Thread: {Sob}This is the good life?

This is the good life? Area's illegal immigrants tell why coming to America is worth the perils
By Thacher Schmid
Jun 23, 2007 - 11:23:29 pm PDT

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For one of Cowlitz County's illegal immigrants, fear first appeared in the form of extreme hunger, during a life-threatening journey across the treacherous Sonoran desert. Nowadays, it's a trip to the local Safeway.

Antonia Abendano said she was twice abandoned by "coyote" guides in the Sonoran desert while illegally crossing into the U.S. On her first journey, which ended in deportation, Abendano said she took refuge in an Indian's hut, living for 25 days on nothing but coffee and water.

A Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on a Fresh Del Monte warehouse in Portland last week brought the realities of America's illegal immigrants back to the forefront and sent shock waves through local Latino communities. Like the 160 workers hauled off to Tacoma from the chilly confines of the Portland warehouse, local undocumented immigrants often work tough jobs for low pay, and maintain a low profile.

Meanwhile, President Bush, in a marriage of convenience with Democratic Congressional leaders such as Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has been pushing the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which would provide a complicated, multifaceted amnesty for illegal immigrants -- if passed. Many details remain to be worked out.

Locally, as across the nation, the illegal immigrant's existence is a parallel world of sorts, still, and a clear picture of Cowlitz County's hundreds, or thousands, of indocumentados, as illegal immigrants are often called in Spanish, is hard to come by.

U.S. Census estimates put illegal immigrants in the U.S. at 11.1 million -- Washington and Oregon combined are 375,000 -- but the census is notorious for undercounting -- and misidentifying -- this population. The subject is so sensitive locally, many won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

"We have people, yes," Courtney Langner, director of the Ethnic Support Council, said when asked if her agency serves undocumented immigrants. Asked for details, Langner said, "I do not feel comfortable answering that question."

What is clear is that as long as it's a question of survival and basic quality of life, Mexican immigrants -- like earlier waves of immigrants decades or centuries ago -- are willing to risk their very lives to come to America. Perhaps emboldened by large pro-immigrant rallies across the country, some local indocumentados are also willing to tell their stories, on the record.

Abendano and Irma Hernandez sat in Abendano's living room in south Cowlitz County for two hours last week to describe their migrations and lives. Speaking in Spanish, they said they see amnesty as an important step to acculturation and normalizing their lives, and seeing themselves as Americans, rather than Mexicans.


Different paths

Abendano, 32, and Hernandez, 35, hail from the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Sinaloa, respectively, and both travelled through California. Both women emigrated in their mid-20s with almost no money and few family members or friends here. In other respects, their stories diverge.

Abendano grew up in a poor village near Rio Alazan in Oaxaca, a mountainous Pacific state that is the birthplace of chocolate. She can't even talk with her parents on a phone unless they travel to the city of Oaxaca, "four hours on foot," she said.

"We never had any money, just what we could grow: corn, beans," Abendano said. She said burros or donkeys are used as transport for bringing basics such as sugar, soap, or ham to the town.

In 1999, already a few weeks pregnant, she left with then-partner Mateo Rodriguez on March 17 to cross the dangerous, mountainous Sonora desert, paying $200 apiece for their guide, or "coyote." Her group of 16 ran out of food and water after two days and two nights of unceasing travel on foot, she said, and the "coyote" disappeared. Twelve in her group were captured by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

She and the other three, including Rodriguez, wandered until they found an Indian's hut, where Abendano said she stayed for "25 days" -- she insists it was that long -- living on nothing but coffee and water. Remembering this traumatic time -- exaggerated, perhaps -- the soft-spoken woman began crying.

"That's the truth that I lived when I came up here."

The Indian spoke no Spanish, she said, but one of her group was able to speak a little English. The Indian's friend eventually drove the group to Tuczon, Ariz. "He was drunk," Abendano said, shaking her head. Arizona police stopped the car, and Abendano was deported to Nogales, Mexico.

After working throughout April and May in Culiacan, Sinaloa, the north Mexican state Hernandez comes from, Abendano tried the journey again -- this time succeeding.

