#RangerBetty100

 If you have only one hour to learn about the history of the United States, I recommend that you spend it with Betty Reid Soskin, National Park Service Ranger. (The NP Lego post below was in honor of her 100th birthday. As of this edit (July 2025), she is retired but still with us!)

I learned about Ranger Betty as many other people did, when the entire National Park Service celebrated her 100th birthday as part of the centennial celebration of the NPS itself. The occasion came to my attention in several different ways over a couple of days. The most fun, of course, was the item above from the impish creatives at NPS Lego Vignettes, from whom I literally learn something new every day.

She is a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in California. Her personal history is so deeply entwined in the mission and purposes of the park that they have created an entire web page for this particular ranger. The Betty Reid Soskin page included a schedule of the popular presentations she gave on site, a biography focused on her relationship to the park, and most importantly, that one-hour video I reference in the opening lines above. 

She is shown sitting as I've seen many rangers do in other parks, on a kitchen stool at the front of a small theater full of visitors. She introduces the park and the park's main documentary video. The hour spent with her includes about 20 minutes with that professionally produced film. It begins, however, with her presenting both a general introduction to the concept of urban national parks and her own connection to this one. After the film is when the real learning happens: in a series of firm but gentle steps, she guides listeners from a superficial understanding of what the home front was all about to a deeper understanding of how that reality was shaped by race and how that might be relevant today.

Spoiler alert: although she was born in Detroit, a key turning point in the life of Ranger Betty Soskin was the evacuation of her family from a flood that ravaged much of Louisiana. Most of us were not aware of it until after Katrina in 2005, though Randy Newman ... and later Aaron Neville ... told us all about it in Louisiana 1927, first released in 1974.

UPDATE: I returned to this post in July 2025 because I happened to hear one of Ranger Betty's talks on The Moth. I recommend both of them! This also led me to read the rest of her story on the Betty Reid Soskin Wikipedia entry.

Lagniappe

If you have more time to devote to learning about the Great Migration that is a big part of Ranger Betty Soskin's story, I highly recommend Isabelle Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. She focuses on the stories of three families in order to provide a few in-depth examples from among the myriad experiences of millions of Americans moving over a period of half a century. For a link to the book and my own thoughts on it, please see my Warmth of Other Suns review on Goodreads.

I found the Ranger Betty video while I was looking for material about this book; I found it a bit after the fact. Wilkerson was featured on the TED Radio Hour, which includes a conversation with her and a link to her TED Talk.

Sieve Details

I have long argued that U.S. border policy serves as a human sieve, detaining persons while allowing their labor or wealth to flow. I have written about many other aspects of misguided policy -- and misplaced thinking -- about migration.

Commerce continues at what used to be my favorite crossing point -- 100 km south of Tucson, between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, but under increasingly militarized conditions.
From Tucson, we moved to Pharr, Texas, where we had bridges directly into Tamaulipas.

I am very thankful to Roque Planas for his eloquent discussion of how to fix migration. He goes farther than I have done, but he makes the case quite clearly. Nothing about our current approach to migration policy is worth saving. Scrap it all, he says, and provides 16 compelling reasons. I would challenge skeptics to think very seriously about his reason #10: hardened borders serve as a kind of ratchet. The harder it is to get in, the more likely people are to stay once they arrive. His ethical and economic reasons are even more compelling in my view, but #16 points to one of the biggest obstacles: some people make a handsome income from unreasonably limiting the freedoms of the rest of us.

Economic Baggage

For almost as long as I have been a geographer, I have asserted that the border between Mexico and the United States is the steepest in the world in economic terms. Mexico is figuratively far from the poorest country on earth, but it is literally very near one of the richest. As I've written in Human Sieve and elsewhere on this blog, the human cost of this disparity is enormous.

From my favorite librarian I learned that at least one border is steeper, and the reality of life at that border -- especially for women -- is difficult to believe. Spain meets Africa directly in two Moroccan port cities -- Ceuta and Melilla -- exclaves that are on the African continent but legally part of the European Union. It is, in fact, EU security rules that have created an unthinkable level of despair on the edges of the town of Melilla.



