Life after an illegal immigrant is sent home
By Lornet Turnbull
Seattle Times staff reporter
MEXICO CITY — Ana Reyes walks briskly through a crowded neighborhood here, out of place among the provocatively dressed women of the night soliciting work in the middle of the day. This is a common atmosphere in much of Mexico, and they condone it.
The 41-year-old mother of four She had four children, who supported those children while she lived off our infrastructure? slips through the entrance of a clothing store, its racks thick with the latest fashion, a sign on the door indicating the shop is hiring female assistants.
She approaches the manager about the job but is told it's only for women 20 to 30 years old. Manager Maria Inez elaborates when prompted: "A younger girl will be able to bring more male customers into the store. She's too old." Again, Mexico supports this type of attitude and condones it.
Ten months after she was picked up by immigration officers in an early-morning raid of her Burien home and soon deported to Mexico, Reyes — jobless and broke — struggles to eke out the barest existence in the dirt-poor barrios of one of the world's biggest and most crowded cities. And we might be reminded that Mexico is the third richest country on this continent. Mexico is not poor.
After nearly two decades picking hops and fruit in Eastern Washington and cleaning hotel rooms near Seattle who gained by her presence? The growners and the hotel owners, not the taxpayer who subsidized her and her family being here, she was among more than 870,000 Mexicans the U.S. government expelled from the country last year. Of the 20 million+ that are here illegally.
For all the attention illegal immigrants get in the U.S. — from those who believe This is not a belief it is a fact and has been proven they're a drain on social services to advocates who say they do the jobs Americans won't this has been proven to not be true, Americans will do all those jobs — little is known about what happens to them after they're ushered by U.S. immigration authorities through revolving doors into Mexico's border towns.
Once there, they get little help from their government. Again Mexico is a wealthy country but refuses to take care of its own people. Many stay, others try to get back to their hometowns. For the most part no one tracks them — not their government, or the U.S., or their advocacy groups in the states. They become largely forgotten — along with the U.S.-born children they sometimes take with them.
Reyes' two adult sons, Christian and Carlos Quiroz, whom she and her then-husband had brought illegally into the U.S. as little boys, were also returned to Mexico last year. But not before using up about $216,000 in taxpayer money for educating those two illegals, and that doesn’t include the $90,000 in education tax dollars spent on the two anchor babies. A total of about $306,000 spent just on their education. Did taxes deducted for the hotel or farm labor come close to covering those expenses? You bet not. And that doesn’t take into consideration all the other parts of our infrastructure they used while living here.
And with no family in the U.S., Reyes' two American daughters, Julie Quiroz, now 13, and Sharise Hernandez, 6, have also joined her here. Now, unable to find work in a city she left 18 years ago, Reyes shuffles between the cramped homes of a brother and a sister in neighborhoods so unsafe her children aren't allowed outside to play. Neitherdaughter is in school. What makes that so different that the neighborhoods the the illegals have created here in the US. That is exactly what MANY of our towns and neighborhoods have become and continue to turn into. The older one longs for her life in Seattle, saying that on the rare occasion she gets close enough to the hotels that cater to tourists here, she strains to hear Americans speak. "I always think that if I had the courage I'd go up and talk to them," Julie said. This sure isn’t the attitude they have while they’re here. It’s that Mexican pride and how great Mexico and it’s culture is. They have no problem hearing Spanish everywhere and choosing to speak it instead of learning or speaking English. You don’t know how well you have it till its gone, or you need to write a sob story to victimize them.
For her mother, small things, like the Starbucks white-chocolate mocha her son sometimes buys her, remind her of their old life. And some days she thinks of little else but how to get it back. "It's ugly here," Reyes said, sitting in her sister's living room, her children and other family members around her. "I never wanted to come back here to live. I wanted to stay and watch my daughters go to school and graduate, have the kind of life I didn't have. That’s sure not what your other illegals are saying. They are so proud of what you call ‘ugly’ and would call you a coconut for saying such things. But they want to stay here and turn this country into Mexico so all of you will feel so close to your culture but don’t want to actually live there.
Fuel for economy
The engine of the American service economy runs on the labor of many of the 12 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally. You notice how humans are dehumanized to be come human resources aka machines or engines. Our society and culture aren’t important because we’re just a human resource. Many had fled poverty in small towns across Mexico and Latin America, becoming the cheap labor that builds houses, cleans hotel rooms and tends gardens in the U.S. Again, Mexico is not a poor country, just a selfish one. And we have become an exploitive one, because after all we’re just a human resource. You see how it works out, they take the human factor out of it, but replace it when trying to create a victim of the illegals.
In recent years, stepped-up immigration enforcement increasingly has led to their arrests in work-site raids, on routine traffic stops, when immigration officers sweep through jails and prisons or, in cases such as Reyes', when they show up at the front door.
"This country simply can't absorb them all," said Neil Clark, Seattle-based field-office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, pointing out the U.S. already admits about 1 million legal immigrants a year. These are facts, proven facts.
"People have got to demand changes in their home countries if they want to make things better," he said. "Coming to the U.S. is not the solution to Mexico's problems." We have become Mexico’s welfare system and allowed that country to continue ignoring it’s own people.
Neither, it seems, is deportation. Wrong, deportation works. Mexico will have to face the fact it has neglected its own people and stop using the US as an inabler.
For Mexico, the return of illegal immigrants is a double punch: The economy loses the deportees' share of some $24 billion that Mexicans abroad send home each year. Which was a tremendous hardship on the US by loosing billions sent out of our own economy. And back in the small towns they fled, deportees compete for what few low-paying jobs exist. Which is the problem Mexico created and it is there responsibility to fix and deal with.
