http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ne ... 307658.htm

Posted on Fri, Dec. 02, 2005


BORDER CROSSING
Immigrants find payoff worth risk

BY FRIDA GHITIS
fghitis@yahoo.com

PUERTO ESCONDIDO, Mexico -- If you travel through the villages of Mexico asking people about their lives and about the idea of crossing their country's northern border, you discover that the siren song that has brought immigrants to the United States over the centuries never stops calling. Its unsettling sounds are inviting and threatening at the same time.

The prospect of an odyssey across the desert beckons like a mirage of opportunity and danger. Every single person I have asked has told me about relatives who have gone to the United States. Everyone, without exception, has talked about having at least considered going to the country where there is money to be made, but only for those willing to go through terrifying dangers to reach an unknown land.

Many Mexicans view the not-so-new immigration plan from President Bush as a purely domestic political move, one that could complicate their plans, but actually changes very little.

Fear of dying

Noé Silva, who works in this fishermen's town on Mexico's Pacific coast, told me that he makes about $4,000 a year working a variety of odd jobs. He's a waiter when tourists come, a carpenter when they leave. He even moved to work in neighboring Chiapas for a few years. That's where the rebel Zapatista Army a few years ago declared an old-fashioned leftist revolutionary war on behalf of the poorest of the poor.

Silva has considered the trek many times. But the fear of dying in the desert keeps him from trying it. Besides, he says, this is the land he knows. This is where his father took him out fishing as a child, where he knows everyone and everyone knows him.

For the millions who make it to the United States, a life of relatively high earnings does not mean a life of comfort. Mexican migrants send so much of what they make back to their families, that remittances have become the second-largest source of revenue for Mexico, second only to oil exports.

Mexico needs the cash, but the belief that America would simply stop functioning without Mexico's millions of undocumented workers is almost universal here. The concept was most undiplomatically expressed by the country's president, Vicente Fox, when he said Mexicans do the jobs that ''not even blacks will do.'' The stereotype-based statement rightly enraged African Americans, but the thought that the United States needs Mexicans is widespread.

Washington mistrusted

One conspiratorially minded Mexican explained Washington's policy this way: The United States needs Mexicans, so what it does is make it illegal and dangerous for them to come. That way, only the most talented and strong and determined end up making it. That's how Americans want it.

The conspiracy takes it a bit far, but the view from a man who, like many Mexicans, resents and mistrusts Washington, holds the key to the Darwinian secrets of immigration. One of the reasons for U.S. success as a country is that it was built by immigrants, a self-selected group, which has always included some of the most determined, driven and hard-working people from around the world.

As long as the United States needs workers and Mexico has more people than jobs; as long as Mexico remains so much poorer than its northern neighbor, Mexicans will give in and seek to make their fortune in America. And, as long as there is no viable legal option to enter the country, an illegal infrastructure, rather than legitimate immigration authorities, will control the border. That will make the U.S.-Mexico frontier one that will open America to anyone willing to pay cash and take the risk.