As detailed in Suzanne Daley's excellent reporting in the New York Times, Melilla is quite literally a Borderline Where Women Bear the Weight. Morocco is not the poorest country in Africa, nor is Spain the richest country in Europe, but the income disparity between the two is about twenty-fold -- a disparity about five times greater than the gap between Mexico and the United States.

Because a loophole in the customs rules provides for a tax exemption for any cargo than can plausibly be considered "luggage" and parcels up to 100 kilograms are considered to meet that criterion, carrying large parcels across the border, pretending it is luggage, is the only viable employment for many Melillans.

Because jurisdictions between private and official security forces in the two countries are muddled, no authorities are willing to protect the women who have been pursuing this trade from trampling by men who are turning to this difficult work in greater numbers.

The women of Melilla compete with each other and with men for the opportunity to be the world's most oppressed baggage handlers.

Climate Foxholes

This morning I was reminded of the adage that there are no atheists in foxholes. Leaving the theological implications of Pascal's Wager aside for the moment, I found a connection between two island stories this morning.

Damage in Taclovan is undeniable. Photo: Aaron Favila/AP, via The Guardian.

The first is widely known, of course, as the most powerful storm ever observed arrives in Vietnam, having pushed past numerous low-lying Pacific islands before devastating many islands of the Philippines.

The visitation of such a calamity on an island country presents special challenges, as people on some islands will have few places of  refuge. A resident of Kiribati has already sought "environmental refugee" status, and entire countries such as his are considering ways to migrate as countries to higher ground. As researcher Susan Martin points out, people who migrate always do so for multiple reasons and usually do so domestically -- the internally-displaced Dust Bowl refugees known as Oakies are a perfect example -- but anybody who is concerned with international migration must include climate-driven migration in their calculations.

When Mary Robinson addressed the Association of American Geographers in 2012 she admonished us to work diligently for climate justice, because those most vulnerable and those most responsible are not the same people, and do not live in the same places. I must admit that I thought of her remarks as referring mostly to some future condition, though the fact that daffodils were blooming in Manhattan on that February day should have been a clue. It turns out that the migration, crop loss, and impoverishment are the least of the injustices of climate change. The dying has started.

A young boy from Mr. Sano's city.
Image: Erik De Castro/Reuters via The Guardian

So it that Yeb Sano has traveled from the ruined city of Tacloban to the pointless climate talks in Poland, leaving his family behind to bring his story to the banquets halls and negotiating tables of Warsaw, hoping someone will listen to his anguish. 

The complexity of our climate means that we can each deny responsibility; climate change did not invent drought, flood, typhoon, or blizzard. But the increasing frequency of "wild weather" is now far outside the bounds set by prior experience. We predicted a new normal, and statistically, we are there. Typhoon Haiyan has been compared to a Category 5 on the hurricane scale, but this is only because Category 6 had not been contemplated when looking at the storms of previous generations. A storm sustaining winds of near-tornado strength across hundreds of miles had not been imagined before this most unusual century.

Students, parents, and educators: It is sometimes difficult to find appropriate educational materials for such an event; I recommend the Philippines storm post on Listen Edition as a possible starting point for discussion with upper-elementary and middle-school learners.

Key Considerations

Closer to home is a less dramatic story about insurance and planning in the city of Key West, Florida -- a lovely place I have not yet managed to visit. Those who manage public affairs in Key West -- and especially those who set insurance rates -- cannot afford "ivory tower" arguments about whether or not the climate is changing. In the case of those with actual responsibilities, to ignore rising seas is now unthinkable. Just as governors have shown more leadership than the national government, so too have municipal authorities and private-sector planners in Key West left debates to those who still have the luxury of entertaining denial for political purposes.

View Larger Map

Incidentally, the "comments" section of the Key West story illustrates the severity of geographic ignorance. Comments on all sides of the climate "debate" reveal profound gaps in understanding of physical systems, human settlement patterns, and math.

