and survival is the most fundamental and undeniable right of all.
But America – and for that matter, the world – is full. We need fewer people, not more, especially in the West. We’ve built a fine country here, one that millions, if not hundred of millions, would like to live in. We can’t let everyone in, and if we did, it would make the world a worse place, not a better one. The energy and ambition that migrants spend in pursuit of jobs in the US would be better spent organizing their communities for change at home. We are draining Mexico and other countries of their brightest, hardest-working people. In doing so, we let their corrupt elites evade responsibility for the welfare of the people. They are outsourcing that job to the US.
I’m not ready to go as far as Ed Abbey, who advised that we welcome migrants with a cold beer and send them back with a rifle, but something along that line would be best for all.
Mexico is not a poor country. Its per capita income is about $20K per year, just below Iran and Argentina, and about the same as the US in the mid-1980s. Its income is nearly twice that of Ecuador, a country that nonetheless manages to fund health care for all. Mexico is not poor, but is full of poor people because of the neglect and malevolence of its rulers. Shipping the most industrious of them off to the US to pound nails and make beds only enables that system to perpetuate itself.
Of course, democracy and justice are not doing so great in the US these days either.
Scott Warren, a No More Deaths volunteer, has been arrested and charged with felony harboring for the “crime” of putting out water bottles for migrants. This is bullshit. It is undisguised tyranny.
We still have justice in this country, but it costs money. I don’t wholly agree with what Scott is doing, but I kicked in some money to his defense fund. You should too.
Borders are hard places. I want a desert that is wild and clean. Others want the better life that lies beyond the desert. We can’t give it to all of them, but we can lean on those countries elites to take responsibility for their own people’s well-being. Right after we do the same for ours, of course.