"The second time, the same thing happened, (the coyote) left us in the desert," she said. But Abendano brought more water, she said, plus apples, lemons and cucumbers. The lost group -- 12 people, this time -- was again helped by Indians who lived in the area, who drove them into Phoenix and left them in a public park near the end of May.

After spending the night in an old abandoned house, Abendano and a friend, Eusebio Aparicio, returned to the park. A Phoenix man opened his home to them for a week, providing food and clothing. Friends in Oregon wired $400, and the pair headed to California.

"I came to know Disneyland"

Whereas Abendano's story invokes images of searing heat, rattlesnakes and brushes with death, Hernandez's involves a different, but no less American, cliche: She has overstayed a vacation visa to Disneyland -- 10 years and counting.

"I came to know Disneyland," Hernandez said, a broad smile revealing braces. Hernandez said she decided in 1997 not to go back while on her third trip to the U.S. and made the decision despite having no money. Hernandez said she had a few family members in Los Angeles, and got married shortly after moving -- to another undocumented immigrant, Ramon Hernandez, who could offer no gift of citizenship.

"I left my profession as a dentist," she said wistfully, noting that she is unable to work as a dentist here because she has no visa and the educational requirements are higher.

"I think about going back, but the years go by," she said.

Hernandez's story is unusual because comparatively few Mexicans can get vacation visas, particularly now. Mexicans often risk their lives crossing after comparing the fabulous stories of wealth and riches told by returning natives. Abendano said she was earning 250 pesos or about $25 per week in Culiacan. Pay for illegal immigrants in this country, while not great, is exponentially better. A manager at an area farm estimated that workers, all of whom are paid by weight of what they harvest, received about $8.25 per hour on average -- though the best workers could make as much as $14 per hour. All were working 12-hour days.

The fear of possible deportation, like the difficulties of illegal crossings, is part of the disillusionment that often happens.

"I thought it would all be very easy, coming here, but with what I went through, it wasn't," Abendano said.

After working several weeks boxing grapes in California -- "I didn't like it there, too hot," she said -- Abendano came to Cowlitz County. Her first few months she slept in what she described as a big room, provided by an employer, with "about 50" people stacked in bunk beds. Then she moved to the floor of a nearby fertilizer storage space, Abendano's oldest child Damian was born, and she was able to get a small room.

Soon after, Abendano obtained work at Foster Farms in Kelso, she said. She showed a reporter a remarkably authentic-looking Social Security card and an old laminated Foster Farms ID, employee #91749. Abendano said she was let go by the company in 2004, after five years' employ, when the company found out her documents were not valid. She now has four children and has studied English for one year.


Fear bookends life

While they have been able to grow roots in a local Mexican-American community that provides some support, and attend Spanish-language services at an area church, Abendano and Hernandez both said they live with constant fear when doing simple things, like going to the grocery store. The feeling is linked with near-constant anonymity, compounded by using fake documents.

"You can't just go out on the street," Abendano said. "If I have to go to the Safeway for milk, I go quickly and leave the children with my partner." Abendano admitted her first years as an illegal immigrant here were marked by frustration and depression.

The two women's willingness to speak frankly to a reporter, however, reflects the fact that for better or worse, they consider themselves part of the community and have no plans to leave. The reality is, the ICE is unable to deport more than a fraction of undocumented immigrants, and rare, large-scale actions like the Portland raid often come with a backlash against the agency. After the Del Monte raid, Portland Mayor Tom Potter personally criticized the ICE. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost to deport all 12 million illegal immigrants would be $250 billion.

ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers of the agency's Seattle-based region, which includes Washington, Oregon and Alaska, pointed out that agents based in Portland and Seattle "travel throughout the (area)," but said she is "not aware of any" ICE offices in the Lower Columbia area. The agency could not provide figures for 2007, but ICE data for the three-state region shows that in 2006 the agency removed 4,674 illegal immigrants, 2,055 of whom were criminals, slightly higher than in previous years.

Is there a connection between criminal behavior and illegal border crossings? Police apprehension is one of the most common roads to deportation, as the ICE data suggests. But any larger connection is dubious given the small percentage of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes -- in the case of Washington and Oregon, about 2,000 of an estimated 300,000.