Lagniappe
(Posted April 15, 2014)

Image source: Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Looking for the link to my own post here, I found several other blogs that have made the same observation. Peter Sinclair, for example, focuses on reinsurers. These are pretty conservative folks as a rule, and they are not in a position to make their decisions on the basis of ideology.

The Border: A Human Sieve

The United States is a nation of immigrants. It is also a nation of immigrant bashing. Always has been. With each economic downturn, a new generation of recent immigrants becomes the scapegoat, even as those of a generation or two ago are venerated as simply industrious. With each economic upturn, the convenience of underpaid labor helps people to forget their indignation about what -- and who -- is legal.

http://notexasborderwall.blogspot.com/

As a geographer who has lived in Mexico, the United States, and that "in-between" land along the border, I think constantly about the real implications of the rhetoric. This is especially true as the pendulum is swinging a bit further as the recession/depression stretches out, and because the rhetoric is hardening -- quite literally hardening into a set of massive walls that will sever the human and physical geography of the borderlands for generations or centuries to come. If the wall resembles a tomb stone, it is because it marks the death of a vibrant, little-understood place -- a couple thousand miles long but only a few miles wide.

The 1994 book Border People by my former church mate Dr. Oscar Martinez provides a thorough and enjoyable explanation of the history and human geography of this unique place. The one gap is that he does not recognize the role of "snow birds" -- tens of thousands of retired, mainly Anglo northerners who flock to the border region each winter, where they are present in abstentia, in a sort of gated archipelago. It would be very interesting to study these enclaves in the midst of the current turmoil. Our friend Tom Miller's classic On the Border is a traveler's celebration of the very linear region, as he traversed each and every available crossing at the time of his writing a generation ago.

The U.S.-Mexico border has, of course, become something very different from what it was when I lived, studied, and worked in the borderlands from 1990 to 1997. In those days, it was already the case that nowhere in the world was a greater income gap to be found across an international border. It was not idyllic -- begging, vice, and violence were facts of life. But so, too, were a wide range of ecological, cultural, and economic connections that knitted the region together. Today, demand for drugs in the U.S., corruption in governments on both sides, and a free flow of weapons from an unregulated U.S. market have combined with truly onerous economic conditions in Central America and the interior of Mexico to create a truly nightmarish landscape. It is a landscape toward which people are pressed, from as far south as Chiapas or Nicaragua, lured by the false hope of a few factory jobs on the Mexico side of the border, and many more in Houston, Omaha, and even Belmont, Massachusetts.

The results are gruesome -- children living in dangerous tunnels, women killed on the way home from work, people dying in the deserts, and assassinations so common that a New Mexico librarian has become a hero simply by trying to keep a count of them.

Because the border wall will never be an absolute barrier -- the fantasies of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich notwithstanding -- I think another metaphor may be even more apt than the tomb stone: that of a sieve. It effectively separates the human worker from the human being. Just as Mitt Romney wants cheap labor to cut his grass but no underpaid workers to vote against him for president, so the entire power structure benefits from a series of barriers that allow for the free movement of capital and the furtive movement of labor, but not the free movement of political rights or moral entitlements.

Ron Paul's son, the radical candidate for U.S. Senate Rand Paul, admitted to precisely this in May, when he said,

“I’m not opposed to letting people come in and work and labor in our country. But I think what we should do is we shouldn’t provide an easy route to citizenship. A lot of this is about demographics. If you look at new immigrants from Mexico, they register 3-to-1 Democrat, so the Democratic Party is for easy citizenship and allowing them to vote. I think we need to address that."

The lack of outcry at this remark is a sign of just how far the pendulum has swung. Proponents of the border wall may come in many sizes, shapes, races, and income levels, but it would not be built if it were not serving the needs of the overclass -- those who really benefit from the division of labor in the world space-economy. Even executives of the regional banks in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas have not been able to stop the construction of the wall -- for they know it will harm regional business immeasurably -- because of the service it provides to global capital. (And global capital gives the rest of us enough cheap toys -- and cheap coffee -- that we tend to play along.)

