but it's not impossible." So why isn’t the Mexican government helping. No they don’t want to admit they’ve failed their own people back at home.
In this city, getting work also depends on whom you know. Also the color of your skin.
Reyes' 68-year-old father slowly shakes his head when asked if he can use his position as a former government worker to help.
"Before, when I was younger, there was lots of work here — enough for everybody," Luis Reyes said. "Now everything has gotten more corrupt ... ." Now is that a surprise to anyone?
"The people I can call, they're all retired, like me. They can't help." And they don’t want to help, let’s be honest here.
So five evenings a week, Reyes does what many of her generation here do to make a living — she peddles on the street. Yes, that same illegal street vending that culture brought here to the US/
She and sister Patricia roll a food cart up a dusty street to sell quesadillas for 70 cents, gorditas for 90 cents. On a good night they can clear $20. On this particular one, they had three customers. Are you saying that again, Mexico won’t support its own people?
One was 28-year-old Santo Lopez, who had been deported from the U.S. only a few months earlier. He had lived for four years in Hope, Ark., he said, holding down jobs in a mechanic shop and at a warehouse. Is this one of those jobs they say Americans won’t do? I don’t think so, I know many Americans do that job. Oh that’s right, not for slave wages that require living 20 to a garage.
He's found a food-processing job here that pays $80 for a six-day week but says he could make that same amount in two or three hours in the states. Again, is the lie about a job Americans won’t do the right insert here?
"I hear they are now jailing people they catch trying to cross the border," he said. "If things get much worse for me here, I might consider just that. Life in detention in the states might be better than it is here." Lopez bought three quesadillas. This is exactly what I’ve been saying. The jails and prisons do nothing to detour those coming here illegally, but they cost the taxpayers billions.
On evenings like these, unsold inventory becomes the family's meal. At the end of every day, everyone in the family pools what money they made that day."And that's how we survive," Reyes said. Isn’t that how most families work, what make this so different? "It's not the life I imagined for my kids." But many who oppose the presence of illegal immigrants in the U.S. say it's right to deport them and that the hard realities of life across the border are Mexico's to resolve. "Maybe if the Mexican government was half as concerned about its people in Mexico, so many of them would not be trying to get out," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation of American Immigration Reform. This is the truth and a fact.
How it began
Reyes grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood near central Mexico City, one of four children. Again, Mexico is not a poor country and it is Mexico’s responsibility of take care of its poor She didn't finish high school but attended a trade school. You notice what trade she learned isn’t mentioned here? She married young and had her first child at 18 So at 17 she go pregnant and her second child four years later and by 22 had another mouth to feed, yet Mexico still doesn’t do anything to help.
In the late 1980s, her husband followed the wave of Mexicans going north for jobs in the fruit farms in Washington and California. He crossed illegally and settled in Eastern Washington; she also illegally broke into the US, followed in 1990. She said she was apprehended by U.S. border authorities and promised a work permit, Social Security number and legal status if she would testify against the coyote. But the smuggler ended up admitting to the charges and the deal for the green card was off, though Reyes was granted what most illegal immigrants covet — a valid Social Security number and a work permit, which would expire a few months later. But that wasn’t enough for this criminal she wanted to suck up more from the US and now has a SS number.
The couple settled outside Yakima in Sunnyside, where they worked in the hops fields, then picked apples and cherries. About a year later, they sent for their boys, 7 and 3 at the time, paying a coyote to guide the children through the desert. But authorities stopped the boys and the smuggler. The children, now grown, speak of spending days in foster homes, separated from one other and afraid, before their father came from Washington and all three crossed with a coyote. Not a problem, they just keep trying and we let um.
Reyes' relationship with her husband grew strained, and in the winter of 1998, he moved without the family to Western Washington. Dumping the wife and kids on the US social system With no money, she and her children were evicted from their Sunnyside apartment. They moved in with Arturo Hernandez.
Together, in 2001, they followed other Mexican fruit pickers to the construction, restaurant and hotel jobs in and around Seattle. Oh to more of those jobs Americans won’t do that so many of our citizens are looking of and have always looked for Reyes landed a job at SeaTac Crest Motor Inn, where Manager Karl Singh calls her a "really hard and honest worker."
"We still miss her," he said. I bet you do, hard to find slave labor.
Plotting their return
Soon after she was deported, Reyes, the girls and her younger son went to live with Hernandez and his family in a small town outside Aguascalientes, some 300 miles northwest of Mexico City. It is here they sometimes return when they need to give her brother and sister some space. When they arrive, the two-bedroom house Hernandez shares with his extended family comes alive. Reyes and the kids say they feel safer here. There are other children for the girls to play with and they can walk the few blocks to the neighborhood store. So it’s not all just one big gang infested ghetto.
Hernandez, who had been employed by a Tacoma boat builder for $20 an hour, is that one of those jobs Americans won’t do? now starts his days tending his father's horses and goats. He's not found a job because all seem to require the high-school diploma he doesn't have. But he was still making $20 an hour! He had gone to the U.S. when he was 16, making enough to send money back to his aging parents every two weeks. That money along with the billions sent in remittances that didn’t stay in our own economy Now I'm back and there's nothing here," he said. "My parents have to help me because I have no money."
His mother said she was apprehensive when he left. "He was still a boy," Maria Pilar said. "I prayed that he would be fine." What about separating families, where the cry that a family was separated? When his mother first learned he was being deported, she was at once happy because she would be seeing him again and devastated by what she knew were dim prospects. Why send your young son away and not protest your own government for not providing for you and him? Again, Mexico is not a poor country.
So he and Reyes, along with her grown sons, haven't stopped plotting ways to get back to Seattle. She thinks her only chance of doing that legally is years away and hinges on daughter Julie, whom she thinks can petition for her when she turns 21. You gotta love that chain migration. And they wonder why Americans are angry.
But it's not that simple: Because Reyes lived illegally in the states for 17 years, she faces a 10-year bar to legal entry. So Julie would have to be 23 and have a home established in the U.S. before she could petition for her mother to join her. Pushing back the others who have waited to do it the legal way to immigrate.
Reyes and Hernandez are considering an offer from an Edmonds real-estate investor who learned of their circumstances and has offered to help them relocate to Juárez. The girls could stay with a family in El Paso, Texas, and attend school there during the week. But the idea of seeing her mother only on weekends worries Julie.The continued schemes to get the US taxpayer to pay for their anchor babies education. They just don’t give up on the entitlements.
A few months ago, it was a different plan — to cross illegally with a group of people who had been deported from Phoenix. Then they heard that a cold front had passed through the desert, leaving four people dead of exposure. And they found out that U.S. immigration authorities are now jailing — not just catching and releasing — those caught sneaking across the border. The parties over, now take your family and stay in Mexico, that is who is responsible for you.
So that plan, at least for now, is on hold
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