From the Los Angeles (actually, San Fernando Valley) Daily News:
Too broke to buy a ticket home, Valley's immigrant day laborers just hang on
by Tony Castro
They are down and out in the United States and homesick for Guatemala. And El Salvador. And Honduras. And Mexico.
And they would go back without even an American penny in their pocket if only they had enough to get home.
They are the discouraged and disillusioned Central American and Mexican day laborers who, in a sign of how hard times are in this economy, find themselves so broke they can't send much, if any, money back to loved ones they haven't seen for years.
"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas - and wishes he could leave sooner....
A glance at Ochoa's and Perez's decline in earnings over the past year underscores how far their dream has fallen.
For months, both have been averaging one day of work a week, earning from $60 to $80 a day. They used to work up to seven days a week at that rate.
"We didn't realize how good it was until it was gone," said Perez.
"In Guatemala, I could live with my family at my parents' house," Ochoa said.
"I would find some kind of work. I might not make much more a week there than I do here working only one day a week. But I would be home. I wouldn't be a stranger in another country."
But now Guatemalan day laborers wishing to go home face the task of saving $400 or more for the airfare to return home.
"If you're from Guatemala and you want to go home, it has to be by plane," said Ochoa. "We're not trying to be picky. But it's not a trip that can be done safely by bus."
Turning themselves into U.S. immigration authorities for speedy deportation is no easy answer. Illegal immigrants often languish for months as prisoners in detention centers. When they are deported, they may end up hundreds of miles from their home towns, families and friends.
Perez suggested a novel solution for how immigrant day laborers could return to their homelands even quicker.
"If those people and groups who are crusading to get immigrants out of the United States would offer the air fare for us to go home, we would," he said, making direct reference to members of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project.
The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.
"It's not like there's any great love there," said Perez. "If you're Guatemalan, Salvadoran or Honduran, you want to fly home.
"If we're going to go home, we want to make sure we get there alive."
Sounds like a good way to stimulate the airline industry. I'm sure paying to send unemployed illegal immigrants home (after being photographed and fingerprinted), because it's so much cheaper for all concerned, is included in President Obama's 800 bazillion dollar stimulus bill, right? I mean, it's got to be in there somewhere. Oh, well, probably just an oversight. I'm sure the Democrats will put in such a humane and sensible measure as soon as their mistake is pointed out to them.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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41 comments:
Can I donate to this cause???
" I'm sure the Democrats will put in such a humane and sensible measure as soon as their mistake is pointed out to them."
I'm sure the Democrats will get off their SWPL arses as soon as they tire of their endless victory discussions and go out and register these poor souls as Dems.
...as soon as their mistake is pointed out to them.
Not enough bandwidth is available for this task.
The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.
So how did they get here? Are we supposed to believe they flew here? If they didn't, then obviously they weren't too scared to cross Mexico on the way in, and they can f**king cross Mexico on the way out, too.
Let's buy them the plane ticket if they agree to have "ILLEGAL" indelibly tatooed on their foreheads, and if they agree to accept the death penalty if they're ever caught in this country again.
Well, fair enough, but the idea isn't just to get them to leave but to make sure that they don't come back once the economy turns around. Otherwise, all they get is a free vacation home. Build the fence and enforce the existing immigration laws, and then they can have their free ticket home.
They're not going home. Remittances are only down by 2%. Why would they go home? The economy is as bad there as here nd the Dems are getting ready to hand them billions in new benefits and, quite possibly, amnesty.
You have to be kidding, Steve.
The Democrats are desperately trying to keep the illegal immigrants from leaving.
If this bad economy continues for another year or more, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of illegals will self-deport back to their home countries.
If there is anything in the stimulus bill for illegals, it will be subsidies for illegal immigrants so that they can stay.
Democrats are worried that their plans for domination are being thwarted. That is why Obama is so worried about "immigration reform" and has made it a top priority.
I wrote Steve last year about the San Francisco's voluntary deportation of the homeless. They offer $200.00 or so and a bus ticket and send them to their hometown. One city complained to SF for dumping these folks on them. Limbaugh yesterday said Hawaii is going to do the same except with plane tickets.
