Why Risk Crossing the Border?

Deborah Benanzis, a woman involved in Norawas de Rarámuri (Friends of the Rarámuri) and a participant of the 2010 Copper Canyon Ultra Marathon forwarded me this story of an illegal Mexican immigrant. Now, I pass it on to you. Perhaps, it will help you begin to understand why people risk everything to cross the U.S.-Mexican border. While reading it, I beg you to keep in mind the Berlin wall. Do you really see much difference?

Wild Rivers review of Espejos y Ventanas/Mirrors and Windows by Mark Lyons

Why do they leave their homes and families in Mexico and choose to be strangers in an often hostile land? Seventy-five percent of rural Mexicans live in poverty, and the underemployment rate is over 60%. Most who do find jobs are paid at a minimum wage equivalent of $4.15 a day, a wage that has dropped dramatically with devaluation of the peso. The economics is compelling: in 35 minutes working at minimum wage in the US, a Mexican can make as much as in an entire day back home. Some may argue that free trade has benefited people on both sides of the Mexican-US border, but it has been a disaster for small Mexican farmers who cannot compete with the cheap corn and beans and rice grown on the US factory farms that are subsidized to the tune of over $3 billion a year by the US government (and which, ironically, use Mexican migrant laborers to harvest their crops). Every day in Mexico, 60 small farmers go out of business and head for the shantytowns of Mexico City—or for the border…

Close to three million farmworkers—almost all of whom are Mexican, and close to 80% of whom have no documents—cultivate and harvest the food that feeds Americans. Over 15,000 Mexicans have found their way to the area around Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, “The Mushroom Capitol of the World.” They live and work in the Brandywine Valley, lush with horse farms and Civil War battlefields, one of the richest areas in the United States. Parallel, interdependent lives, a clash of class and culture: uneducated, poor, brown Spanish-speaking immigrants, desperate to work and support their families back home; and wealthy Anglos who depend on their labor to work the mushroom barns, yet resent the invasion of these aliens. An uneasy truce, beneath the specter of immigration raids, deportation and employer sanctions.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 4:19 pm. It is filed under Latin America, Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.