The crossing: as the U.S. cracks down on the main illegal entry points, more migrants are taking their chances in the desert. A reporter makes the trek with one group.

It is our second night in the Arizona desert. We're hungry and tired. Our throats ache and burn with dust. But we keep on, tramping through the cactus and nettles toward an unseen highway where our guide says a ride will be waiting. The men I'm with are trying to escape the poverty of Mexico for the promised land of Farmingville, New York, where a laborer can make $10 to $15 per hour instead of per day. I've come along to find out how they do it, and what drives them to risk such a perilous journey.

We crawl under a cattle fence, cross over the highway, and under another fence. There, waiting, stand two Mexicans with pistols in their waistbands.

"Take off your clothes," they order in Spanish. They rifle through the pockets and check the linings for money, as we stand nearly naked in the biting desert air. The bandits tell us to dress, leave our bags, and walk back the way we came.

When we return later, the bandits are gone. We gather our belongings off the desert floor. We've missed our ride, the guide says. We'll have to camp and walk a third night, another 25 miles, to the next pickup spot. We take shelter beneath a spiny tree.

"I'm so cold," says Eduardo Cervantes, 19, his teeth rattling. "I told my father I didn't want to do this."

"You're a Mexican," says his friend, Mario Huerta. "What else can you do?"

Faced with that same question, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans attempt to cross the border illegally into the United States each year. Many don't make it. As the U.S. Border Patrol has damped down on the traditional border-jumping towns of San Diego, California, and El Paso and Laredo, Texas, Mexicans desperate for work have been willing to try the more dangerous route through Arizona's Sonoran Desert. The Border Patrol arrested 272,397 of them in this area in 1997. Last year, the number nearly tripled.

And they were the lucky ones--most of those arrested are eventually sent home. But an average of two people a day die trying to make the trip. On May 24, 14 people died of exposure on a desolate stretch of the Arizona desert, one of the deadliest illegal crossings in recent years.

THE STARTING POINT 

The Lopez Portillo neighborhood of Mexico City is a swamp filled in with earth and stone. The streets are dirt; the people keep cows or horses. But some 25 new homes are being built there with money earned in America. One belongs to Eduardo's family.

His father, Lalo, is proud of the redbrick structure with curved windows. Lalo Cervantes, 38, a slick man who speaks English well, is directly responsible for bringing 50 men from Mexico City to Long Island. Those men, in turn, have brought perhaps 200 more. Cervantes knows the contractors on Long Island. He knows which used-car salesmen in Phoenix will speed the migrants on their way and where to get legitimate birth certificates for illegitimate purposes. His efforts, although illegal, have bought a better life and a new house for his family in Mexico.

"You know, man, when I die they can't say bad things about me," he says. "I built this. I did something good."

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

It's April, late in the season for migrant workers. Farmingville is already full up with them, some just 15 or 16 years old. But Eduardo and Mario pile into Lalo Cervantes's Ford and head from Mexico City toward the border town of Agua Prieta, 1,200 miles north.

With luck, the entire journey will take two weeks. While Eduardo and Mario sneak across the border, Lalo Cervantes will drive through. He has an agricultural work visa. It is his visa and his connections that make smuggling possible. He also plans to take along his sister, brother, cousin, and brother-in-law. They have already crossed and are waiting in Phoenix.

Cervantes explains to his son that he is going to show him the ropes, how to make a double life in America, and introduce him to the right people. Eduardo is tall and sickly, and has blond streaks in his hair. He left school at 14 and has few job prospects besides the neighborhood car wash. Mario, 25, has an easy sense of humor and a pregnant wife at home. Between them, the men have the car and about $2,000.

VISIONS OF AMERICA

Eduardo has been to Farmingville once before and didn't like it much. On the way across the border, he had gotten lost when his group was attacked by bandits. He wandered for two days without water before the smuggler came back and found him.

And Farmingville, like many American cities with large numbers of immigrants, has mixed feelings about them. Some people feel as if their town has been invaded. Some picket the street corners where Mexicans wait for a day's work building a house or landscaping a yard. Last year, two Mexicans, lured by the promise of jobs, were taken to an abandoned building and beaten with work tools. News of the attack made it all the way down to Lopez.

After two days, the Ford rolls into Agua Prieta, the brakes squealing and the transmission burping thin smoke. Agua Prieta is a dusty city of 100,000 that doubled in size over the last five years as American companies opened factories there, and the U.S. Border Patrol all but shut down the usual crossing points for illegal immigrants. The avenues are lined with rundown guest houses that shelter the hopefuls before they make their walk across the desert.