If a private organization or individual does this, it will be deemed as :"evil racism". Watch.
The tropical charter season is underway. If they're hurting along with everyone else (except McDonald's), maybe they'll be open to one-way standbys paid by third parties.
Another way is to set up one's own service-- rent old DC-10s and L-1011s and use retired or up-and-coming pilots. Or even Central American craft and crew! (Cheaper, easier to return, and they'd love the business.)
Question is, who'd pay? Perhaps beleaguered local governments and labor unions might give it the seed to get off the ground, so to speak.
Undocumented Immigrant Amnesty Act of 2009
1. Undocumented Americans go their local police station
2. Fingerprinted and photgraphed
reported
3. They're not thrown in jail (that's the amnesty part)
4. Flown to home country
5. Eligible to visit US again in 3 years (instead of the typical 10 for long-term immigration violations)
You could even throun in a cash payment when they walk off the plane if we need to sweeten the pot.
That they're willing to go indicates that they're not worried that there will ever be effective border enforcement.
It would be an even better idea if we added two more things. First, we want a letter, a set of fingerprints and a picture. The second thing is that we need a fence. These are the type of guys that hope across the border in the middle of the night. They are not here on expired visas. Once a fence is up they won't be able to hop back across after the holidays.
All you guys saying they'll just come back when times are better - well, maybe you're right, but if you do nothing you know for sure where they'll end up. If the odds are 50% that they'll come back then it probably works out to around $2000 or less per permanent deportation. Vs. tens of thousands if they ever visit an emergency room or hundreds of thousands if they ever have kids. This is the bargain of a lifetime. I wonder if numbers USA or other organizations are trying to help out with this.
"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas - and wishes he could leave sooner
Clearly their reason for being here was to suck money and services out of our economy.
When times get a little hard, these illegals skip back to the home country - to where they were sending much of their erstwhile loot anyway.
Loyal Americans being cruelly denied their dream of American citizenship? Horses--t. If such were their dream, they would have applied for citizenship and come here legally, as thousands do every day.
ICE will already pay for your transportation plus a bit more for "moving expenses" if you agree not to contest deportation. And they don't "languish" in deportation centers unless they're criminals. My guess is for Guatemalans transportation amounts to a bus ticket and they'd rather fly.
I don't buy the safety aspect. Why would the drug people bother with penniless Guatemalans on their way home?
Assume 9 million illegal workers and assume 150 million people who have or want a job. Illegals thus make up ca. 6% of the workforce. Our unemployment rate is now around 7-9%. Theoretically our unemployment rate could be around 1-3% if all the illegals left and the jobs were taken by legal citizens.
That's being a bit too optimistic but it points out something important: our unemployment rate will not go down so long as nothing is done regarding illegal immigration. It will remain where it is or else grow even larger.
Market forces haven't changed. Employers still seek the cheapest labor possible, and that labor will still be the illegal kind.
Americans can't afford to take on any more debt. We don't have the home equity to tap. Our economy has to grow through actual effort this time. If Democrats do nothing about illegal immigration then the situation will not get better at all or else will do so only very slowly. This is not the 1930s. Americans are used to short-lived recessions and if the situation is no better in 2010 we will take it out on the Democrats.
i agree that the correct way to deport border jumpers is to tattoo them and send them on their way. but this is far too sensible for modern american politicians.
"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez....
Lets give these people citizenship!
This is going to sound bad, but this is the kind of thing people consider, or should, when making decisions that impact their own lives:
Why would these people put themselves into a situation where the local people and government would be be better off just slitting your throat and dropping you into a shallow grave? Lot cheaper than worrying about housing you or flying you home out of their own pocket.
Maybe I'm just silly that way, but I don't like the idea of 100% banking on the largesse of people thousands of miles away, with whom I share neither race, culture, or language.
BRING AIR FARE WITH YOU, OR SOCK IT AWAY FIRST THING, YOU MORONS!
These people don't even have the sense to save up 400 bucks for air fare and sock it away.
An amnesty in which illegal aliens are given a free plane ticket home and no jail time if they turn themselves in makes sense to me.
"A win-win proposition"
It's really simple, just make it clear for illegal immigrants: 'Do the right thing or face the consequnces'.
