The Immigration Mess

to the streets of New York, some people are willing to risk everything —including life itself—for the American dream. Here are their stories

The monument is at the entrance to the world's largest mental institution. The government is going to put up a fence right where we are standing now, way out from Nogales and Douglas, on the southern border of Arizona. It is the last stop out of America and the first stop in America. The plans are for a 700-mile fence along a 2,000-mile border with Mexico. How you seal a border by having 1,300 miles without a fence is math by cuckoos. In some places it will be almost impossible to erect any fence. Near San Diego there is a 230-foot-deep canyon.

What are you worrying about? The great government says it can handle that sensibly. It will dig up enough dirt from a mountain to fill 70,000 dump trucks and fill in the canyon.

Beautiful! How do you like it? How do you like this? How do you like paying taxes to people this demented?

The monument commemorating the first European to set foot in Arizona stands a few steps from a hut with a sign proclaiming us customs. The place is closed for the day or the week or whatever. The customhouse is alongside a school-yard chain-link fence with a gate that opens to Mexico. It is closed now, which makes no difference. I can bring a Mexican grammar school class out here to the fence on a day excursion and watch them scramble over and drop to our holy soil.

Read this monument here to the friar and learn from the past:

BY THIS VALLEY OF SAN RAFAEL

FRAY MARCOS DE NIZA

VICE COMMISSIONER OF FRANCISCAN ORDER

DELEGATE OF THE VICEROY IN MEXICO

ENTERED ARIZONA THE FIRST EUROPEAN WEST OF THE ROCKIES. APRIL 12, 1539.

I believe I am the only one who can report on this monument and its sig­nificance, for 1 have been the only human being around here for the past two days. The monument is of tremendous significance. Nobody sees it, yet it is about the excitement and dash of coming to this country that has no fear of you—no fence, no barbed wire, just a clear way for a marvelous act: walking confidently into a place where nobody has gone before.

That notion of living is lost in a cloud of mental illness. The fence site is under a silent sky that covers field after field of identical knee-high green bushes bristling with small thorns. The bushes sit close together on the red sand; at a distance they turn into liquid to the eye and spill across the first rising rock of the Patagonia Mountains, which are so laced with copper that their reflection at dusk turns the sky burgundy. The mountains have elbows of sheer rock. Mist floats across the many miles of desert, thickening into a thin fog in some places in the low sky.

I am here with Tom McAlpin, who retired as a mailman in Nogales two years ago and knows every house in town and the fields around. He has a quite distinguished light-hued mustache and comes from the McAlpin Hotel family of Manhattan. McAlpin lives a few miles out of Nogales in a house on a hill, and behind it down a path he has a studio where he paints for pleasure. The first time I met him, I was on

Short Street in Nogales, a place of silent houses and a high hideous fence made of the mesh used on landing strips in Vietnam. Right now he gazes at empty country land where he could go 10 years and never have a letter to deliver.

This is the first of desert land that runs hundreds and hundreds of miles without a person, house or shed to be seen. No, we passed one broken house somewhere in the two hours of driving. It had a sign stating the policy of

its dog: MY NAME IS I I.IKE TO BITE.

A sign on a post in the sand says it is the town of Sycamore, but there is only a rutted road into Sycamore Canyon, along Sycamore Creek. Then the jarring road trip ends at the monument standing alone under a burgundy sky.

If we put up a fence on this land, the only things it could turn back would be clouds.

"Before this, flag burning had me all excited," McAlpin is saying. "Then I was told that gay marriages would inter­fere with my lifestyle. But immigration hit a chord. They brought out the armed forces for this one."

Still, there will be a great fence of steel—enough steel to revive Gary, Indiana—designed to keep these little dusty people on their side of the border. The fence will have cam­eras and sensors and buzzers and lights that will alert the country: The Mexicans are coming!

Stan, from Stan's Fences in Bisbee, Arizona, says wist­fully, "They asked me about supplies. We have a steel cable that can be very good in a fence like this. I'll hear from them, but I can't get the contract for the actual building. That's gone."

