Thread: Mercy or Justice?

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... e293d.html

Sonia Nazario: Mercy or Justice?

America must tackle the problem at its source - poverty south of the border

02:27 PM CDT on Sunday, August 13, 2006

It started as an off-the-cuff question to María del Carmen Ferrez, who came to clean my house twice a month. Did she plan to have more children? Carmen, always chatty, suddenly went silent. She started sobbing. She told me about four children she had left behind in Guatemala. Her husband had left her, and Carmen simply couldn't feed them more than once or twice a day. They would ask for food. She didn't have it. So she left them in Guatemala with their grandmother and came to work in El Norte. She hadn't seen them in 12 years. Her youngest daughter was 1 year old when she left.

RUDY GUTIERREZ/Special Contributor Carmen's answer stunned me and sent me on a journey of my own. How could a mother leave her children and travel 2,000 miles away, not knowing when or if she would see them again? After nearly two years of research in the U.S. and in Latin America, I found some answers – and many more Carmens.

Regardless of the law, regardless of the danger and pain, millions of women, often single mothers, come to the United States from Mexico and Central America and send dollars to the children they leave behind. And after years apart, their children, desperate to be with their mothers, often make their own harrowing journey through Mexico to find them.

These mothers and children offer up almost certain proof that the legislative "solutions" that Congress is debating – and that brought thousands out into the streets in protest – can't and won't make a difference in the nation's illegal immigration problem.

First, some facts. Clearly, illegal immigration is out of control. The U.S. is experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history. An estimated 850,000 people enter the U.S. illegally each year – more than double the number in the 1980s and early 1990s. Today, there are an estimated 12 million illegals here. In addition, nearly 1 million people come to this country legally or become residents each year – more than twice the number in the 1970s. In Los Angeles, four in 10 people are from another country.

Certainly there are undeniable benefits to all this. Most people agree that U.S.-born workers won't do at least some of the backbreaking jobs that illegal immigrants take, especially for rock-bottom wages. Picking lettuce. Cutting sugar cane. Or, in the case of one woman I interviewed, cleaning houses where there had been a suicide or violent crime.

Immigrants' low wages keep some businesses from closing or going abroad in order to compete. A 1997 study by the National Research Council, still considered the most objective and authoritative on the effects of immigration, found that immigrant labor also lowers the cost of food and clothing for all of us, and it puts such things as child-care services within the reach of far more Americans than before. Immigrants bring new blood, ideas and ways of looking at things that drive creativity and spur advances.

And yet the downside is real, too. Because they have lower incomes, immigrants and their U.S.-born children qualify for and use more government services – including welfare – than the native-born. They have more children and therefore more youngsters in public schools. Compared to native households, the NRC found that immigrants and their native-born children pay one-third less taxes per capita than others in the U.S. And according to a Harvard University study, immigrant pay scales have lowered wages for the least-educated – and the neediest – among the native-born, mostly African-Americans and previous waves of Latino immigrants.

The cost-benefit calculation is just as troubling when it comes to the immigrants themselves. The mothers I talked to were able to send money to their children in their home countries so the kids could eat better and go to school past the third grade.

But after spending years apart from their mothers, these children often felt abandoned, and they resented – even hated – their mothers for leaving them. Many mothers ultimately lose what is most important to them: the love of their child. Many children who found their way here later sought the love they hoped to find with their mothers elsewhere – in gangs, for example.

Will the proposals roiling Congress end the problems of illegal immigration? It's not likely.

"Get tough" sums up one side in the debate, but it's a policy that has had little success to date. Starting in 1993, the number of agents patrolling the border and the amount of money spent on enforcement tripled, according to a 2002 Public Policy Institute of California study. Yet the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. only grew more quickly. Why? More immigrants came and more stayed for good, knowing that entry and re-entry would be more difficult and costly in the future. As for criminalizing illegals and their employers, in the past, such sanctions have been skirted and ultimately ignored.

The other, less draconian approach is to "control" immigration via temporary guest-worker programs and promises of future green cards – perhaps even citizenship.