Please come and sign up for the free transfer to your homeland or... wait for our Law Enforcement to catch up with you.
In case you don't feel to hot about this offer, let's be honest, it will take at least 3 years of hard labor in a Government sponsored facility for an individual to earn enough and pay for the ticket.
So, you came back again,... minimum 6 years of free labour.
Pragmatically, it's a bargain to send them home even if you had had to charter a Concorde.
Why not seize the assets of all the check cashing businesses?
Jorge's cronies sit on the boards of one of the biggest.
Use the seized assets to repatriate the migrants (sic).
Any plan to deport these Guatelombians won't work unless there's a border fence built to keep them from coming back in.
Um, guys, this plane ticket home idea sounds great until you do the math - millions of illegal immigrants at several hundred dollars per plane ticket = over a billion dollars, easy.
It would be worth it, and could be done with a fraction of the money we spend annually to police Israel's border, but using buses or something would make a lot more sense.
Using Air Force jets would serve the dual purposes of providing crew proficiency flights and enabling the illegals to be shipped out from places like Scott AFB in the midwest.
Apparently there are suckers even here at iSteve who are the sorts that Drudge targets with his occasional headlines announcing "300 Illegals Deported!"
Oh yeah! We're turning this thing around!
Wake up already. The New World Order playbook says the European nations must be made non-European and that's it. The Western world is being systematically dismantled and otherwise transmogrified according to elaborate and detailed plans drafted by people who are strategically far beyond the typical iSteve commenter.
The humongous flow north from Latin America and the rest of the world is slowing slightly? A few on the bottom rungs are returning home? So what? You're talking about a statistically insignificant reverse flow to the south. At least 30 million have come north over the past thirty years and the "demographic battle has been won" as that sicko leftist posted last week. And the second generation is totally legal no matter the status of the border jumper parents. California is theirs now. Many other states will be soon.
You think this economic crisis is going to save the southwest and the country as a whole by reversing the flood? You don't know who you're dealing with. NWO policy remains in full effect. Future immigration flow to the north is going to dwarf the numbers of the past decades.
Regular old-fashioned American citizens have battered wife syndrome. The Powers That Be knock the citizen slaves back three steps and then let them move forward one step. At which time the citizen slaves note their forward progress and remain hopeful.
Wake up already. The New World Order playbook says the European nations must be made non-European and that's it.
I used to snicker at the New World Order/Black Helicopter/Bar Code-on-the-wrist type of people. Then I started paying attention to mass immigration proponents and the multicultis and realizing how very much on the same page they all are. It's as if they're operating from the exact same playbook, no matter the country, no matter their line of work, no matter their alleged political party. It's truly frightening.
When I was a college student, one of my professors offered extra-credit for volunteering at some immigrant rights group (and vaguely hinted that our grades might suffer if we didn't), so I volunteered. The people running the group used to snicker all the time at the complaints that mass illegal immigration was turning the U.S. into an overcrowded third-world country. They said that it would serve those arrogant white people right and teach them a humbling and much-needed lesson. Their Schadenfreude was palpable; they didn't even bother to hide it from me.
Maginot, what is it you would have us do? Just give up?
We're in the process of turning this thing around. We've started by defeating amnesty and geting E-Verify used increasingly.
After a few more victories against illegal immigration, we will start targeting legal immigration, trying to get our policies more restrictive. If the NWO types don't like it, we will work to amass enough power to overcome them.
Eventually we will attack birthright citizenship, and if need be we will try to encourage an outmigration of those second generationers.
I am under the impression that the illegal immigration tide has turned to net outmigration. Currnetly we need to work to continue and increase that trend. Once we show we can do that, then we move on to the harder work of undoing the damage that has already been done.
Perhaps there are powerful forces lined up against us. But we can't just give up.
The following is a news article from the Mexican newspaper "Excelsior" (Mexico City) 1/27/09. It was translated at the website of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (http://nafbpo.org/) which presents selected news items from south of the border on a daily basis.
BTW, without checking in on these news reports regularly, the average American can have no idea of the chaos and crime occurring in Mexico.It certainly gets scant coverage in the MSM.