It sure is. Boeing has the contract. It is worth $67 million to begin with. Just by watching television, you can tell Boeing has a contract to build the fence. In the early eve­ning hours a Boeing commercial appears that says the com­pany makes great sensors. This is an absolutely marvelous home product to sell to the housewife in Winnetka. Then the commercial fills the screen with this big name, Boeing. Remember the name. Boeing builds fences. You would expect to see a commercial for Boeing with a great big plane with its bomb-bay doors open to bomb the freaking enemy. Instead we have an ad saying Boeing hears Mexicans best.

The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson lists the types of fences that could be built with all the money from the congressional bill. The fences could be 10-foot-high cor­rugated steel or 15-foot-high steel mesh slanted in at the top. As of now $1.4 billion is taken out of your pay for fencing and 10,500 border patrol agents. Also National Guard troops, which is only the start.

We are not putting up this fence because we don't like Mexicans.

We will have a fence of sheet metal and steel bars that will allow water to cross and sister-city residents to see one another.

A coyote with a gun pushed the three women into a room in the old house and told them if they screamed when they were raped, he would kill them. He said they could moan and remain alive.

He jabbed the gun at the 10 men and made them go into one room. He pushed the three young women into another.

The girl standing near Santo clutched his arm. "Help me," she said. "Help me or I will die here."

Santo remembers holding her tight. Faviana. He had never seen her before that night. They were in a group of 13 from around Puebla. They had slept in holes on top of rocks. He was 27; she was 18. Two long, large snakes had been slithering into the holes.

Santo throws his arms out as far as they can go. "They were this long. We had to kill them with sticks. This long!" The girl. Faviana, remembering with him, cries out, "Yes."

But in the room there was danger. The gunman said if Santo didn't let go of the woman, he would be shot.

Santo felt the girl against him. Trembling.

He remembers he told the coyote that she was his cousin and that they came from a big family. If anything happens to her, they will all come and get you.

The coyote believed what he was saying. He let Santo take her into a corner, where they stayed through the night. They heard the other young women wailing and sobbing as they were gang-raped by the coyotes.

He didn't know how she got there. He knew his own tale. He was nine when he left elementary school in the third grade in Puebla and went to work to help get

food for his nine brothers and sisters. He went up in the mountains and grabbed rabbits and chickens and brought them down as if he had gone to a butcher. He did this and then worked in a bakery for $6 a day. He heard that in America he could earn $6 an hour. He and his cousin were trying to build a house to give them something more than the crowded floor they had to sleep on. They did wonderfully well as long as their young backs were all they needed. But then the building suppliers wanted money. Santo knew he couldn't earn enough in Puebla to buy a bucket of nails.

There was an old man in the square who told stories of America to the young. "In New York you must try to save the dust when you scratch the gold in the streets. This dust is gold dust, and it can make you rich." (continued on page 148)

Immigration

(continued from page 74)

Santo went to a businessman for whom he had worked many odd jobs. The businessman lent Santo $2,000 to pay a coyote. Santo left his house in the morning, with a schoolbag on his back and a bottle of water. He took the bus to the Puebla airport and then a plane to Chihuahua, where two coy­otes met him and the others and took them into the desert nights. They had no idea where they were when the coyotes took them to this house and left them.

In the morning they were jammed into an old van. They rode for three days. They could not stop, the driver said, because the police would see that they were immigrants and detain them. Santo remembers their stopping in Louis­ville and giving everybody a small piece of fried chicken.

The van took them to an Italian res­taurant in the Bronx. Each of them got something to eat and then was immedi­ately pulled into a back room—a coyote stood guard. When the coyote left the door, Santo slipped up and listened. Inside, one of the coyotes was yelling into the phone—to Mexico, Santo was sure. The coyote was saying that they had not arrived yet, that they were lost and each family had to send more money for the search.