"When we have a situation where workers who are processing the fruit and vegetables we eat are treated like criminals, it really speaks to a system that is broken," said Erica Steinbauer of Causa, an immigrants rights group in Portland.


Farm migration now one-way

Traditionally, migrant farm work has accounted for a large percentage of illegal immigration by Mexicans into this country -- the first migrant farm workers were actually bused in by California agribusiness owners from Mexico around World War I, as the U.S. and California governments essentially looked the other way. With increasingly tight border security, however, fewer now risk returning to Mexico.

"For farmworkers, they're frustrated," said Steve Witte, director of the Pacific Northwest office of the United Farm Workers, which has a long history of advocacy for undocumented immigrants going back to its founder, Cesar Chavez. "They're hardworking folks, they don't want to cause any problems."

Jerry Dobbins, owner of Dobbins Berry Farm in Woodland, has been to Mexico and was astonished by the poverty there. Emphasizing that no one except Mexican immigrants has "hit me up" for work picking berries in the last three years -- though he said non-Hispanic teens have asked for other kinds of work -- Dobbins said he'd like to see "something doable for a guest worker program" that would allow migrants to return to Mexico.

Dobbins, like virtually all businesses that may employ illegal immigrants, says he checks all workers' legal status. "It's not up to me to prove the authenticity of these papers," Dobbins said. He speaks highly of the workers in his employ and sees the group as humble, and highly motivated.

"I'm not saying their being here illegally gives them rights," Dobbins said, "but they're doing this for the survival of their families."

"Everyone can look the other way, but that's silly," said Benno Dobbe, owner of Holland America, another Woodland farm, which also checks papers. "If by any chance there are undocumented workers coming into this country, whose fault is it? The government is a big problem in this whole situation. They keep moving this issue forward without addressing it responsibly.

"I'm not going to blame anyone," Dobbe said, saying that immigrants do work others generally won't. "I'm just getting people on the farm that are willing to do the work on the farm, and I'm very pleased to be able to offer the work to them."


Amnesty's promise

In the end, many illegal immigrants say, the hardest part of their illegal status is being cut off from their roots. This is where the idea of amnesty comes in. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 being debated in Congress, if it passes, would not simply legalize millions of immigrants as President Reagan's 1987 amnesty law instantly did for 3.7 million. While details are uncertain, the law includes a variety of provisions: Immigrants could be required to pay a sizeable fee and wait for many years before full citizenship; one bill (with the acronym DREAM Act) being discussed could offer immigrants who arrived as children and serve two years in U.S. armed forces temporary citizenship. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum have been critical of it, further underlining the contentiousness of the issue.

From where Hernandez and Abendano are sitting, anything that would allow them to reconnect with their parents, culture and traditions would be great.

"You feel like you're in someone else's country," Hernandez said, adding that she sees herself as Mexican "because I don't speak English that well." Hernandez did understand spoken English fairly well, however, and both she and Abendano smiled knowingly when asked if they had ever pretended not to understand English.

Would citizenship or temporary legal status make them feel more like Americans than Mexicans?

"I think so, because I wouldn't have to feel so afraid, and I'd be able to see my parents," Abendano said. "It's eight years since I saw them." Abendano said her parents are 71 and 72 years old and can't easily fend for themselves. "I have to send money to them for the basics," she said. (Abendano's partner Mateo Rodriguez and Hernandez's husband Ramon Hernandez provide the families' income, they said.)

"Yes, because in the first place, you could visit your family," Hernandez responded. "Second, I could work. Third, I could go to school. I'd have more benefits."

Asked about her use of publicly-funded benefits and services, Abendano said she has a card from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services which she uses to pay for the children's medical costs, but said neither she nor partner Mateo Rodriguez receive any public or government benefits. Hernandez mentioned possibly studying to work as a dentist. A trip back to Mexico would also allow her to eat foods she loves such as nopal, a kind of cactus, which she says she can't find here.

