Thread: Lure of a job is stronger than a border fence

newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nybres125329568aug12,0,7103308.story

Newsday.com
Lure of a job is stronger than a border fence
JIMMY BRESLIN

li@newsday.com

August 12, 2007

As he got on the bus at dawn in Puebla, in Mexico, he dreamed of the Jamaica Avenue el, whose rust dissolved in the scenes of his dream. The el train he saw shimmered in the sunlight that played on the sidewalk. The train ran right over his head, the sound thrilling.

Sure, Rojas never had been in New York, but he knew all about the sound of the train because his cousin, who lives under the el, holds the phone to the window so he can listen. He was getting thirty dollars a week, he says, working seven days a week in a bakery in Puebla. In front of him now was a job in a Queens bakery that would pay $300 for a five-day week. The days would be long, 11 and 12 hours, but it still is a five-day week.

That is why he was coming to America, to New York. It was why he would go through any summer heat and suddenly treacherous river water and all the barbed wire fences you can put up. Money, 10 times the money he can make in Puebla, that there could be such money. There would be no pretending, no imagining. Real money.

He is a single figure representing throngs who come over mountains and deserts and reason that it is such a cheap price to walk for hours, a night, a day, for as long as they must in order to work in America for American money.

There were, up in this place America, middle-aged white men in suits and ties arguing bitterly about immigrants coming through the border.

Pick out any of them, a congressman named Tancredo from Colorado, and they want prison bars and deportations, even if there are 12 million of them. You can start in towns like Hazleton, Pa., and this a sumphole, and why anybody would come to the place is beyond me, but the mayor, Lou Barletta, sees half of Mexico coming at him. His proposal is to fine anybody renting space to illegal immigrants $1,000.

"If they don't come to here," my immigration economic adviser, Angelo of the Elite Cafe, Columbus Avenue, was saying, "it will be the same as I told you the first time. You stop the Mexicans. You send us Americans to do the work. Make sure you can pay. Coffee in a cup, it will be four dollars and the taxes make it what I would charge, five dollars. One egg and bacon sandwich. Eight dollars."

Rojas brought with him his sister, Marie Luisa, 21, who had a job promised in the same bakery in Queens. In Puebla she earned forty dollars a month. She wasn't sure what she would get paid in the bakery in Queens, but it would be so much more than her money each month that she shook when she thought of it.

"I am going to make enough to come back and build a new house in my town," she said.

The brother and sister sat in bus seats with no cushions and all around them the seats and the aisle became packed with people carrying bundles to bring with them to America. The ride took two days, the brother recounts. He had the trip kept in a composition book. At one point, he got off the bus and walked for 15 hours. There was no water. Then the group of 10 was placed in small row boats, four at a time, and wound up in the heavy waves of the Gulf of Mexico. They were good and shaken and landed below Houston. They were just getting their land legs when a border patrol man told them to change direction and walk over to his truck. They were under arrest. They sat for four hours in a patrol station and then the big border patrol man drove them to the Mexican border.

"Don't feel sorry," Rojas recounts. "Just turn around and come back tomorrow. You sure will make it then."

On the second day, he got off the row boat and started walking and this time there was no border patrol, but a car sent by the coyotes, or dangerous guides, who charge $3,000 apiece. This is tough money for a Mexican, but they borrow anywhere and sell anything to raise it.

Rojas and his sister were driven to the airport in Houston and the plane to New York.

The others followed.

They are not the first to find a friendly border guard. The idea of building a fence for a thousand miles and then having border guards on it is a slow endless run of ignorance that will, in this case, keep your morning coffee in a diner at the same price it is today.

Yesterday, Rojas and his sister stood in the apartment under the Jamaica el tracks. A train rattled overhead. Both were gleeful.

"I take that train to the bakery," Rojas said. "Today I make danish in America!"

This sob story makes the very point I have been trying to make for a long time - the jobs are the crucial point.

If we, the people, go after the employers ourselves, in a concerted, targetted, boycott, they will go home.

Do not worry about the $4 cup of coffee, or the other things. All these things were cheaper before the illegals invaded than they are now. Also, always keep in mind the hidden cost of that $1.50/2.00 cup of coffee -

Imagine your auto insurance at half of what it is now.

Your property taxes may not go down, I don't expect that much of the nature of the political beast, but maybe the money could be spent to educate our children - not illegals. Also, it might not continue to go up -

Imagine healthcare cost decreasing,

Imagine fewer Americans being killed, raped, children molested, etc.

Oh, the benefits are endless -

17 comments at this time to this story at: http://www.topix.net/forum/source/newsd ... 936Q9F858A

Here's one of them:

Glenn Spencer
Scottsdale, AZ Reply »
|Flag |#6 3 hrs ago

I am head of American Border Patrol, a non-profit corporation. I am also the pilot of the plane that flys the border between El Paso, Texas and Sand Diego, California to document progress in fence construction. Most of the fence along the border is a four-foot five-strand barbed wire stock fence. There are many breaks in it. Since the passage of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 that called for the construction of at least 700 miles of double-layered fence,
Bush has built 2 miles of this fence. Most construction was halted in March. The double fence in San Diego, built more than ten years ago, cut illegal immigration by more than 90 percent. The fence works and this explains why open borders advocates say it won't. It also explains why Bush refuses to build it.

Oh, I think it will work to keep down the ones coming in and don't mean to imply that it should not be done.

This kinda also points to what I am saying - while the President is preaching 'border security' - he is making sure it isn't happening.
As long as he can fool us by saying 'we need border security' and we relax and think he is doing something, he isn't. It will take time to build that fence and he knows it. It will take time to train more BP agents, that fact is also not a secret to him.

That is time we don't have.

We need more employers to face the music and more jobs dried up. A fence will keep them out - but do nothing to send them home. Unless we work inside to send them home, we are just going to be fenced in with the same bunch that are daily producing more and more babies, etc., buying into more and more businesses, getting more and more politcial clout, gong into politics themselves.

Border security, alone, was the biggest and most important part of this just a few years ago - now it must just be half the solution. Just my opinion.

If fences don't work, why is there one around the White House? I bet there's a fence around Ted Kennedy's house too.

Fences would work - but fences alone will not solve our problems.

Also, the reporter on Lou Dobbs said their has been little or no money allocated for these things - so do you think they are serious?

Make no mistake, if the President announced, and meant it, tomorrow that EVERY employer caught with illegals in his/her employ would be facing jail time and serious fines, we would see them cut the illegals loose all over this country.

They know this President is not serious about any of it. Personally, I think he is mollyifying us while he figures out some way to make all these people legal.

How may are being given green cards as we speak?
How many are being given citizenship as we speak?
How many are having babies as we speak?
How many are they paying $20K to join our military as we speak? That means citizenship for them and their families and in the future, their extended families.

While we are listening to their claptrap about building a fence, with no money, they are working like fiends to circumvent our laws.

A fence would help - it will keep the problem from getting worse and tha is no small thing - it won't solve it, though.

"I am going to make enough to come back and build a new house in my town," she said.

It's either build a HOUSE or start a BUSINESS. Don't you wish you could avoid taxes, get free healthcare, housing subsidy, etc., so you could start a business or build a new house. What ever happened to the family "starving" back in their home country. I thought that was the reason they came??!!

They have had a taste of all the freebies and lack of law enforcement - they don't want to go back. Heck, we will probably give them an interest free loan for the house and the business.