Santo grabbed Faviana by the hand and rushed her out of the place and down a couple of blocks to the sub­way going to downtown Manhattan. At a pay phone she called her sister in New Jersey, who said she would meet Faviana at a big station, 168th Street. There she said good-bye and got off the train; Santo stayed on. When he came up the stairs to his brother's house, the banister was lined with six small faces. They laughed at him. There were three more in the rooms, which had mattresses on the floors. A small boy of six pulled himself along the floor. One of his legs was missing— the prosthesis was on a shelf. He had been in a major hospital with a small leg injury. They had committed inex­cusable errors and the leg was ampu­tated. A court settlement of S25 million was made, but the child can't get the money until he reaches 18. The child's father and mother get $5,000 a month but don't talk about it, for people will turn them in to immigration. "They say that if they get deported, they will not be near the money and it will be stolen," says Santo.

The room shook as an elevated train passed close enough to be reached from the second-floor window.

Santo considered his position. He could get a job in a warehouse, separat­ing knives and forks for $6 an hour. Faviana wrote him, "You are my guardian

angel." Then she called him. She wanted to see him.

"I like the girl I saved," he says.

"When is Fernando coming back?" the bread deliveryman asks one morning.

"Soon he will be here," Angelo says.

He stares at the crowded street from behind the counter of a coffee shop on the west side of New York. Today he is anxious. He has a counterman sick, the grill man is off, and the one running the dishwasher and mashing potatoes has the flu.

The top counterman, Fernando, who can do everything from scramble eggs to handle purveyors, is not back from Mexico yet. He went there with his wife and son to see their family.

Right now Fernando is out there in that desert outside Douglas, going through the low bushes, looking out at mountains far away, and for the first time he is worried about getting back to America, to New York, where he earns a salary at the coffee shop that he can­not conceive of at this moment because he is broke and in the desert.

New York needs him and all his kind as much or even more than they need New York. They are the picture and sound of poverty. They come from dust and houses with no running water and no sure meals, and money is something the storekeeper wants from you—a rumor. When they can find work, there are no hours, and the pay is too small to discuss. They leave school in the early grades and then must struggle painfully to learn to read and write in their own lan­guage. Then they leave this and place their lives in danger in a desert, rely­ing on the most desperate of criminals to get them through to America. They come to a place like New York, unable to read or write Spanish or do much more than use a smile to speak Eng­lish. But they are here, and they work. You see them at dawn, one standing in the doorway to a restaurant, holding the tall paper bag of bread and rolls left by the bakery. He holds them until the owner opens the door and lets him come in and start working right away. You see the woman in the hotel hall­way, starting on the first beds, raising the mattress and putting a sheet on it, then doing another and one after that as pain stabs through her arms and her shoulders ache. You see them in the morning outside their houses, waving their arms in an exercise, any exercise, to loosen them up for another day of work that hurts.

Yes, these Mexicans come to emer­gency rooms with no money when they are sick. The women have babies all over the city, the city has to serve them, and the bills are not paid. These children crowd schools and don't do

that well, because their parents never bothered with schools.

But they work. And working people improve. The ones who oppose them say Mexicans are taking jobs from Ameri­cans, but Americans don't do this work anymore, particularly in the cities. So if you don't hire a Mexican, you won't get the work done. Nonunion construction jobs are filled by blacks, Mexicans and others from Central America.

"Our city's economy would be a shell of itself and would collapse if they are deported," the mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, said one day. He couldn't understand why anybody should be sur­prised to hear this. Yes, these people use our benefits and in some cases use them to the straining point.

Still, not only do they work, but we need their work.

You see best how whites show their weaknesses when they say these immi­grants could be terrorists, sneaking across the border with bombs, crawling through a tunnel with maybe the lives of everyone in your office building or on your commuter train folded in their arms as they wriggle into America. This is why we must have fences and troops and searching instruments, for it is only natural that these brown people would come here to blow us up.

It did not go that way when 15 Saudi Arabians out of 19 true terrorists crashed planes on September 11.

1 saw Mexicans there. I was running up Vesey Street when, halfway down the block, the second tower blewr up and col­lapsed and debris flew onto the street and put death in everyone's minds as they ran desperately, including Mexi­can busboys from the hotel in the World Trade Center and delivery boys from cof­fee shops. Up a block and around the corner a Mexican in kitchen whites said, for no reason except to tell why he was so frozen with fear, "I saw a lady's head on the sidewalk."