Lalo Cervantes stops at a seedy hotel and knocks on a door. A man with a shaved head and boils on his neck answers. He is Pancho, the coyote, the kingpin of the smuggling ring. He says tougher policing means he now takes only 10 to 12 in a group instead of 50 to 100. And he charges $800 for the trip to Phoenix, up from $650 last year. He promises Cervantes that he will put his best man on the job, his cousin Placas. "Your people will be safe," Pancho says.

Guides like Placas do the actual walking across the desert and are paid $75 per pollo--chicken, as migrants are called. Pancho says the trip will be 50 miles and take two evenings to walk.

Eduardo is nervous. "I don't want to do this," he says once outside the hotel. "My heart is pounding."

We drive to a guest house with a dozen awful-smelling beds, a television, a shrine to the Virgin, and three toilets, where we kill four days watching television, sleeping, and drinking chocolate milk. The night of the crossing, we take a taxi about 20 minutes into the desert. The driver stops at a turnoff, says "Good luck," and disappears.

Without a word, Placas, the guide, emerges from the weeds. The sun is setting. There are perhaps 80 shadows there, and Placas commands 10. We all carry plastic milk jugs filled with water.

Placas, 21, is lean, tough, and tattooed. He runs his chickens hard, through the dark desert, over railroad tracks, through cactuses and thickets that rip at the skin. One man falls and his jug of water explodes. He turns back. He would never make it without water.

There is no more steel fence this far out in the desert. The border is marked by barbed wire and an eight-foot trench, nothing more. We climb through it and run for the hills. The first night, we walk 10 hours over the mountains, groping and injuring ourselves and avoiding the spotlights of Border Patrol agents who roam the frontier in all-terrain vehicles. Eduardo is sure-footed. Mario labors and stumbles, but never complains. The desert is cold. The moon rises and sits in the clouds like a pearl in velvet.

ROAST CHICKENS

Near sunrise, Placas thinks he hears ranchers, men who a year ago held his charges at gunpoint until immigration officials could arrive to arrest them. He tells his chickens to take shelter under the scrub and wait out the sun. All around is the refuse of mass migration: clothes, bottles, wrappers, cans. The air is hot and still, the ground dry and baked. There are no birds, no wind. Only the sun and the ants move.

Eduardo sits under a sage bush, wondering when he'll be coming home. Mario thinks about his wife. It's hard being a Mexican, he says. Your own country is corrupt and across the border is a life of solitude.

MEN WITH BAD HAIRCUTS

By the second night, after the robbery, there is little food or water. The flies are terrible. Some of the migrants are convinced Placas double-crossed them. "How could the bandits have found us in the middle of the desert?" says a man named Felipe.

Late into the third evening the moon rises, casting a bright light down upon us. We crawl through an open field around the sleeping outskirts of Benson, Arizona, and wait for the ride. We lie on the desert floor, shivering. Some of the men curse Placas; if they don't make it tonight, it looks like jail.

Finally the truck arrives. Its windows are painted black and the drivers are Mexican. They have bad haircuts and drive 100 miles an hour down the country roads. They make it to the highway, avoiding the immigration checkpoints. The men in back are battered, hungry, and happy.

The truck skids into the parking lot of a restaurant in southern Phoenix.

The Crossing

The hatch flips open. And there stands Lalo Cervantes, with tears in his eyes.

Instead of paying the coyote $800 a head to drive his people to New York, as many do, Lalo Cervantes goes to a used-car salesman he knows, a Mexican, in south Phoenix. He chooses a white Chrysler white looks pure and family-like, he says. The price is $900, including license plates and a 24-hour head start before the salesman calls the Department of Motor Vehicles to cancel the plates. The drive across the U.S. takes three days because Cervantes insists on a circuitous route avoiding Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and St. Louis because, he says, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has checkpoints in those towns. We spend a half-day replacing two blown tires.

Lalo's brother, Oscar, a scrawny peasant with a sleepy expression that makes him look drunk, is the most conspicuous. He wears dirty clothes and wanders stupidly around the gas stations. Lalo's brother-in-law drives erratically, but the others are too frightened to drive at all.

TROUBLE IN NEW JERSEY

It's dark in New Jersey when the car overheats. "I told you to keep an eye on the temperature!" Cervantes yells at his brother-in-law as they stand on the side of the highway, staring at the motor. "Listen, stupid, New Jersey is the worst state in America. The police don't like brown faces here!" With that, the smoking car packed with illegals drives slowly into New York. They spend their last coins on a toll for the bridge.

