The desert is not a very comforting place. The sun relentlessly beams down during the day; the frost takes over at night. Almost every plant has thorns or prickles, and natural sources of water are nearly impossible to find. Though the environment may seem harsh, what’s even more discomforting are the stories buried deep within those desert lands.
It was mid-morning on a brisk January day, and my class and I emptied from our buses after a long drive through the desert hills of Arizona. I was aware that migrants coming from Mexico were dying in the desert as they made their perilous journey across the border, but I hadn’t possibly imagined getting so close to this issue. Our class crossed the road and stood behind the guardrail, looking out to the hills, which looked just like all the other hills in Arizona. I gazed out at all of the trees, cacti, and bushes. The terrain appeared to be innocent, lifeless, and untouched, or maybe I was just telling myself that because I didn’t want to believe that migrants are crossing the desert every day. “Sure,” I thought, “They cross the desert, but what’s the likelihood of any of them crossing this EXACT place?” Our task was to walk some of the trails and pick up the trash and belongings that migrants had left behind and by the looks of the seemingly-untouched plants, I hadn’t expected to find much of anything.
As we walked along the trail, the first thing we discovered was a shoe - old, dusty, and beaten. My first reaction was that it was just a random hiker who had lost a shoe, but we continued along a bend in the trail, we found another shoe, the first one’s match. Random hikers don’t drop a pair of shoes. As we continued up the hill, my group and I walked down off the trail into a ditch with some dry shrubs. There were clothes and trash everywhere and I still wanted to believe it was just hiker’s trash. But it definitely wasn’t. I leaned down and gently shook one of the pieces of clothing from the branches. Shaking it out, I saw it was a child’s shirt for a boy no older than 7 years. Among the other trash we found were bottles and cans of various products in Spanish, and most strikingly, a baby bottle.
From a distance, the desert may have seemed untouched, but when I got closer I found that everywhere I looked had evidence of migrants walking the trails. From then on it was impossible to ignore; people do in fact cross the desert every night, even with their young children, their babies. And these are the same “illegal aliens” who smuggle drugs and other illegal things into the country? According to the U.S. Border Patrol, of 18,000 migrant arrests in 2010, only 2,000 were prosecuted for criminal offences other than illegal entry. So what about the other 16,000? They are merely migrant workers who have families like we do, they have a life, a commitment to helping their family survive, just like we do. I want you to ask yourself a question: how extreme would the hardship have to be for you (or your parents) to be willing to risk your own child’s life?
These decisions the migrants are forced to make, like leaving your children behind or risking their lives, are not easy ones. These day-to-day decisions are the dictator of life and death. With an unemployment rate of 5.5% in Mexico, and underemployment as high as 25% (International Index study 2009), it’s no wonder why people are leaving Mexico to find work elsewhere.
The common question is: why don’t these people just wait? Imagine you are the father, mother, or oldest sibling of a family, and you apply for a temporary work visa to go work in the United States and send money back to your family as their only support, but you get told you have no chance, and must wait anywhere from 6 to 20 years, and in some cases even longer. Could you sit back and accept the fact that your family will lose your home, and eventually starve to death if you don’t do anything? Is all of that pain and suffering really worth the honor that you came to the country legally? These people don’t want to come here, they need to.
Regardless of legal or illegal status, migrant workers provide so many benefits that are impossible to ignore, and are nearly the backbone of the economy in the U.S.. Seventy-seven percent of all farmworkers were born in Mexico (BOCES Geneseo Migrant Center), if none of those people could work in our country, it would become increasingly difficult for farms to produce and distribute their crops, therefore resulting in a spike in prices of food. These migrant workers are more closely connected to your life than you may think, and more connected than you may want to think.
The media today portrays all immigrants as being evil people with terrible intentions, but what those people don’t see are those children’s clothes and baby bottles in the desert, the stories of poverty and starvation in Mexico, and the ever-present benefits migrant workers bring to the U.S. economy. For years and years, the government has been dumping money into building walls and strengthening border patrol, yet barely any mentions of true immigration reform. The majority of U.S. citizens will never see these statistics on the percentage of migrant arrests of people who are actually participating in illegal acts other than hopping the border wall, which is simply because the stories and facts about these migrants are rarely in the spotlight of the media. This makes it nearly impossible for the average American citizen to be educated enough on the issue to make important political decisions that effect everyone. Who are we, as American citizens, to go around building walls and criminalizing anyone who crosses them, when we’ve never been faced with the fact that our families will die if we don’t seek work our country simply cannot offer? Who are we to judge and punish when we simply do not understand?
The only way to begin to fix this issue is to open the U.S. citizens’ eyes to the immigration issue and it’s true colors, and push aside the black and white views we’re stuck in today. I’m not asking to take down the border wall and let migrants come freely, and I’m not claiming to have any other sort of solution for this problem - yet. All I’m asking is for you to form your own opinions and better yet, share them with every opportunity. If the government isn’t doing anything to solve the immigration problem now, it’s our responsibility as U.S. citizens to get the ball rolling.