Fernando is 36, and with him in Mex­ico are his wife, who is the same age, and his son, 18. They left New York and flew home to Puebla for a visit that could ease a wife's ache at wanting to see her family, fulfill Fernando's need to see his parents, sisters and brothers and also let them just return to their beginnings.

Then they started back to New York, and this had to be done on foot, for they didn't have a slip of paper that would get them past a maintenance man at the airport. They came the established way, by bus to Agua Prieta, which looks across the red sand at Douglas. They were col­lecting in groups in the hotel lobby and paying coyotes S2.500 each to guide them across the border. Fernando got into a group that was crossing the next day in daylight. Once, years before, he had come across at night, and there were snakes he couldn't see until they were at his ankles. Border patrol searchlights

caused the people to flatten between bushes for hours, living with the snakes.

This time there would be no fright or reptiles; Fernando and wife and son would walk only in the daylight.

They had fabulous luck. They came out of the empty desert and started walk­ing, Mexican style, single file along the side of the highway. Nobody else could be seen. The coyote had assured them that cars and a van would come and live up to their 52,500 agreement to take them to the airport in Los Angeles.

They were so busy walking that nobody saw the guns. Big guns held out there by patrolmen in camouflage.

Fernando remembers his brain turn­ing to ice.

He and his wife and son raised their hands and then got into the van. They were thrown back into Mexico like minnows.

The coyote had disappeared, but he was in the lobby in the morning, ready to help them cross the desert again, this time for $500, seeing that he had failed so miserably the day before. This time, he said, I can show you the way to Los Angeles and New York, and you will not take a wrong step.

They did very well. They lasted 10 hours and were back on that highway walking nice in single file. The guns this time seemed to be true cannons.

Fernando called his brother in New York and said he had been delayed and his brother should tell Angelo.

Angelo stands in the coffee shop and explains immigration as only somebody who has had to get up in the morning and work at immigrants'jobs can.

"If they stop Fernando and all the immigrants from coming to work here," he says, "then we will pay $18 an hour for a counterman and $7 an hour more in benefits. That will make me charge S10—no, S12—for bacon and eggs. You will not pay, and I will close my store."

On his third try Fernando broke out of the desert at dusk and into an America with no lawmen in sight, and it remained that way until the ride came. By morning Fernando was back where he belonged, behind the counter.

When Mexicans first came to southern Arizona, the people of Nogales turned the place brown by marriage. Their descendants are not worried about a fence. But since the lone Franciscan from Europe stepped into Arizona, large pop­ulations of European whites have settled in the area, and several million Mexicans have crossed the border into Arizona. In their home area of Douglas, many Euro­pean inheritors want a fence and fresh troops with field artillery. A small pam­phlet distributed to Douglas churchgoers reads, "Immigration is deliberately out of control as Catholics pour through our southern border."

The feeling becomes more intense as you get farther from the sand.

James Sensenbrenner, a congressman from Wisconsin who started the rally

against the Mexican horde about two years ago, is so agitated that if he ever sees one of these Mexicans standing in the snow in Green Bay, he will call for an armored division.

One night on television an old Iowa congressman, Leonard Boswell, had people trying to bite his throat open because he favored giving food stamps to immigrants—illegal immigrants— who were hungry. Just by standing they break the law, thus becoming the only people who commit the crime of being. When Boswell was asked about treating immigrants in our hos­pitals, he said they should of course be treated if they need it. The crowd wanted him assassinated.

"Open the door?" L.A. Gonzalez says. "They'd be gone. I would be."

Gonzalez, an immigration officer, stands by a white Rocky Mountain Tours bus in an empty corner of a restaurant parking lot. The bus driver is inside the restaurant; 40 Mexicans sit silently inside the bus. The Mexicans are not going to

a ski resort. They are being deported to Mexico, deep into Mexico.