Unfortunately, a past guest-worker program, in which Mexican braceros filled agricultural jobs between 1942 to 1964, laid the groundwork for the massive illegal migration of workers from Mexico that followed. And the last time the United States offered illegal immigrants a path to a green card, in 1986, it resulted in about 2.7 million immigrants becoming legal, but it didn't stem the tide of newcomers. Who knows how many of them crossed the border believing that there would eventually be another amnesty?

So what should the U.S. do? If you travel the routes that feed Latin Americans into the U.S., you'll come to believe that there is only one way to stem illegal immigration – at its source, in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and wherever people are desperately poor. That's because desperate people find ways around obstacles such as walls and temporary guest-worker rules.

One woman I met at a migrant shelter in southern Mexico was Leti Isabela Mejía Yanes. She had left Honduras, where 42 percent of the population is unemployed or underemployed, where ads tell women older than 28 they need not apply. Ms. Mejía Yanes, a single mother, left three children in Honduras because she could only feed each of them two pieces of bread a day. The youngest, a 1-year-old boy, got breast milk and one piece of bread. Sometimes she quieted their cries of hunger with a dollop of tortilla dough mixed into a big glass of water. She had lost both legs trying to board a moving freight train that would take her north through Mexico. Months later, she would return to Honduras defeated.

I met a Honduran teenager who had been assaulted by bandits, held at knifepoint, stripped and robbed. A girl in his party had been gang-raped by the bandits. He had made 27 attempts to get through Mexico. Mexican authorities were about to deport him again. He vowed to make attempt No. 28, to not give up until he reached his mother in the United States.

Time and again, I met migrants willing to endure months of danger and misery to reach the U.S. As long as they had any hope of success, they refused to go home.

Instead of arguing about green card rules and wall heights, the U.S. should be formulating a new foreign policy. It should be aiming resources and diplomacy at improving conditions in Mexico and the few Central American countries whose migrants make up more than two-thirds of those in the U.S. illegally. Trade policies could give preference to goods from immigrant-sending countries to spur job growth. More aid could be invested there for the same purpose.

What I found out is that most immigrants would rather stay in their home countries with their extended families, with everything they know, than take the enormous risks required to cross the border and to make a new life here. Many women say it wouldn't take radical changes in their countries to keep them at home, by their children's sides.

They say that if they had food to feed their children and clothes to put on their backs, if they could send them to school or even if they had just the hope of doing so, they would never walk away, leaving behind their homes, their lives, the children themselves.

Sonia Nazario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Los Angeles Times, is author of "Enrique's Journey." Her e-mail is sonia@sonianazario.com.

Have they ever thought about NOT having babies they can't feed????

I am puzzled??!! If these people are so dirt poor, only living on bread and water, where did they get the money to go all the way to the United States? It had to cost a fortune as far as they are concerned. It's baffling to me!

Instead of arguing about green card rules and wall heights, the U.S. should be formulating a new foreign policy. It should be aiming resources and diplomacy at improving conditions in Mexico and the few Central American countries whose migrants make up more than two-thirds of those in the U.S. illegally

So now it should also be our job to help these countries straighten themselves out? I DON'T THINK SO!!!

How about this, all of the illegal aliens go back to their own country and try to fix it...GEE THERE'S AN ORIGINAL IDEA...

ITA. Illegals should indeed go home and do the job that Mexicans won't do -- fix it and stop whining expecting sympathy and handouts while overpopulating the planet. The practices of abstinence and/or birth control would be a great head start.

It never fails, they only mention the Agriculture jobs as if that`s the only jobs they come over here for. They don`t mention the middle class jobs being taken over and how middle class is becoming just a page of American History.
They only mention how Illegals Immigration is keeping prices down but don`t mention how their causing U S Citizen to loose their jobs and homes
and bring to U S Poverty level up.

In short, what the Illegals are doing is.......trading places with the legal and native U S Citizens. And these Legal and Native Citizens are being lowered below the poverty level as the illegals once were. They may have it better here financially, but they never change their life style. They can buy a beautiful home..........and turn it into a slum.

