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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Illegal
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“Illegal.” I’ve always hated the term. I haven’t taken anything that doesn’t belong to me. I haven’t hurt anyone. I work for my living, I work hard for it.
I grew up in Tepic, married my wife, had two beautiful children. I think I would have liked to live my days out in Tepic, near my mother. But Tepic is controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel, and they wage their violent drug war there. I began to fear for my family, but my work in Tepic barely covered our expenses, and would never have provided the money to move my family. So I left Tepic, and crossed the border into the US. I thought I could send enough money home for my family to leave, settle in a new and safer place, but the economy in the US is not good, and it’s taking longer than I’d hoped, and the violence is escalating. The Cartel uses guns purchased illegally in the US (sold through gun shows) to fight their wars with rivals and the police. Mexico’s most influential export to the US is workers; America’s most influential export is guns, and by extension, death and terror. Of course, the byproduct is that American guns enable the cartels to thrive, and continue to export drugs to America. I work in a slaughterhouse in Valentine, Texas. They pay me illegally low wages because they can, because the kind of person willing to break the law to hire an illegal worker usually does it to save money. I’d prefer to have a visa; I tried to get a visa. I have a cousin in Fort Lauderdale, third cousin, whom I’d never met. I wrote to him, and had his mother write to him, asking him to sponsor an I-30 Petition for Alien Relative. Understandably, he balked at the idea of signing an Affidavit of Support- putting himself on the hook for whatever my expenses became. But I wanted to work: that was the point. I wanted to earn enough to send money home for my family. Eventually, his mother nagged him enough that he signed the Affidavit. I’m still on the waiting list for my petition to become “current.” My son is eight. He’s getting to an age where the Cartel will reach out to him, draw him into their family. I try to provide for him, but they can give him things I cannot, offer him money and luxury an honest man can never know, and he is only a boy, too young to understand the bargain they would have him strike. I’ve seen it enough to know that my time is short, that if they get to him, I might never get him away. This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement performed a sweep collecting nearly 300 “criminal immigrants,” illegals who broke the law here or at home. A friend I know who works in a meat-packing plant was terrified that the next sweep would catch him. I shook my head and told him, “You are not murderer, nor a child molester. These men were not our brothers, they were not even our equals- they were animals, not men. Criminals.” The last word caught in my throat. I knew in my heart I was right, that the difference between the laws the broke and the one I did mattered. But I did not know if the difference mattered enough to keep me from being deported, or to save my family. |
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