The bus door is closed and another officer stands in front of it. Immigration doesn't want anybody getting out. The Mexicans inside were picked up during the night and are exhausted from a bus ride that took hours.

"Where are they from?" Gonzalez is asked.

"From Yuma now," he says. "They were picked up last night. We fly them out of here on Aeromexico to Mexico City. Buses take them to their towns. If you just put them back across the line here, they are returning tomorrow. This way they get let off where they live. They're not going to be coming back soon."

Gonzalez is from the South Bronx, the Catholic parish of St. Luke's, an old par­ish of cops and Irish tunnel workers that has since turned Latino. Once there were saloons on every corner; now nobody there is born in America, and Latin music screams from corner bodegas.

"You are here for one of the last trips," Gonzalez says. "They aren't going to do this anymore."

"It doesn't work?"

"It is very expensive. It costs, oh, I don't know, somebody said SI.500 for each person you deport. They are going to try something else.'

Marisol Arce, another agent, says, "I only don't like that they bring kids through the desert."

"There was one I remember," Dr. Oscar Lopez says later, closing his eyes. "There was a woman and her baby the other day." He sits in a bare room of El Centro de Salud, a Red Cross center of sorts in the Mexican town of Seasa, a place with virtually no telephones out­side of pay stations. If you're sick, you crawl on your arms and legs to get help. The first place you go is the Cruz Roja, or Red Cross, a one-story building with a couple of rooms for people to flop down in while waiting for something to help them or to be taken by one of the young guys at the desk to El Centro de Salud, a couple of blocks away. It is where they brought the woman after they found her dazed in the desert, clutching her six-month-old baby. "She got lost from a group," Lopez says. "Two days and nights, she held the baby. They had no food or water. The mother was very sick when she got here. The baby—this is a surprise. The baby was all right. Why, I don't know. The mother was very sick."

"What did you do for her?" some­one asks.

"Gave her an IV for two days. Then we sent her to Caborca. That is 120 miles to the south."

"Where is the baby?"

"A social worker cares for her."

Asked how many have died on his side of the border, Lopez says he has figures of 50 and 75 but seems unsure, except that many die. On the American side you must rely on the border patrol, and its figures are as low as it can make them, so there is no sense in repeating them. One thing is certain: Hundreds die, many with no identification.

Haifa dozen National Guard soldiers in camouflage uniforms are in front of an Indian gambling hall on the highway running through Tohono O'odham lands on a Sunday afternoon. They are stop­ping before the drive to a motel where they are quartered.

"Where you from?" one of them is asked.

"Virginia."

"How long have you been here?"

"Two months. We're going home next week."

"How did it go for you?"

"Oh, we were out there."

"Could you stop many?"

"A few."

"When do you think they'll be stopped for good?"

"In about 500 years. They're com­ing here for money. How are you going to stop that?"

The presence of guardsmen and the

millions of border patrol and immigration cops ends the idea of the Minutemen. We have enough badges and therefore need no old, preposterous vigilantes.

Now as you read this number—$340 a week—it tells you everything there is to know about immigration. In Puebla or Cholula they make nothing: $6 a day at construction, S3 selling soda in the street. Maybe literally nothing anytime else. You then tell these people it is possible to make $340 in a week. Their minds stop. Reason assumes command. Of course, this cannot be. Oh yes, somebody says, my cousin says he earns $400 a week in New York. That's right. He came here with his wife for Christmas, and they told us. You heard them. The streets of New York are covered with money. You just bend over and pick up what you need.

This is the kind of story that built the place I know, the city of New York. They sat without a shilling in the emptiness of west Ireland, with rock glinting through the sparse grass in the sun. To New York they came, those farm Irish. Large num­bers worked on building the Brooklyn Bridge for S3 a long day. The contractor, a heartless Irish named Crimmons, con­tracted with another purveyor of misery in Palermo, Sicily to send over boatloads of Sicilians to work for $2 a day. Tell a man starving in a sulfur mine in Lercara Friddi, in the hills outside Palermo, and he comes pounding down the slope to the ship in the port. This is the story of all those who came to New York. The dream of the money in New York was a stronger impetus than a saber in causing the Jews to get out of Odessa.

