did you cross the border on your feet yourself?
I have crossed the border by foot a couple times, but since I have a US passport, it’s a lot easier for me than for the folks who trek for days across abandoned stretches of desert.
But I do know quite a few people who crossed the border in various ways without papers.
FWIW, they’re the thriftiest hardest working SOBs I’ve ever met, they paid all their taxes just like everyone else without getting nearly the benefits “legal” immigrants or citizens get, and several of them got royally screwed over by employers and the US legal system.... but most of them still ended up much better off than they would have in rural villages in southern Mexico, where there are basically no jobs.
Some now have green cards and good steady jobs and families in the US, others took their savings back and started businesses in Mexico. A couple were permanently crippled by work injuries with effectively no compensation and are back in Mexico supported by their relatives, and a few more are in incredible amounts of debt (incurred with local loan sharks to get the money together to cross the border) and are back in their villages, even more broke than they were when they started.
Most undocumented immigrants to the US get deported multiple times and immediately cross back over the border at great expense to themselves; if you have a couple years of wages in debt to get across the border, it’s impossible to just give up and go home, or the loan shark will come take everything you own and beat up your family, so of course you cross back again and again. The whole border control system is basically set up in such a way that all the costs and risks get shoved down onto the poorest and most desperate, while most of the benefits accrue to shady employers. Just like everything else in our society I guess.
The restrictions on crossing the US/Mexico border over the past 30–40 years have had the paradoxical effect of trapping migrant workers in the US for much longer time than they would themselves prefer to stay. Before that time, migrant agricultural workers doing part-of-the-year work on US farms would go home during the off season. But once it started costing a lot (in money and time and uncertainty) to cross the border, they were effectively stuck, because they had to stay and work long enough in the US to make the trip worthwhile. As a result, each new batch of migrant farm workers would have to go find jobs in construction, or textile factories, or meat processing, or in restaurants, or whatever during the off season, instead of just returning to Mexico. Once they’d gotten stable jobs in something other than agriculture, they wouldn’t want to go back to picking vegetables the next year, so a whole new batch of migrant agricultural workers would need to be brought from Mexico. Repeat this every year for 30 years, and we now have a much larger immigrant population than before, directly as a result of policies intended (at least rhetorically) to curb immigration.
US agriculture is 100% dependent on undocumented Mexican immigrant labor. If you blocked all undocumented immigration to the US, food prices would go up dramatically and there would be a huge crisis. Likewise, construction, meat processing, low-skill manufacturing (furniture and textiles and whatever), etc. are totally reliant on undocumented immigration.
If you actually wanted to reduce the scope of undocumented immigration to the US, there are 4 things you can do: (1) invest money in economic development in Mexico (and stop the war on drugs in the US that makes Mexican drug cartels so powerful), (2) end US agricultural subsidies which have since NAFTA been destroying Mexican agriculture, (3) reduce the cost of crossing the border, e.g. by making it much easier for Mexicans to get visas to cross legally, by instituting a guest worker program, etc., and reduce the risks involved in being in the US by giving people better access to essential rights / services like drivers licenses, healthcare, school for their kids, workers’ compensation, minimum wages, etc., and make sure that violations of migrants rights are enforced properly (4) crack down on US employers who employ undocumented immigrants, with real penalties not just a wink and a nod.
Basically every proposal I’ve seen with policy changes (or continuing existing policy) that isn’t one of those 4 things is not really about reducing undocumented immigration in any real way, but instead just about punishing the immigrants (which is both cruel and totally ineffective in aggregate). Most of the Republican congressmen who keep talking about how terrible immigrants are don’t actually give a **** about stopping undocumented immigration. Their rhetoric is just a way to tap into fear and xenophobia, and score some points with ignorant racists who want to see poor brown people suffer.