I conclude this post with a passage from the opening pages of Richard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited. Thanks to my friend John McClintock for bringing it to my attention. Thurman first wrote this in the context of the oppression of African Americans in the 1940s; my friend John -- a military veteran, BSC philosophy graduate, and divinity student -- selected it in the context of a Memorial Day sermon about war; and I see it as deeply relevant to the discussion of how a wealthy, mostly Christian nation treats those who work to create its comforts, both at home and far away. I had the honor of reading this passage at the beginning of John's sermon at First Parish Church in Bridgewater.

Rev. Thurman wrote:

To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.


Learn more about Christian perspectives on immigration from Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Lagniappe -- 2019 update

The pressure to harden the border has become much more intense. Many local residents in the borderlands continue to resist, on a bipartisan basis. See articles from Big Bend and Butterfly articles for just two of the many examples.

Dinero al Norte

Thanks to my colleague Vernon for pointing me to Marc Lacey's fascinating NY Times cover article about impoverished families in southern Mexico struggling to send money north to their relatives in the United States. Although the trend Lacey describes remains relatively small, this story is relevant to many key facets of migration between Latin America and the United States.

As I write this, I am enjoying a cup of decaf coffee from Chiapas, the home state of some of the families mentioned in the article. Although the article does not mention coffee, it is an important part of the background. People continue to leave coffee-growing areas because prices fluctuate between low and lower, so that even people who own their own land often work as virtual slaves. Since people in this position are not often represented at "free" trade negotiations, their options become fewer year by year. Nobody should complain about "illegal" immigration before thoroughly understanding these dynamics, because the "legal" and "just" are divergent concepts. The same process is unfolding in coffeelands throughout the world; see these examples from Oaxaca and Chiapas, and know that a similar story is behind every cup of conventional coffee sold.

Back to the NY Times story: It was first brought to my attention when we were discussing the exodus of Brazilians from the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. As the U.S. dollar has weakened, many who moved to Massachusetts in order to bring or send money back to Brazil have decided to leave. In many cases, these have been middle-class Brazilians who saw coming to this region for a year or two as an expedient way to earn money to invest in a business or a nicer home in Brazil. When the U.S. economy weakened, many of these folks found their way back home, revealing the extent to which some sectors of the Massachusetts economy had become dependent upon them.

The case in Mexico is similar in some ways, except that the migrants tend to be much poorer, and the ability to move back and forth is much reduced. An ironic consequence of the poorly-conceived border wall is that crossing once is so risky that people will remain in the U.S. who in previous years might have gone home. As Lacey points out, this is not an option for people who have risked everything for a chance to earn money in the North.

For some families of Oaxaca and Chiapas, the result of these current absurdities is that undocumented workers in the richest country in the world are receiving small payments from some of the poorest people in Mexico, hoping to keep them in place until the economy improves. Eventually, they hope, the work that U.S. citizens usually eschew will be available to them once again, and the remittances will resume their usual pattern.

Just like Arlo

I was reminded of Alice's Restaurant when I read this article about Walt Staton, a fellow member of the UU church of Tucson being arrested for "littering" in the context of civil disobedience related to something much bigger. In Arlo's case, the war was in Vietnam; today it is much closer to home: a war on peasants. Politicians -- even "Christian" politicians -- grandstand about things they do not understand, and people die as a result.

Actually, we are not exactly "fellow members" in the literal sense. Staton is a young divinity student who attends the UU Church of Tucson, Arizona, where Pam and I were active members in the early 1990s. In those days, the church was pre-occupied with its own internal squabbles. I am glad to see that the membership has turned its attention back to making a difference in the lives of real people. Before our time, in the Reagan years, this church put itself on the line for refugees during the Sanctuary Movement against Reagan's criminal policies in Central America. Today, the church is once again taking a stand, on behalf of the victims of a misguided war on undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America.