Pietro DiDonato's great American novel Christ in Concrete is about an Ital­ian in Brooklyn who drowns in concrete while working in construction. He works for the lowest of money. I was reread­ing the book when my newspaper office called and told me of a young Mexican, Eduardo Gutierrez, who had drowned in a concrete lake in the basement of a collapsed construction site in Brooklyn. Sixty years separated the tales. Through all the weeks there were stories of workers dying. Then one Sunday in fall 2006, 1 stood under the el on a street in Queens with a somber group of Mexican laborers who stared up at workers being carried from the top floor of a construction job that had been bent into a V by poured concrete. One worker, Daniel Basilio, was crushed to death. Only hours earlier his wife had given birth to a baby girl in their home village ofTasquillo, north of Mex­ico City. Some of the laborers were saying in Spanish that no one knew how to call the wife and tell her that her husband was gone. She would know soon enough, one of them said, when the money he sends home does not come in the mail.

Though immigration is so chilling and disheartening in this case, it had always been honorable, the strongest point of the life that made America. We were a people who through it all regarded immigrants as the relatives who needed a hand. We didn't have to love them. We just told ourselves we had to live with them no matter where they were from. Have you been in a place with all these Irish? Stupid unmannerly slobs. Can't understand a fucking word. The Ital­ians in Brooklyn are the worst greasy bastards. Only blacks are harder to put

up with than Mexicans. They can't read: they can't write. They wear rage.

Those who came here understood something about this. They were out on the deck of the arriving steamer in their best clothes. They regarded this as most important, the dress a woman wore on the thrilling day she came to America. Sarah Jastrow arrived in Washington Heights and was in wonderment ai this can in her hand—soup. No boiling bones and putting scraps into the pot for the slow job of producing soup. We are in America: they have soup in cans. She walked around for two days trying to open that can, until a neighbor noticed and came out with a can opener, which Sarah would use for life. She always thought of this small street kindness as the heart of America.

But now we have a different standard in this country. For some, the willing­ness to assist has been replaced by self­ishness and greed, and the great thrill of immigration has become the grubby nastiness of turning Mexicans away because of their skin color. Keep them outside like the mutts they are.

We stand and look at people who are supposed to be our friends, people with no army threatening us, people to whom we are supposed to be good neighbors, and in their faces we put up the most expensive spite fence any­one has ever seen.

Nogales, Arizona has a population of 20,878. Sixteen feet away. Nogales, Mexico has an estimated population of 300,000. The traffic coming through the customs plaza is a river of molten metal. Looking down from Terrace Avenue are many loungers with cell phones who are obviously waiting for a truck or van carry­ing hidden immigrants. There are fewer waiting, though, than the last time I was here, a couple of years ago. Now there are so many National Guard and border patrol agents that they get in one anoth­er's way. The tightening at this entrance only sends the immigrants farther out into the desert. It does nothing for the life of the twin cities. Two uniformed offi­cers hold on to two small young people carrying their clothes in paper bags and walk them into headquarters.

The streets of Nogales are uglier because of the fencing. Up Nelson Ave­nue, in an alley of some sort off Short Street, is a high fence. The fence turns the alley into a dark slum. Later, banks of lamps on towers will shine bare white light on the ugly fence. The people living here have no say in their surroundings.

Down a couple of blocks at the pedes­trian gate, the fence starts up a hill and then goes over it and beyond for a dis­tance—not as great a distance as it will soon cover but enough to keep a couple of families on the Mexican side living with a fence in their face. I look up at a frame house that is virtually flush against the fence. On the porch is a guy in a

red shirt, walking back and forth. Two others come out of the house and pace. They appear to be one good leap from sailing through the air and into Arizona. I know in the past, people would climb the fence and drop to the street. Once a man had a baby on a rope and asked someone on the street to hold the baby while he came down. The person said sure, and the guy on the fence lowered the baby into the other guy's arms, then jumped off the fence and landed on a leg that instantly gave way. He writhed, and they had to get an ambulance for him. The stranger on the street looked at the bundle in his arms and took the baby home with him.

