La Migra No Match for Men Trying to Survive

The consensus among the men at the park entrance is that it took four days:

Four days from the time la migra rounded most of them up, processed them and drove them south to Tijuana, to the time they slipped across the border once again, making their way back here.

This is El Toro, south Orange County, a move-up kind of place of neat stucco homes, close-in schools and easy shopping. The men, all of them Mexican, stand out.

They wait here at the park entrance. Or depending on your perspective, maybe they loiter, or lurk, or disturb the peace--a community’s peace of mind.

The men say the jobs, with their drive-by employers, no questions asked, are fewer than before. It’s worth noting that hiring an undocumented immigrant is still against the law, except that issue doesn’t come up here.

A full-size Mercedes, its gold paint glistening in the morning sun, slows to a stop. In an instant, the men surround the car. One of them slips inside and the driver pulls silently away.

“ Gano. Gano ,” one of the immigrants says. This means the other guy won. He got there first.

Nobody knows what the job was, or how much it will pay. Sometimes these workers end up not getting paid at all. Then they’ll grumble among themselves and hope for better luck the next time out.

“A month ago, they took five of us,” one man relates. “We all got in the back of the pickup. We were supposed to make $6 an hour. We each worked for nine hours, knocking down walls, dissembling furniture. It was an office they were remodeling. They never even gave us lunch, and we didn’t get paid, either.”

Other motorists, mothers with toddlers in car seats, commuters en route to work, stare at the men as they drive by. The traffic this morning is relatively light. A sheriff’s deputy cruises by slowly, staring too. The men, some 35 of them, peer back.

Not all of those recently rounded up by the Border Patrol have returned here, of course, but the feeling among the immigrants is that they all will, given enough time.

Their reasoning is logical and clear. It is better here, they say, at least when it’s money you’re counting, when you’re talking about jobs.

The dollars the men send home--to Guanajuato, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Chiapas and everywhere else on the Mexican map--stretch much further than the pesos they used to earn.

“We understand how the people feel about us here,” says Jino Hernandez, motioning his arm toward a nearby housing tract. Then he shrugs as if to say there is nothing he can do.

He is 54, from Mexico City, with a wife and two kids; he would rather not be here. This is a young man’s game, this illegal search for work on the other side, but there are no hard and fast rules. Women come, children too.

You just do what you must, to get by.

Then there’s a different perspective, from people who were here first. They also work long and hard to see that their families are well fed.

For the most part, if you are to believe the public opinion polls, they’ve had enough of these immigrants coming in search of a better life. What about their life? they ask. The pie, even in this land of plenty, is only so big.

Readers call, or write me, to complain that immigration is spoiling their quality of life. One woman suggested immigrant children should be bused to different schools, to spread the handicap around. Others say that “cultural enrichment” is just a politically correct way of infringing on the rights of those born in the USA.

And some come right out and call themselves racists. It’s become a badge of pride.

None of this is new of course, although to me this anti-immigrant feeling seems more virulent as of late.

Our government, meantime, keeps reacting--schizophrenically at best. Place a Band-Aid here, pass a law there. Enforcement is something else. Appease this group, then worry about the fallout that goes with that. The misses outnumber the hits.

Back at the park entrance, Julian Cruz asks, “If we all go home, what’s going to happen here?” It’s a rhetorical query, meant to encompass the larger questions at hand.

Home for this immigrant is Mexico City, where he used to work for the city government, planting trees. He earns more, doing whatever he can, here. His wife works as a nanny; the couple have three kids. Cruz is 35.

“I’ll tell you,” he goes on. “It’s not going to happen. Who would do all the work if we all went home?”

The other immigrants listen to what this man says, then they nod their heads. They say they do the work that others turn down, that for them pride means a job, regardless of the kind.

A train sounds off in the distance. It is heading north.

“Look at the pollos ,” one man shouts, and heads turn, laughter starts. The silhouettes of other newcomers, riding between the boxcars and even on top, are clearly visible from where we stand.

“They’ll get off in Santa Ana,” one immigrant says. “Then, who knows, maybe they’ll end up here.”