"We crossed for the American dream," said Arturo Sepulvera, a former migrant worker who works for UFW. "What we're really most concerned about is that (the proposed amnesty law) really benefits us."

"In the end, we don't come to commit crimes or be delinquents -- it's the opposite -- we're looking for a better life," Hernandez said.

This is the good life? Area's illegal immigrants tell why coming to America is worth the perils
By Thacher Schmid
Jun 23, 2007 - 11:23:29 pm PDT

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For one of Cowlitz County's illegal immigrants, fear first appeared in the form of extreme hunger, during a life-threatening journey across the treacherous Sonoran desert. Nowadays, it's a trip to the local Safeway.

Antonia Abendano said she was twice abandoned by "coyote" guides in the Sonoran desert while illegally crossing into the U.S. On her first journey, which ended in deportation, Abendano said she took refuge in an Indian's hut, living for 25 days on nothing but coffee and water.

A Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on a Fresh Del Monte warehouse in Portland last week brought the realities of America's illegal immigrants back to the forefront and sent shock waves through local Latino communities. Like the 160 workers hauled off to Tacoma from the chilly confines of the Portland warehouse, local undocumented immigrants often work tough jobs for low pay, and maintain a low profile.

Meanwhile, President Bush, in a marriage of convenience with Democratic Congressional leaders such as Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has been pushing the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which would provide a complicated, multifaceted amnesty for illegal immigrants -- if passed. Many details remain to be worked out.

Locally, as across the nation, the illegal immigrant's existence is a parallel world of sorts, still, and a clear picture of Cowlitz County's hundreds, or thousands, of indocumentados, as illegal immigrants are often called in Spanish, is hard to come by.

U.S. Census estimates put illegal immigrants in the U.S. at 11.1 million -- Washington and Oregon combined are 375,000 -- but the census is notorious for undercounting -- and misidentifying -- this population. The subject is so sensitive locally, many won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

"We have people, yes," Courtney Langner, director of the Ethnic Support Council, said when asked if her agency serves undocumented immigrants. Asked for details, Langner said, "I do not feel comfortable answering that question."

What is clear is that as long as it's a question of survival and basic quality of life, Mexican immigrants -- like earlier waves of immigrants decades or centuries ago -- are willing to risk their very lives to come to America. Perhaps emboldened by large pro-immigrant rallies across the country, some local indocumentados are also willing to tell their stories, on the record.

Abendano and Irma Hernandez sat in Abendano's living room in south Cowlitz County for two hours last week to describe their migrations and lives. Speaking in Spanish, they said they see amnesty as an important step to acculturation and normalizing their lives, and seeing themselves as Americans, rather than Mexicans.


Different paths

Abendano, 32, and Hernandez, 35, hail from the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Sinaloa, respectively, and both travelled through California. Both women emigrated in their mid-20s with almost no money and few family members or friends here. In other respects, their stories diverge.

Abendano grew up in a poor village near Rio Alazan in Oaxaca, a mountainous Pacific state that is the birthplace of chocolate. She can't even talk with her parents on a phone unless they travel to the city of Oaxaca, "four hours on foot," she said.

"We never had any money, just what we could grow: corn, beans," Abendano said. She said burros or donkeys are used as transport for bringing basics such as sugar, soap, or ham to the town.

In 1999, already a few weeks pregnant, she left with then-partner Mateo Rodriguez on March 17 to cross the dangerous, mountainous Sonora desert, paying $200 apiece for their guide, or "coyote." Her group of 16 ran out of food and water after two days and two nights of unceasing travel on foot, she said, and the "coyote" disappeared. Twelve in her group were captured by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

She and the other three, including Rodriguez, wandered until they found an Indian's hut, where Abendano said she stayed for "25 days" -- she insists it was that long -- living on nothing but coffee and water. Remembering this traumatic time -- exaggerated, perhaps -- the soft-spoken woman began crying.

"That's the truth that I lived when I came up here."

The Indian spoke no Spanish, she said, but one of her group was able to speak a little English. The Indian's friend eventually drove the group to Tuczon, Ariz. "He was drunk," Abendano said, shaking her head. Arizona police stopped the car, and Abendano was deported to Nogales, Mexico.