In the 1980s, people were fleeing civil wars that were often funded by the United States; then they would be deported if they sought asylum here. Today, the causes of migration are somewhat less severe, but the consquences of crossing the border can be much worse. People are fleeing economic catastrophes rather than wars. Economic pain in Mexico and Central America benefits U.S. consumers who enjoy cheap coffee, cheap clothing, cheap radios and televisions, cheap corn, cheap ... fill in the blank. The relationships are complex, but the short version is that if rich consumers are getting something for less than it should cost, a poor person somewhere is making up the difference.

From living in the border zones of Arizona and Texas for a total of seven years, we learned that the area within about 100 miles of the border is more like a third country than it is Mexico or the United States. Anti-migrant sentiment (which flares up with every recession like a fish rising to bait) has in this instance focused like a laser on the center of that broad swath of land.

Politicians and pundits from far away have sliced the border zone in half with giant walls, creating even more problems. First, walls are built with regard only to political boundaries and not with any regard to cultural, economic, or ecological connections. Impoverishing the border region is no way to solve immigration problems. Second, the walls can actually contribute to longer migrant stays in the United States, as many of those who survive the ordeal are not inclined to repeat it. Third, the walls have been built to block relatively easy crossings, deflecting migration to the most hostile lands. The migrants, however, do not understand this and the coyote smugglers do not care.

The result is that hard-working, ambitious people who have paid thousands of dollars for safe passage across the border find themselves abandoned in the harshest environments in North America. Many, many have died, and people of conscience intervene. They are not encouraging migration, since they are ameliorating a problem that the migrants do not even know about. They are not smuggling; indeed, they are trying to stop the deaths of those who have been victimized by smuggling.

Since the article was published, Staton has been sentenced to community service -- 300 hours picking up litter -- and one year of probation. Further developments will be posted at No More Deaths.

What does this story have to do with geography? Everything. Complex and imbalanced economic relationships drive the migration. An even more severe imbalance exists between quasi-military strategists in the United States and their impoverished adversaries, in terms of access to geographic information about the border region. And lack of geographic education about the border contributes to political support for policies that do not serve the national interest.

Immigrant bashing

Talk-radio host Jay Severin has been suspended from Boston radio station WTKK, for racist comments related to the current flu outbreak. His hate speech is the predictable result of a perfect storm to brew xenophobia: in a country that knows little about math and less about geography, a disease outbreak during an economic collapse create perfect scapegoats.

Taking Severin off the air, of course, only draws attention (this post included) to his vitriol. The incident creates a perfect opportunity, however, to address the four underlying factors mentioned above.

First, math: the flu outbreak is serious and the numbers are growing. Public-health officials in the U.S., Mexico, and beyond are rightly concerned and are making recommendations about specific, short-term measures based on evidence. Within two countries covering several million square miles and 400 million people, however, it is important to recognize that most people and most places are safe, at least for now.

Second, geography: Severin's comments reflect a deep failure to understand the interdependencies of the United States and Mexico. I lived for seven years in the borderlands of Arizona and Texas, and have spent several months in Mexico itself. I learned that we are connected in many ways, most of them positive. I also learned that just as some problems in both countries are related. Migration from Mexico may surpress wages in the United States, but drug policies and weak gun laws in the U.S. elevate crime in Mexico.

Third, disease: Because epidemics are inherently scary and difficult to understand, fear and ignorance thrive.

Fourth, economy: Prosperity in rich countries is absolutely dependent on low wages in poor countries. We who prosper work hard, so the illusion is created that we deserve our prosperity and that those who are poor must not be working. The reality is that excessive prosperity in one place requires poverty elsewhere. The economic problems of the middle and working class in the United States are clearly -- CLEARLY -- the fault of giving too much power to the super-rich. It is easiest, however, to blame the poor for our problems, and this is what Severin has done.

Severin and his ilk serve the interests of the super-rich by shifting attention from the real criminals -- at banks and brokerages -- to the "criminal" behavior of economic migrants. When the economy rebounds, the high dudgeon will cease until the next time a scapegoat is needed. And when that happens bottom-feeders will stand ready to exploit the fear and ignorance once again.