OH dear again, nlhome I am sorry I jumped to conclusions reading your post - sounds like you do have a handle on the patterns of living carried out by most undocumented - as to the issue of undocumented that is a ball of knots -
One issue is since the border is now so tight it is keeping many an undocumented here that traditionally they only came for a year or two - always went back for the holidays to bring the money earned back and if they needed more they returned - for a couple of hundred years when something families were purchasing or a community was building, they at first left these villages, that take a day to walk out of and found employment in towns mostly in northern Mexico. Gradually they learned there was more work available in the US that paid better so they did not have to be away from their families as long - so that became the pattern. These villages HAVE NO MONEY - it is as if the village is one big family -
There is no electricity, water is the nearby stream, they grow all their food, and if they need to buy a cow to increase the small herd they then need money or if they want to buy a piece of land or the community wants to build a place for kids to learn - the Mexican government does require collage students who are education majors to teach for a year in small communities that children from other nearby villages walk over an hour to attend classes. There is money needed to build a school room and the student/teacher lives with a local family. Those that did come to the US were the very ones who wanted their children to be educated to at least read.
They never could send their earnings back home because the money would be taken at the post office and it was often a trick getting home without being robbed but this system had someone coming here, doing work that we are not educated our kids to do anylonger and then they went back with maybe 3 or 4 times in the life each time coming here for two or maybe three years. Now, they leave behind their family and end up making a new family here because they cannot get back without a great deal of expense and risk trying to return. Young hard working men do not live as bachelors for 2 or 3 years - before there were girls who are still at the bars but the guys are stuck here and a weekly night out does not satisfy a guy used to a home-life.
The families left behind have no idea if the one who was seeking work in the US is alive or dead - most of these villages and tucked away homes have no phone service - they leave messages for each other by forming rocks in certain patterns on the side of these dirt roads much like the rock formations we all learned from the Scout handbook.
It has been 14 years now since last I was down but there are some who, in my case a guy from Lubbock sets up a hiking experience and part of the hike is we stop in a sizable town before to buy lots of beans and rice and pack a burro with our purchase and as we find a family where the small plot of corn and several young children are living with a mom we leave her bags of rice and beans - some live in caves that their family have lived in for hundreds of years, others in thatch roofed huts with a small fire contently going in the corner regardless it is the middle of summer as the source of light and for cooking - and so by trapping the one who came here for temporary work we are creating greater poverty, breaking up families which is creating greater need so that now more and more use their only escape once they are in their late teens and they too come adding to a greater number of undocumented full time immigrants living and working in the U.S.
The other side also is that we have taken away from our economy all the low priced crops - a farmer cannot grow things like onions or radishes without cheap labor so all those crops the Mexican farmhands learned how it is done because they were the labor and when the border became an issue they simply took their knowledge with them and now all those inexpensive crops are gown and shipped form Mexico adding to our cost because now there is shipping added to the produce - this has been the story of much of our fruit as well and seasonal flowers like all the now town after town of vacant greenhouses in northeast Texas that grew poinsettias - no inexpensive labor so they were abandoned and the western slopes of the Rockies in Colorado was where our seeds were grown. Again, no labor and those farmers gave up trying to inform the nation of what was happening so now it is a special catalog for a few small places that still sells natural seeds - it left the door wide open for Monsanto so that even our seed packets in the garden centers are Monsanto genetically modified seeds.
All I know is I do not want to be paying high property tax, as I do for schools tax to educate kids to plant onions, or even roof buildings in the high summer heat - our students may not all go on to college but I expect the high taxes coming from my pocket is providing an education for them to do more than basic field work or the grunt work required by a community to function and so, temporary labor to me takes care of that. Plus our kids are no longer being trained even at home how to do that kind of labor nor do we want them to be maids or part of the road crew as their adult job much less pay with tax dollars how to do those jobs.
Fences may fence out but in the process they fence in so that now we have a bulging immigration issue with more kids born here from undocumented workers and that population will continue to grow where as before, fewer families were created here in the U.S.
We cannot do anything now about the policies that brought us to this point - but I cannot see the benefit of splitting up families and then dealing with adults down the line who were traumatized as kids when one of their parents were taken. If the fence on the border was working I could see that as a solution but it is not working except as a deterrent to those who would periodically and yes, every Christmas return home.
As to the women left behind - her and her children's entire diet is dependent on that field of corn she grows with no running water therefore, she scoops up pails of water from the stream and carries them up to water the plants - she is taking care of kids, needing energy to cook and wash and take care of a house, all on her own with no electricity and no way to travel to a town that is at least 5 to more often over 10 miles away. This is not a random story but a typical story of nearly all rural Mexico. Then I look at my life sheesh...