After working throughout April and May in Culiacan, Sinaloa, the north Mexican state Hernandez comes from, Abendano tried the journey again -- this time succeeding.

"The second time, the same thing happened, (the coyote) left us in the desert," she said. But Abendano brought more water, she said, plus apples, lemons and cucumbers. The lost group -- 12 people, this time -- was again helped by Indians who lived in the area, who drove them into Phoenix and left them in a public park near the end of May.

After spending the night in an old abandoned house, Abendano and a friend, Eusebio Aparicio, returned to the park. A Phoenix man opened his home to them for a week, providing food and clothing. Friends in Oregon wired $400, and the pair headed to California.

"I came to know Disneyland"

Whereas Abendano's story invokes images of searing heat, rattlesnakes and brushes with death, Hernandez's involves a different, but no less American, cliche: She has overstayed a vacation visa to Disneyland -- 10 years and counting.

"I came to know Disneyland," Hernandez said, a broad smile revealing braces. Hernandez said she decided in 1997 not to go back while on her third trip to the U.S. and made the decision despite having no money. Hernandez said she had a few family members in Los Angeles, and got married shortly after moving -- to another undocumented immigrant, Ramon Hernandez, who could offer no gift of citizenship.

"I left my profession as a dentist," she said wistfully, noting that she is unable to work as a dentist here because she has no visa and the educational requirements are higher.

"I think about going back, but the years go by," she said.

Hernandez's story is unusual because comparatively few Mexicans can get vacation visas, particularly now. Mexicans often risk their lives crossing after comparing the fabulous stories of wealth and riches told by returning natives. Abendano said she was earning 250 pesos or about $25 per week in Culiacan. Pay for illegal immigrants in this country, while not great, is exponentially better. A manager at an area farm estimated that workers, all of whom are paid by weight of what they harvest, received about $8.25 per hour on average -- though the best workers could make as much as $14 per hour. All were working 12-hour days.

The fear of possible deportation, like the difficulties of illegal crossings, is part of the disillusionment that often happens.

"I thought it would all be very easy, coming here, but with what I went through, it wasn't," Abendano said.

After working several weeks boxing grapes in California -- "I didn't like it there, too hot," she said -- Abendano came to Cowlitz County. Her first few months she slept in what she described as a big room, provided by an employer, with "about 50" people stacked in bunk beds. Then she moved to the floor of a nearby fertilizer storage space, Abendano's oldest child Damian was born, and she was able to get a small room.

Soon after, Abendano obtained work at Foster Farms in Kelso, she said. She showed a reporter a remarkably authentic-looking Social Security card and an old laminated Foster Farms ID, employee #91749. Abendano said she was let go by the company in 2004, after five years' employ, when the company found out her documents were not valid. She now has four children and has studied English for one year.


Fear bookends life

While they have been able to grow roots in a local Mexican-American community that provides some support, and attend Spanish-language services at an area church, Abendano and Hernandez both said they live with constant fear when doing simple things, like going to the grocery store. The feeling is linked with near-constant anonymity, compounded by using fake documents.

"You can't just go out on the street," Abendano said. "If I have to go to the Safeway for milk, I go quickly and leave the children with my partner." Abendano admitted her first years as an illegal immigrant here were marked by frustration and depression.

The two women's willingness to speak frankly to a reporter, however, reflects the fact that for better or worse, they consider themselves part of the community and have no plans to leave. The reality is, the ICE is unable to deport more than a fraction of undocumented immigrants, and rare, large-scale actions like the Portland raid often come with a backlash against the agency. After the Del Monte raid, Portland Mayor Tom Potter personally criticized the ICE. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost to deport all 12 million illegal immigrants would be $250 billion.

ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers of the agency's Seattle-based region, which includes Washington, Oregon and Alaska, pointed out that agents based in Portland and Seattle "travel throughout the (area)," but said she is "not aware of any" ICE offices in the Lower Columbia area. The agency could not provide figures for 2007, but ICE data for the three-state region shows that in 2006 the agency removed 4,674 illegal immigrants, 2,055 of whom were criminals, slightly higher than in previous years.

