Borders: Activists in both countries see urgent need for new policies, as illegal crossings are pushed into remote desert areas.

              By JAMES F. SMITH, Times Staff Writer

                   MEXICO CITY--The Mexican government is determined to bring down the soaring death rate of its citizens trying to slip across
              the U.S. border--even if it takes ideas as controversial as equipping migrants with survival kits.
                   Activists on both sides of the border Thursday cited the deaths of at least 14 migrants in the 115-degree heat of the Arizona
              desert as proof of the urgent need for a new U.S.-Mexican policy that promotes orderly and safer migration.
                   Reports in recent days that Mexico had agreed to give migrants survival kits as one step toward that goal provoked an outcry
              from anti-illegal immigrant groups. Even migrant supporters were skeptical.
                   Juan Hernandez, head of President Vicente Fox's new Office for Mexicans Abroad, stressed that the survival kit is just one of
              many ideas generated by a U.S.-Mexican migrant health committee. The kit has yet to be approved and is still being considered by
              experts.
                   But Hernandez is resolute in his commitment to attack the alarming rise in deaths of illegal border-crossers, who have been
              pushed away from cities and into dangerous desert crossings by tougher U.S. border controls since 1994.
                   "It doesn't bother me that this causes controversy and debate," Hernandez said. "These migrants are heroes, and we are going to
              fight for them."
                   Hernandez, a former University of Texas literature professor who is one of Fox's closest confidants, said that "for too long, the
              U.S. and Mexican governments closed their eyes to migrant issues. . . . Let's recognize that these individuals do need health services,
              that people are dying on the border."
                   The Mexicans put the death toll in 2000 at 491, up from 369 a year earlier, while the Border Patrol counted 367 deaths last year
              compared with 231 in 1999.
                   Figures on undocumented migrant crossings are imprecise, but U.S. records show that 1.6 million Mexicans were arrested in
              fiscal 2000 and sent home. The population of Mexicans illegally in the United States is believed to number between 3 million and 5
              million, and rose by about 150,000 a year through the 1990s.
                   Nicole Chulick, a spokeswoman for the Border Patrol in Washington, said of the kit idea: "We think there are better ways of
              protecting migrant lives and preventing deaths on the border."
                   She noted that Border Patrol agents have been equipped with life-saving gear and emergency medical training. The Border Patrol
              launched a search-and-rescue patrol in 1998, although critics say the rising death toll is the best indicator of the effort's
              ineffectiveness.
                   The risk in even considering survival kits for migrants is the possibility of inflaming latent antimigrant sentiments just when
              U.S.-Mexican relations have improved dramatically. That could jeopardize other key Mexican goals such as regularizing the status of
              longtime undocumented residents and adopting a guest-laborer program.
                   In fact, immigration foes seized on the survival kit like a red flag. Barbara Coe, head of the California Coalition for Immigration
              Reform, said, "It very well illustrates that President Fox holds the U.S. immigration laws in contempt, and that instead of trying to
              keep illegal aliens home, he is encouraging them to come."
                   In Mexico, the daily Milenio newspaper on Tuesday sarcastically suggested issuing "Happy Boxes"--a play on McDonald's
              Happy Meals--containing No. 40 sun block and a ball to throw to Border patrol dogs to distract them.
                   But others on both sides of the border, including some who oppose the kits, welcomed the renewed attention to the alarming
              surge in border deaths and the treatment of migrants.
                   Jorge Santibanez, president of the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana and a member of Hernandez's health panel, said the
              overarching goal must be a long-term U.S.-Mexican policy on migration, which both governments have agreed to negotiate.
                   "But there are consequences today that have to be attended to urgently," Santibanez said. "And one of them is the health of
              migrants."
                   He noted that the committee debated the pros and cons of a survival kit, including its practicality, contents and cost, as "one of
              many ideas, good and bad, operative and nonoperative."
                   "But for the first time in many years, Mexico is assuming the responsibility for protecting its migrants," he added. 'I don't support
              the kit, but I do support the principle of defense of the migrants."
                   Still, some migrant rights activists were annoyed.
                   Claudia Smith, a lawyer who runs the border project for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, said "the survival kits
              just might give migrants a false sense of security. What you really need to cross over these mountains and deserts, sometimes a
              35-mile walk, is water--lots and lots and lots of water. The question is, 'How can you ever carry enough water to get through some
              of these treks?' "
                   But Smith's basic objection "is that it sidesteps the real issue, which is the ever-increasing deadliness of the [U.S.] strategy itself."
              She said debate on the U.S. policy of forcing migrants into the desert "seems to have been shoved aside."
                   Since 1994, measures such as Operation Gatekeeper on the California border have raised higher walls near cities, forcing
              migrants to make more dangerous crossings in rural, often desert areas, leading to far more deaths from dehydration in the summer
              and hypothermia in cold weather.
                   The migrant health panel is just one of a burst of initiatives since Fox put Hernandez in charge of caring for the roughly 20 million
              Mexicans abroad.
                   In Hernandez's crowded temporary office in the presidential complex, a crowd of Mexican Americans and rural Mexican
              migrants competed for attention from the harried 12-member staff.
                   Hernandez, son of a Texan mother and Mexican father, works hardest to improve conditions for migrants in their traditionally
              poor home villages. He flies every week to some U.S. city to lobby Mexican Americans to invest back home in rural areas.
                   "We believe Mexico must create opportunities so these people don't ever have to leave home," Hernandez said. "If we are
              working in the United States for our VIPs--very important paisanos--we are working 20 times harder here."
                   Hernandez, who grew up both in Texas and in Fox's home state of Guanajuato, also has battled to improve treatment of migrants
              and of returning Mexican Americans on the Mexican side of the border, where bribery and theft by police and customs officials have
              been common. Hernandez himself crossed through official border posts 16 times over Christmas, sometimes in the middle of the
              night with his family, to identify and root out abuses. He made eight crossings at Easter.
                   Mexican officials also have stepped up their investigations of criminal gangs of polleros, who charge hundreds or thousands of
              dollars to lead migrants across the border--and often abandon them there, leading to many of the deaths.
                   The proposed survival kits would have to be light, no more than a pound, and could contain things such as rehydration salts,
              granola bars and snake and scorpion antivenin serums.
                   Funding for such a costly exercise may not come easily. The California Endowment, the state's largest health funding agency, was
              initially reported to be putting up part of its $50-million grant for migrant farm worker health care toward the kits. But spokeswoman
              Peggy Hinz said the foundation's charter limits it to health projects for people in California, and "we'd really need to see how [the
              kits] would fit in with a long-term, meaningful strategy toward improving the health of agricultural workers."
                   Despite all the obstacles to the efforts, Hernandez aide Omar de la Torre said: "We are not willing to do nothing and just wait for
              it to improve. We prefer to make mistakes than to sit on our hands."
                                                              ---
                   Times staff writer Ken Ellingwood in San Diego contributed to this report.

              Copyright 2001