Tragic Raffle

How beautiful is the United States.

Mexico is beautiful, too. A person’s homeland always maintains a special grip on his heart and memory. But economic despair drives people to desperate measures. In Pabellon de Arteaga, Mexico, the other day, a railroad station master watched local residents board a train for the border city of Ciudad Juarez and commented: “In their hearts they may not want to go, but they cannot resist the lure of the dollar and a better life.”

On the same day, six young men were buried in Pabellon de Arteaga--victims of a horrifying death of heat and suffocation in a railroad boxcar at Sierra Blanca, Tex. They were trying to make their way to the beautiful United States to breathe the fragrance of economic freedom. Twelve other young men died in the same boxcar, its doors locked from the outside by a smuggler of human cargo. The line about the beautiful United States is from a poem entitled “The Illegal,” found written in a notebook discovered in the boxcar.

How appalling that 18 lives could be snuffed out in such fashion. How tragic that 18 young men felt the need to leave their homes and their families to risk arrest, deportation and even death in order to survive. “It was the hunger that drove them from here,” said the brother of one of the victims.

Still they come, even in boxcars, in trucks, on foot and in any way imaginable. No law can stop people who have no other hope--nor can a fence, or a border patrol, a river, an ocean or an army. Another resident of Pabellon said, “Until there is something better to keep them here, people are going to continue raffling their lives.” It is a raffle in which the prize too often is tragedy.