Is there a connection between criminal behavior and illegal border crossings? Police apprehension is one of the most common roads to deportation, as the ICE data suggests. But any larger connection is dubious given the small percentage of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes -- in the case of Washington and Oregon, about 2,000 of an estimated 300,000.

"When we have a situation where workers who are processing the fruit and vegetables we eat are treated like criminals, it really speaks to a system that is broken," said Erica Steinbauer of Causa, an immigrants rights group in Portland.


Farm migration now one-way

Traditionally, migrant farm work has accounted for a large percentage of illegal immigration by Mexicans into this country -- the first migrant farm workers were actually bused in by California agribusiness owners from Mexico around World War I, as the U.S. and California governments essentially looked the other way. With increasingly tight border security, however, fewer now risk returning to Mexico.

"For farmworkers, they're frustrated," said Steve Witte, director of the Pacific Northwest office of the United Farm Workers, which has a long history of advocacy for undocumented immigrants going back to its founder, Cesar Chavez. "They're hardworking folks, they don't want to cause any problems."

Jerry Dobbins, owner of Dobbins Berry Farm in Woodland, has been to Mexico and was astonished by the poverty there. Emphasizing that no one except Mexican immigrants has "hit me up" for work picking berries in the last three years -- though he said non-Hispanic teens have asked for other kinds of work -- Dobbins said he'd like to see "something doable for a guest worker program" that would allow migrants to return to Mexico.

Dobbins, like virtually all businesses that may employ illegal immigrants, says he checks all workers' legal status. "It's not up to me to prove the authenticity of these papers," Dobbins said. He speaks highly of the workers in his employ and sees the group as humble, and highly motivated.

"I'm not saying their being here illegally gives them rights," Dobbins said, "but they're doing this for the survival of their families."

"Everyone can look the other way, but that's silly," said Benno Dobbe, owner of Holland America, another Woodland farm, which also checks papers. "If by any chance there are undocumented workers coming into this country, whose fault is it? The government is a big problem in this whole situation. They keep moving this issue forward without addressing it responsibly.

"I'm not going to blame anyone," Dobbe said, saying that immigrants do work others generally won't. "I'm just getting people on the farm that are willing to do the work on the farm, and I'm very pleased to be able to offer the work to them."


Amnesty's promise

In the end, many illegal immigrants say, the hardest part of their illegal status is being cut off from their roots. This is where the idea of amnesty comes in. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 being debated in Congress, if it passes, would not simply legalize millions of immigrants as President Reagan's 1987 amnesty law instantly did for 3.7 million. While details are uncertain, the law includes a variety of provisions: Immigrants could be required to pay a sizeable fee and wait for many years before full citizenship; one bill (with the acronym DREAM Act) being discussed could offer immigrants who arrived as children and serve two years in U.S. armed forces temporary citizenship. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum have been critical of it, further underlining the contentiousness of the issue.

From where Hernandez and Abendano are sitting, anything that would allow them to reconnect with their parents, culture and traditions would be great.

"You feel like you're in someone else's country," Hernandez said, adding that she sees herself as Mexican "because I don't speak English that well." Hernandez did understand spoken English fairly well, however, and both she and Abendano smiled knowingly when asked if they had ever pretended not to understand English.

Would citizenship or temporary legal status make them feel more like Americans than Mexicans?

"I think so, because I wouldn't have to feel so afraid, and I'd be able to see my parents," Abendano said. "It's eight years since I saw them." Abendano said her parents are 71 and 72 years old and can't easily fend for themselves. "I have to send money to them for the basics," she said. (Abendano's partner Mateo Rodriguez and Hernandez's husband Ramon Hernandez provide the families' income, they said.)

"Yes, because in the first place, you could visit your family," Hernandez responded. "Second, I could work. Third, I could go to school. I'd have more benefits."

Asked about her use of publicly-funded benefits and services, Abendano said she has a card from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services which she uses to pay for the children's medical costs, but said neither she nor partner Mateo Rodriguez receive any public or government benefits. Hernandez mentioned possibly studying to work as a dentist. A trip back to Mexico would also allow her to eat foods she loves such as nopal, a kind of cactus, which she says she can't find here.