SNIP>>
The economic crisis which lashes the United States forces the Mexican workers, legal and illegal, to return to their places of origin.
According to Carlos Villanueva, president of the World Association of Mexicans Abroad, (”AMME”) 30 percent of the nearly two million fellow countrymen who arrived in the country during the December season to spend the yearend holidays with their relatives have not returned to the United States for lack of a job which would guarantee their stay in the neighboring country.
Villanueva explained that the contraction and recession in the world market has mainly affected the more unprotected classes of the United States, among which is found the Mexican migrant community.
During an interview with Martin Espinosa for “the First Report Program 98.5″ (Villanueva) who also founded “AMME” pointed out that one million 583 thousand jobs were lost by the close of 2008 in the neighbor country, of which one million were formal jobs and the rest were of the informal sector, mainly composed of illegal Hispanic immigrants, among them the Mexicans.
We are the most disorganized community, and therefore the ones who are most easily expelled from the United States.
Nevertheless, Carlos Villanueva emphasized that despite the number of countrymen who already are in Mexico, there is another large number of immigrants affected by the crisis who gamble on staying in the United States, and because of this have been obligated to change into poorly paid work activities.
Construction workers have changed direction, earn some 60 percent less, but are going into other sectors, many are selling flowers at the street corners and many others have begun to compete for a spot as gardeners, all of them with very low wages, he underscored.
On another matter, Villanueva asserted that the drop in individual monetary remittances for December 2008 was 33 percent, for which reason states such as Zacatecas and Michoacán have already gone into economic emergency.
In view of these numbers, Villanueva urged the federal government to again take up negotiations about a necessary immigration reform with the new American President, Barack Obama, to attempt to improve the fellow countrymen’s conditions in that country.
[The preceding article was followed by the following commentary from Jose Rubalcava Reyna:]
Granted that the economy. which is presently globalized, can affect the world’s countries, we ( or the government ) mustn’t blame the country’s financial crisis as the only causalty factor of Mexico’s poverty. I believe our poverty is ancestral, not only in the economic aspects but in all aspects which integrate Mexicans. With or without a crisis we are a poor and ignorant people. Perhaps because of this we shouldn’t worry, after all we haven’t got much to lose.
<< END SNIP
"Why would these people put themselves into a situation where the local people and government would be be better off just slitting your throat and dropping you into a shallow grave?"
Still dreaming of Stormtroopers, Svigor? Even though you and I would both be considered untermenchen by them. Funny, that.
- Fred
"Um, guys, this plane ticket home idea sounds great until you do the math - millions of illegal immigrants at several hundred dollars per plane ticket = over a billion dollars, easy."
A billion dollars is a bargain compared to the social and law enforcement services costs of these illegals.
Furthermore, the airline industry can use the stimulus.
A billion dollars is a bargain compared to the social and law enforcement services costs of these illegals.
Boat would probably be the cheapest way, especially for people from Central American countries where everywhere is close to the sea. You could even package it as a vacation cruise, with games and free drinks and the like, sort of like a going away present, if that would make it more palatable to liberals. No hard feelings, hope you enjoyed your stay, just please understand that we're getting more serious about our borders, and please don't come back!
"Let's buy them the plane ticket if they agree to have "ILLEGAL" indelibly tatooed on their foreheads, and if they agree to accept the death penalty if they're ever caught in this country again."
Why not a serial number...or a pink triangle?
Erm, "air fare"; hoist on my own pet peeve.
truth said
Why not a serial number...or a pink triangle?
I prefer a red letter "I" for "illegal."
PS: the homosexuals already trademarked the pink triangle.
Why not a serial number...or a pink triangle?
Or a rainbow for you, "Truth"....
The Nazis actually started the Pink Triangle in the Polish concentration camps. Strangely enough, pink was considered a strongly masculine color 70 years ago, and the homosexuals were branded with pink triangles not because they were considered feminine, but because they were attracted to other men.
Erm, "air fare"; hoist on my own pet peeve.
Gotta assume the post this refers to was lost, since I don't think Steve gives a damn about me explaining how my handle is Slavic, but my genes are not (British/German).
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