"Sometimes they leave with much fanfare and dreams of getting the family out of poverty — only to be sent back home, their deportation seen as a failure," said Erica Dahl-Bredine, country manager for Catholic Relief Services Mexico, based in Tucson, Ariz. Again, this is the failure of Mexico to not take care of its own people, not a failure of the us. We are not responsible for Mexico lack of integrity.
So many don't go back home but instead remain in border towns such as Tijuana and Juárez — sometimes because they don't have money for a bus ticket home but mostly because they're waiting for a chance to re-enter the U.S. And who encourages them to try to return or does nothing to provide for them? Mexico!
It's what Reyes might have done last July if she'd had the money to pay a smuggler to help her return to the U.S. Instead, she returned to her family in Mexico City, buying time while she figures out a way to get back to Seattle. And we’re suppose to feel sorry for this invader because she won’t address her own government about her situation. But they have no problem marching in our streets carrying a Mexican flag.
She'd first come to the attention of U.S. immigration authorities in 1998 when she got into a fight with another woman on a street in the Eastern Washington town of Sunnyside, violating a restraining order. Maybe she should have used that energy to confront the Mexican Government.
In 2003, an immigration judge granted her a chance to leave the U.S. voluntarily, saying her daughters were young enough that they could adjust to life in Mexico. She appealed and lost, but never left, she said, because she kept hoping changes in U.S. immigration laws would allow her to stay legally. Yes, she was expecting another amnesty just like Mexico has been pushing for. Their desire to control our political system has been getting stronger by the minute.
She was asleep the morning 10 months ago when a team of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers knocked on the door of her apartment, her name on their fugitive list for that day. Gee, this country has laws, and they actually apply to those that don’t belong here. That’s something these sob stories are trying to weaken.
Among those inside, besides her two daughters, were her younger son, Carlos; her boyfriend and the father of her younger daughter, Arturo Hernandez; and her brother-in-law Luis Hernandez. The men were all returned to Mexico. Reyes' older son was living in Tacoma and deported several months later. One big happy family of illegals. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know how many social service entitlement programs they were all receiving?
Later, Reyes would remark that if deported, she would not bring her daughters to Mexico because she would not be staying long. No she felt entitled to return no matter what our laws may be. Our open borders are proof that she’s been invited to return.
She couldn't have known how bad things would get for her here. Again, she can thank Mexico, that country that they so admire, yet would rather see them dead than support them.
Mexico City as home
The metropolitan area of Mexico City is the second-largest in the world — teeming with congestion, pollution and poverty. The divide between rich and poor is vast. Again, Mexico is the third richest country on this continent. It is NOT POOR. Yet those with the wealth and power refuse to share. Yet we have a US government that is bleeding our citizens dry to provide for Mexico’s poverty.
It is, in so many ways, removed from the green landscape and fresh air of Western Washington, are you catching the bias here, Mexico also has some beautiful green landscapes, again Mexico has wealth and many other natural resources where Reyes lived in an apartment complex and worked as a hotel maid for nearly half her years in the U.S. On good days, she earned about $70 a day, her boyfriend about twice that. So between the two of them they earned $210 a day, not bad considering her boyfriend probably worked under the table and because they weren’t married she was probably getting welfare of some sort for the kids. Not a bad haul I’d say. How many of our citizens would like to be in that situation right now. But of course they’ll cry that those are jobs Americans won’t do.
Much of what the family had was left behind in the Burien apartment: a microwave, beds, tables, other furniture. "Everything that I worked really hard for," Reyes said. None of this would have been left behind if she had left when she was told to the first time. Now she complains that her gamble of getting caught didn’t work our in her favor.
Now, in Mexico, home is sometimes her brother's third-floor, two-bedroom apartment near the historic center of the city, where drug dealers and prostitutes hug grimy street corners. Very much like the Los Angeles barrios and slums so many other cities that these illegal invaders have help turn into.
Mostly, it's her sister Patricia Reyes' cramped two-bedroom house in Arboledas, a poor neighborhood that is part of the city's stubborn where does the word stubborn come from, oh I guess that the slant use to give us the impression of what a hard area this is march toward the mountains surrounding it. The house is like many others throughout the city, joined to those on either side, with the street as its front yard. How much more of a slant can this piece get?
Her family lives like many in Mexico's large cities, doubling and sometimes tripling up under the same roof. Up to 10 family members sometimes share her sister's home.Just like what they’re doing in so many of our neighborhood and cities they’ve destroyed and turned into barrios and ghettos just like back in Mexico Reyes sleeps on a mattress on the floor, a wooden bar braced at the front door to keep rats from scurrying inside. Again enough with the ‘oh it’s such a horrible place’ that is just more brainwashing to justify the invasion. Mexico is not a poor country and these types of situations are their responsibilities to fix.
She is often depressed, her family said.
"We're been back and forth, back and forth," Reyes said. "It's the hardest thing because I had my own place up there, my own car, my own money. I have nothing here." Time to start complaining to the Mexican government and expecting them to take care of you.
Looking for work
Reyes' age, long absence from Mexico and lack of a high-school diploma help explain why the hotels, restaurants and stores where she seeks work aren't calling her back. Mexico won’t let their illiterate have jobs or educate their own, so they send them here to the US and expect us to support and educate them
"I tried the hotel jobs and even when I tell them how much experience I have, I still don't get called," she said. "They say that someone younger will produce more than me." Oh but Mexico is such a great culture, at least that’s sure what they brag about after they’ve broken into this country.
Susanna Noguez, who works in the protection department in the Mexican consulate office in Seattle, said, "If she has the intention of finding any kind of work, it's not easy,
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