Why is none of this ever brought to light by any of these comparison shoppers?

Originally Posted by gofer

I am puzzled??!! If these people are so dirt poor, only living on bread and water, where did they get the money to go all the way to the United States? It had to cost a fortune as far as they are concerned. It's baffling to me!

Don't believe all those stories from those "poor women" all of them say that they are single, and don't know where their man is, if they don't know where their man is, how can they make more babies? They are just taking advantage of American's generosity, and they know that they can make stories and people believe them. In their own countries the higher class knows these kind of people very well, and they know that they can't go to them with these stories. These kind of people are ignorant when it comes to books, but by nature they are very clever, very inginious.

And you are right in being curious about that gofer, with the money they
spend in coming here they could open a little business in their countries, a hot dog stand, a little restaurant, many things they could do. What happens is that before they come to this country they already know what they can get out of the system. If I wanted to get food stamps I would not know how to go about it, believe me, before they come here they know all of that. These women should be deported, these is the kind of people who really milk- off the system.

I could not find a topic about this ACTIVIST ILLEGAL WOMAN in Chicago. Do you think our government is going to give up with this woman and let her stay in this country? This woman is an example of what I explained gofer about these kind of people in my other post. This woman has no education, but look how she has managed to fight the immigration laws. I just hope that she would be deported, she is trying to make people feel sorry because she has a son born in this country. People as this who have the guts to be a revolutionary being illegal in the country do not deserve any consideration.

Here is part of the story:

CHICAGO - A prominent activist for illegal immigrants sought sanctuary in a church Wednesday rather than turn herself in for deportation, saying she fears being separated from her young son.

"I am single mom. My son, he is citizen," Elvira Arellano, a Mexican national, said from just inside the doorway of Adalberto United Methodist Church. "I am not terrorist. I am not criminal. I am mom. He is my son."

Arellano, speaking through a translator Tuesday, said her 7-year-old son, Saul, worries that they will be separated.

"I want to stay here for my son. I want to give him a better future, a better life," she said.

Arellano, who was deported shortly after illegally crossing into the United States in 1997, is president of United Latino Family, which lobbies for families that could be split by deportation.

Opinion...Arellano IS a criminal:

Here's her story, as well as an email I sent to Senator Durbin & Congressman Gutierrez,

http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... c&p=198415

Re:

"When I came through in August of 1997 -- the first time, with a fake ID .
. . I was detained and sent back home," Arellano said in Spanish. "But I
didn't know it was considered a deportation. Three days later I got over
by just walking through a town."

Here, she worked as a cleaning lady at O'Hare Airport until 2002, when she
was arrested and subsequently convicted in federal court for working under
a false Social Security number.

With the help of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.)
and various community groups, Arellano secured four one-year extensions to
stay in the United States. They enabled her to get a legal Social Security
card, Illinois driver's license and work permit. But she's still
ineligible for citizenship because of her first arrest.

IMO, she's had a lot of chances to understand that she is engaging in
criminal activity. What I don't get, is don't the congressfolk get that
she's a criminal? _________________

Why should only AMERICAN CITIZENS and LEGAL immigrants, have to obey the
law?!

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Sir, Why do you support criminal behavior? Clearly, Arellano is a
criminal from the FIRST time she entered this country illegally, meaning
to do so, with fake ID. So, you are aiding and abetting a felon.
Sincerely,

Illegals are dis respective cowards. They use their kid to do their dirty work.
I have a home based business that deals with them on occasion. I have a "CLOSED" sign in english and in Spanish with 6 inch letters. There has been several times when the parents would stand at the end of the driveway and send there kid "as young as 5 years old" past the signs, over the gate and then past the "no trespassing" sign to the front door at 10:00 at night. If they want to see me pissed off that's all they have to do. I make sure they never show up again.
When ever they`re interviewed there`s always kids in the spot light.
My sympathy goes so far and when it comes to illegals, that's where it stops.
I don`t care what they`re problem is, what they`ve gone through or the status they`re in at that time. They are too many US citizens that have been put in the same position and because of them. They`re law breaking criminals and they`re proud to admit it.