"We crossed for the American dream," said Arturo Sepulvera, a former migrant worker who works for UFW. "What we're really most concerned about is that (the proposed amnesty law) really benefits us."

"In the end, we don't come to commit crimes or be delinquents -- it's the opposite -- we're looking for a better life," Hernandez said.

Americans are having to pay for anchor babies. These are like a thief entering your home and then having a baby and saying that you must pay for the care and feeding of the baby becuase it was born in your house. I don't mind paying for sick americans but I do object to paying for anchor babies of illegals. I want a vote on them being able to have children.

I just want them to all go home, take the anchors with them and let this nightmare be over.

Check it out!!! www.tdn.com

boo-hoo-hoo
What about Americans who have lost everything due to tornadoes, hurricanes or fire; those who have suffered crippling diseases; those permanently handicapped or disfigured by violent criminals; those kiled or injured in traffic accidents; those killed or disabled in the worldwide struggle for freedom?

The mainstream media---sheltered as they are from real hardships invariably take the side of migrants. So what took you so long to wake up to the real condition of the world--and what gives you the right to choose to be champions of these intruders as your form of religious service? Get a clue and pack your bags for some form of overseas duty and let Americans who have already sacrificed enjoy their own land.

What is clear is that as long as it's a question of survival and basic quality of life, Mexican immigrants -- like earlier waves of immigrants decades or centuries ago

There’s a different there was no social welfare and they were legal (there’s that word again) and not at public charge. Also we (Americans) decided who is allowed in, not a bunch of border crashers demanding rights and social services. The bottom line is there are billions of poor people around the world, being poor is not a real reason to be allowed in.. What benefit is it to us to import more poor? Oh, that's right it's not about us it's about them (big business and investor elites) and that's the only reason it's even being discussed!

"You feel like you're in someone else's country," Hernandez said, adding that she sees herself as Mexican "because I don't speak English that well." Hernandez did understand spoken English fairly well, however, and both she and Abendano smiled knowingly when asked if they had ever pretended not to understand English.

Now there is an enlightened illegal! She sees herself as Mexican??? Did I miss something?

"I came to know Disneyland," Hernandez said, a broad smile revealing braces. Hernandez said she decided in 1997 not to go back while on her third trip to the U.S. and made the decision despite having no money. Hernandez said she had a few family members in Los Angeles, and got married shortly after moving -- to another undocumented immigrant, Ramon Hernandez, who could offer no gift of citizenship.

(Abendano's partner Mateo Rodriguez and Hernandez's husband Ramon Hernandez provide the families' income, they said.)

What I don't understand here is how an illegal can earn enough to support his family on one income and provide such expensive dental care (braces) to them. Affording orthodonture is far out of reach of MANY American families with TWO incomes! I also noticed this woman wasn't asked the question about publicly funded benefits, or at least her reply was not published...

Asked about her use of publicly-funded benefits and services, Abendano said she has a card from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services which she uses to pay for the children's medical costs, but said neither she nor partner Mateo Rodriguez receive any public or government benefits.

Abendano said she was let go by the company in 2004, after five years' employ, when the company found out her documents were not valid. She now has four children and has studied English for one year.

According to her own statements, Abendano has graced the American taxpayer since November 1999 with 4 wards of the state by birth. How is it that she and her current "partner" receive no publicly funded services or benefits??? Isn't even the use of Washington state DSS funds for child medical a "family" benefit covering costs that the typical American bread winner is normally required to pay? Sounds like denial has set in!

At this point I have to ask, how does one illegal's income support a family of six (not to mention the money they send back each month to Abendano's family)??? Man, I bet he's doing a job lot's of Americans reading this would LOVE to have given the salary he must be knocking down!

"We crossed for the American dream," said Arturo Sepulvera, a former migrant worker who works for UFW. "What we're really most concerned about is that (the proposed amnesty law) really benefits us."

What I am most concerned about is that ANY proposed immigration legislation benefits ONLY those who come for the American Dream LEGALLY!