Borderline

For a soulless city, Phoenix certainly has an interesting airport. The last time I was here, supposedly on business, I had my boarding pass issued by a vampire and found myself being herded through security by an official dressed as a giant chicken. Then it was Halloween, but here we are on an ordinary June afternoon and circumstances seem no less strange. I am stuck in a lift between arrivals and car rental with a Mexican cradling a large, foul-smelling ice chest in his arms.

What’s in the box? I ask.

‘A feesh,’ he whispers, ‘for my wife and children. I catch him in Veracruz.’

A sea bass, you understand, will not be the only thing smuggled out of Mexico today. Illegal immigration has shot to the top of the US political agenda and with a view to researching a documentary on the subject, I am, along with two colleagues, heading down to the Mexican border to talk to the disparate factions who stand on opposing sides of this increasingly bitter front line.

Phoenix is in the grip of a dust storm. Palm trees bent double by the wind deposit dried fronds across the windscreen of our pick-up truck. The burnished copper façade of the Fiesta Inn glints under a yellowing sky. A more discriminating critic might question the wisdom of building a metallic hotel in such a blisteringly hot place, but I have a soft spot for these kinds of mid-western hotels. In fact I have a soft spot for anywhere that promises me a queen bed and a coffee machine for $65 a night. The Fiesta Inn, as it happens, has even loftier ambitions, billing itself as a ‘resort’ and, sure enough, as we lug boom and tripod through a pair of clanking industrial gates, we pass a mildly depressed couple sitting at a table sipping beer from Styrofoam cups while husks of desiccated vegetation float in the pool beside them.