More at the link.FORT HANCOCK, Tex. — The giant rusty fence of metal bars along the border here, built in recent years to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States, has a new nickname among local residents: Jurassic Park Gate, a nod to the barrier in a 1993 movie that kept dangerous dinosaurs at bay in a theme park.
On the other side, a brutal war between drug gangs has forced dozens of fearful families from the Mexican town of El Porvenir to come to the border seeking political asylum, and scores of other Mexicans have used special visas known as border-crossing cards to flee into the United States. They say drug gangs have laid waste to their town, burning down houses and killing people in the street.
Americans are taking in their Mexican relatives, and the local schools have swelled with traumatized children, many of whom have witnessed gangland violence, school officials say...
Not everyone coming from El Porvenir is seeking asylum. Many Mexicans in towns along the river have special border-crossing cards, which let them cross for up to 30 days to do business and shop near the border. But some have used the visas to relocate their families temporarily to Fort Hancock and other small towns on the Texas side.
Those who have temporary tourist visas or who can obtain business visas because they have enough money to start businesses in the United States are also moving their families across the border. (Cities like El Paso and San Antonio have had real estate booms and a flourishing of small businesses and Mexican restaurants as a result.)
Other Mexicans who were once happy living in Mexico are taking advantage of whatever means they have to obtain a visa and get out. Some were born in a hospital on the United States side and are American citizens, for instance, or have married citizens but have never applied for residency.
In El Paso alone, the police estimate that at least 30,000 Mexicans have moved across the border in the past two years because of the violence in Juárez and the river towns to the southeast. So many people have left El Porvenir and nearby Guadalupe Bravos that the two resemble ghost towns, former residents say.
People without access to visas, however, have been seeking asylum, even at the risk of being detained for months. In the early days of the conflict, the asylum-seekers were mostly journalists, police officers and officials who had been threatened by organized crime. But now people with ordinary jobs are showing up at the border and saying they fear for their lives.
“This is an emergency situation, a war,” said Jorge Luis Aguirre, a journalist who himself has asked for asylum after his life was threatened in 2008 in Ciudad Juárez. “It’s a question of life and death for these people.”
But few Mexicans are granted asylum. Over the last three federal fiscal years, immigration judges heard 9,317 requests across the country, and granted only 183.
Fort Hancock has had a surge in applications in March and April, officials said. All told the number of people asking for asylum at ports of entry along the border alone has climbed steadily, to 338 for the federal fiscal year ended last October, from 179 two years before.
In Fort Hancock, the influx grew after one of the warring drug gangs placed a banner in El Porvenir’s central square recently threatening death for anyone left in the town on Easter. In response, the Mexican authorities flooded the town with federal police officers, and the promised mayhem was averted.
If, as I suspect, we in the United States are going to see enough nativist pressure exerted on our government to give into the demands to close our borders, then a measure of good ought at least come out of it. I will here repeat what I have said elsewhere: our continued efforts to intervene in the affairs of a foreign nation has the end result of destabilizing that nation, rendering it incapable of responding to our requests. If we are going to cut of the only hope these people have of making a new life for themselves, then we ought to do our part in ending a major component of what drives them in that quest.