The trouble with the story is that

it happened.

To stop such atrocities and other crimes such as coming to America without papers, the great new spite fence will go up with the support and en­thusiasm of those elected to stand in Congress and up­hold America.

Here are the words of a couple of politicians in Congress during the debates that led to the wildly enthusiastic vote for a new fence.

Charles Bass (R.-N.H.): "Mr. Chair­man, I rise in support of the Nor­wood Amendment, which will provide state and local en­forcement the nec­essary authority, resources and intel­ligence needed to apprehend and de­tain illegal immi­grants that they encounter during their routine duties.

The president, in his recent comprehen­sive immigration strategy, has called for an elimination of catch and release at our national border, and it is essential that this be expanded to include incidents within the interior of the country.

"Over 400,000 alien absconders and more than 85,000 criminal illegal aliens are in our country. Illegal immigration is a national problem. Throughout the country, state and local law enforce­ment are confronted with the prob­lem. Recently my district has been in the national spotlight concerning the strategies that local law uses in place of federal guidelines that force the ille­gal immigrants to be released when

police detain them in the course of their normal duties. Tragically, many of these criminal aliens remain loose within our borders. Therefore, I urge my colleagues to vote yes on the Nor­wood Amendment."

Nathan Deal (R.-Ga.): "My state is one of the fastest growing in terms of population of illegal aliens in this coun­try. Two of the five fastest-growing pop­ulations of illegal immigrants are in my congressional district.

"You heard Congressman Norwood say there are 500,000 criminal aliens in this country who are waiting to be appre­hended. I am told we have only three enforcement agents. In our adjoining state of Alabama, they have only one.

Why not tap into the 700,000 state and local law enforcement officers who are available and trained to enforce the law? Let me just point out that if you wish to vote against this bill, you are basically saying that you want to allow 500,000 criminal aliens to stay on the street, because 2,000 federal officers simply are not going to remove them."

Any sheet of the high-piled sheaves of paper regarding this bill calling for the fence could show how it would pass, as it surely did at the end of September 2006. The new law reflects the part of the community that doesn't like browns. Drop down a level and you have a state senator, Russell Pearce of Mesa, Ari-

zona, calling for the return of Opera­tion Wetback, an armed program that would deport 1.4 million Mexicans. Pick up a paper and read about Tucson city councilman Steve Leal, who used city money to buy video recorders for constituents to tape these brown aliens and their drug peddlers, of which there were many, in his area.

On the road back from Tom McAlpin's, there is a small shrine, a cement altar with a curved top and two large candles on it. On every roadside there seem to be small altars like this, built as memori­als for accident victims. Most are for im­migrants who died trying to get to Tucson and then on to Los Angeles and New York. On the road from Lukeville

is an altar with a boy's backpack on it. A sign reads,

ANEMO ANTONE JR.

8/2/83-5/22/04. They brought him north for a future. These memorial altars are many, as are the deaths. They have also become the Old North Church and the torches of the un­derground wher­ever there have been undergrounds and, here in the desert, the succes­sors to smoke sig­nals. On a lonely road with one of these small altars on its edge, a man who lives in a house there tells me that frequently at dusk somebody comes from some­where, lights the two candles and leaves. The candles burn at the start of night. He says that on many nights he hears the rustle of bushes and the

padding of people suddenly coming to the shrine. Then he hears car doors slamming. Several of them. He doesn't hear cars pulling up or leaving, just doors slamming as people crowd into the cars—crowded with more people than you'll ever see. At dusk tonight, tomorrow, the candles will be lit again, little lights in the night. These altars, from San Diego to El Paso, are beauti­ful lights to see. A government is going to try to stop them with a fence thai reflects its own ugliness.

Here's what the past has taught us: You should always bet on the light.

"If they stop all the immigrants,

we will pay $18 an hour

for a counterman. That will

make me charge $10—no,

$12—for bacon and eggs.

You will not pay."