We reach Farmingville at 2 a.m. The beds are all taken. We sleep on the floor.

The next morning on the corner starts the way it always starts, at 7 a.m., with 200 men waiting for the chance to work. Eduardo and Mario have prearranged jobs that will start on Monday. They come to the corner to watch.

A landscaper pulls up. Lalo Cervantes negotiates a deal for his cousin and brother-in-law: $10 an hour for a roofing job. In twos and threes, the men go to work. By 9 a.m., there isn't a Mexican man standing on the corner of Farmingville, U.S.A.

The Crossing, The Changing Face of America FOCUS: A Dangerous Journey Reveals a New Facet of Immigration Today

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand how immigration is changing the United States, and why some illegal immigrants from Mexico risk death in a 4,000-mile trek to seek work in a New York City suburb.

Discussion Questions:

* Has immigration affected your school or community? If so, in what ways?

* Some critics of illegal immigration suggest that the U.S. military be posted on the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border to keep illegal immigrants out. Do you agree? Why or why not?

* Why did the Border Patrol clamp down on traditional border-jumping towns? Were there unintended consequences?

* Is the U.S. responsible for those who die trying to enter the country illegally?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Background: Students should understand (1) the difference between legal and illegal immigration, and (2) the fact that even legal immigration has long stirred controversy. Use the article "Destination: America" on page 28 and the time line on page 30 to explore the history of immigration.

Debate: On balance, do immigrants help or hurt the U.S. economy? Students may debate this question using the facts listed in "Show Me the Money," on page 17.

Issues in "The Crossing": Why, if construction is booming in Farmingville, don't U.S. citizens get the jobs? Should construction companies be prosecuted for hiring illegal immigrants? President Bush once said that if a man needs food for his family and there is a job across the border, nothing will stop him. What does this suggest about stopping illegal immigration?

Interview 1: Are there any immigrants in the student body? If so, invite a few to meet informally to discuss their family's experience. Why did they come to the U.S.? How did they get here? Is the U.S. different from what they expected? How have they been treated by Americans?

Interview 2: Students can interview family members--or consult any available letters or family records--and report back to the class. How does their immigrant ancestors' experience differ from that of today's immigrants?

Web Watch: The Center for Immigration Studies seeks to limit immigration: www.cis.org The National Immigration Forum supports legal immigration: www.immigrationforum.org. See also upfrontmagazine.com

RELATED ARTICLE: Beefing up the border.

The recent death of 14 Mexican migrants in the scorching Arizona desert has renewed debate over the United States' crackdown on Illegal immigration.

The U.S. spends some $2 billion annually to build walls and post 24-hour patrols, trying to stem the tide of illegal immigrants. But every year, at least 300,000 immigrants enter the country illegally or overstay their legal visas.

Once inside this country, however, illegal immigrants are highly prized by employers strapped for labor, particularly hotels, restaurants, landscapers, and meat-packing plants. So long as this job magnet exists, policymakers acknowledge that migrants will take extraordinary risks to improve their lives. "If you hold out the prospect that if they just get across the border, it's the land of milk and honey, then naturally people will try things that are dangerous," says Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

Ground zero in this struggle is the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has adopted a strategy of beefing up security in urban areas. The approach was first used in the early 1990s in El Paso, Texas, and later in San Diego, California, where it was called Operation Gatekeeper. Arrests of immigrants trying to enter illegally have declined at these large border crossings, but most experts agree that the strategy has merely forced immigrants and their smugglers to push further out into harsh desert and rugged mountains to elude the Border Patrol.

While President Bush has expressed sorrow for the migrants who died, he has not altered his plan to increase the Border Patrol by 1,140 agents over the next two years. If Congress approves, the number of guards will reach 11,000 by 2003, a doubling in personnel in six years.

But is this a responsible policy? Critics say enforcement on the border is only effective if the job magnet is removed. One way would be to increase raids on American employers who hire illegal workers, a tactic denounced by most communities as harmful to their economy.

Another solution, advocated by Mexico's new President, Vicente Fox, is to channel those migrants into a temporary guest-worker program, which would allow farmworkers and other laborers to live and work in the United States for a year and then return home. The plan faces serious hurdles in Congress, and American and Mexican officials continue to discuss the details.

--Eric Schmitt

CHARLIE LEDUFF is a reporter for The Times.