The Arizona Republic

In the past 10 years, Marcelino, a 29-year-old laborer from Mexico, has risked his life three times crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.
Last December, Marcelino attempted a fourth crossing, but this time, he documented his journey through Arizona's Sonoran Desert on a hand-held video camera borrowed from producers of the cable television program "National Geographic Ultimate Explorer."

The grainy footage captured by Marcelino provides a rare, firsthand glimpse of the risks migrants take crossing the Sonoran Desert, where last year at least 205 illegal immigrants died crossing the border illegally.

The video also provides some of the most compelling moments in Ultimate Explorer's newest documentary, "Chasing the American Dream," about illegal immigrants from Mexico in search of work and a better life in the United States.

The footage documents Marcelino and four family members leaving their rural town in Oaxaca, where most of the 150 inhabitants already have immigrated to the United States.

It shows them arriving at the border, where they begin their four-day journey on foot through the desert until they reach a road.

From there they are transported in the back of a pickup truck to a drop house in Phoenix and finally to a small town somewhere in the United States where Marcelino had a job waiting for him in a factory.

At the border, they pay professional smugglers $1,500 each to guide them under cover of night through a flimsy barbed-wire fence intended to keep out livestock, not people.

By navigating their way by moonlight through the vast and desolate Tohono O'odham Nation in southwestern Arizona, Marcelino and the other migrants elude U.S. Border Patrol agents and avoid the searing daytime heat. But at one point they risk running out of water, and to keep warm during the frigid desert nights, they wrap themselves in plastic bags.

Ultimate Explorer host Lisa Ling said the documentary avoids taking sides in the thorny election-year debate over illegal immigration.

Instead, "we try to give you a sense of who these people are. On one hand, our economy is dependent on this work force, but on the other hand, it's a work force that lives in secret," Ling said from Washington, D.C.

The documentary also tells the story of Rosa Cano Dominguez, a 29-year-old mother of two from the Yucatan who died in the Arizona desert after crossing illegally.

Her body remained unidentified until a Baylor University anthropologist last year used DNA testing to identify her. The case, first reported by The Arizona Republic, was the first in an ambitious project to create a DNA database to identify scores of illegal immigrants who have died anonymously.

Ling scored an interview, included in the documentary, with Mexican President Vicente Fox just days after he met with President Bush earlier this month in Crawford, Texas, to discuss immigration and border security issues.

In the interview, Fox acknowledges that Mexico must do more to create a stronger economy to prevent Mexican immigrants from risking their lives for better opportunities in the United States. But he also asks the United States to recognize the contributions Mexican workers make to its economy.

Ling, who spent a night with Tucson-based Border Patrol agents tracking undocumented immigrants, said she was struck by the billions of dollars the United States spends trying to stop illegal immigration at the border, when migrants who are caught and sent back to Mexico usually just turn around and try again until they are successful.

"It begs the question of whether this is futile," Ling said.

WHERE AND WHEN:

What: "National Geographic Ultimate Explorer: Chasing the American Dream"

Airs: 6 p.m. Saturday on MSNBC.