Marrying an Alien: A Drama in 317 Acts

[pne]

Well, maybe not quite that many, but what this guy had to go through to have his Polish sweetheart join him legally in the US sounds like quite an Odyssey.

Comments

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

There's a large amount of resentment in various areas of the country regarding immigration. It's not really an issue here in the northeastern United States, but in the states that share a border with Mexico (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California) and their surrounding states, there are a *huge* number of undocumented aliens from Latin America (for instance, much of El Salvador's population fled to the United States to flee los escuadrones de la muerte in the 1980s, many Mexicans now come for work). While for the most part, they live and let live -- they work for wages NO American citizen would accept (often as little as 10DM a day for 14-16 hours of work) in fields like agriculture, a number of them move into the cities, in neighborhoods where the vast majority of people speak only Spanish (it's 33% of Americans' first language and there's a sizable number of American citizens that never learned English at all in those border states), and avoid the immigration services as best as they can.

They work wherever undocumented people can work -- bars [where usually the owner skims a fair amount of the cash], taxi services, waitressing, etc. The real issue is that they need SOME level of state services *and* they reproduce. I doubt many people care about single men coming over the border for shit wages picking fruit off of Texas ranchers' trees -- it's the family fleeing Latin America that then in turn has children who go to school, family that needs medical care, etc.