Texas is enormous, but it's always close to Mexico.
Immigration is at the center of public discourse here, and as we crossed into the behemoth one major question stuck on my mind: What do young people in Texas have to say on the issue? Will they sound like Senator Barack Obama, strongly supporting "a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, not violate the law, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens?" Will they take the hard line of the Minutemen, that gun-toting, self-appointed posse of border guardians? Or will their positions be more vague, sounding like Senator John McCain as he tries to maintain his base without alienating the more conservative sector of his party?
To find out, I traversed the state, talking to everyone from McCain supporters at a Fourth of July jubilee to consuls at the Mexican consulate to an intern at the Del Rio border patrol.
We stopped first in Houston (300 miles from the border) to stay with a friend, Clay Ellisor. Ellisor is a 24 year old at a crossroads--should he join the Navy or work for a non-profit in Sudan?--who has been attuned to Latin America for quite some time. Growing up surrounded by a large Hispanic community, Ellisor went off to Texas A&M and to major in Spanish before taking an internship two years ago with the Nicaraguan Embassy in Washington, D.C.
"Having had much of my life directly affected by them, I have a real respect for Mexicans and Hispanics," Ellisor said in a slow, deliberate drawl. "I have always admired their emphasis on the family and working hard, and for that we are lucky to have them in this country. There have to be laws about immigration, but at the same time the laws have to be practical. We need people to do jobs, we aren't going to do them ourselves, and Mexico is a big mess with a lot of violence. If people come into this country to do jobs that people here are too spoiled to do, let them stay."
I heard this sentiment echoed by a diverse sample of people in Schertz, Texas (170 miles from the border), where I spent the Fourth of July talking to every young person I could find at the town jubilee. At a celebration honoring the day a country of immigrants declared its independence, it seemed that whomever I talked to in front of the tilt-a-whirls and carnival games--whether they were white, black, Hispanic, Republican or Democrat--all felt similarly about immigration: They favored a policy that would make illegal immigration harder and legal immigration easier.
Zach West, an 18-year-old McCain supporter who is about to join the military said he believes there are two types of immigrants: those that come to the States to work hard, and those that come for a free ride.
"I understand the urge to come to the U.S to make a better life," West said. "If you're going to come here and work hard to make life better for your family, great. But if you're going to come here when our economy is already in the tank and suck up welfare without paying taxes, that's not OK."
Lamonte Harris, 25, an African-American who plans to vote for Obama, took the same basic stance.
"I love immigrants," he said. "I want there to be more and more, but I still think we need to have some control of our borders. I'm not saying we should have a wall or anything, just more patrol."
Even several children of Mexican emigrants I spoke to took positions similar to Harris and West.
"I don't see what the real problem is with having more immigrants come to the country," Sal Garcia, 18, said. "There really are plenty of jobs, especially of the ones that most immigrants take, and it would be nice if my entire family could move here if they wanted. But that doesn't mean everyone should be able to come over without any kind of process. The process should be made so people don't feel like the have to come over illegally, but should be just enough to weed out the people who are too lazy to do it."
For some, Mexico is not just close by; it is contiguous.
The town of Acuña is exactly 2,325 feet away from Del Rio, yet the commute still takes 23-year-old Maria Sanchez an hour and a half. That is because the bridge that connects the two towns also connects two countries: The United States and Mexico.
Born in the United States, Sanchez is an American citizen who spent much of her life living with her extended family in this country. But, when money got tight, she moved back in with her mother and two sisters, all of whom are citizens of Mexico.
I met Sanchez at her place of work, Del Rio's public library, a location that seems worlds away from home.
"It's not really something I can see myself getting used to," Sanchez said about the long wait to cross the border. "I understand that they catch drug dealers and keep bad things from getting into the country, I read about it all the time in the paper, but it's a difficult necessity for me to deal with."
One of the ways that Sanchez has tried to combat the daily border crossings has been to try and get citizenship for the rest of her family; a process that has proven very difficult.
In 2005, when she turned 21, Sanchez began the application to bring her mother over legally. After a couple of years of background checks and forms filled out, the Sanchez family finally earned the elusive interview.
"I figured if anything was wrong, they would have told us before the interview, so it could get cleared up before we went in," she said. "Usually the interview is the last step, it's either you're in or you're out. Well, when we got there, three months after being told of our interview time, they said there was a problem. They needed to make sure that I, my mother's sponsor, was actually a U.S citizen. Suddenly the investigation was on me, and I had to prove myself. I said, 'Here's my birth certificate,' but they said it wasn't enough. They wanted school transcripts, yearbooks, and photographs of me when I was younger in American stores like Wal-Mart, as if there aren't Wal-Marts in Mexico."
Fortunately for Sanchez, there are some people working to make immigration easier. Maxaira Baltazar, 24, the youngest member of the Mexican Foreign Service, is one of these people. A consul who works a half mile from the border, Baltazar is responsible with what she considers the first step toward attaining legal status in the United States: providing documentation to Mexican citizens in this country.
"Without a Mexican passport, there is no way to get an American one," she said.
In order to do her job, Baltazar lives in the United States full time, but is still a citizen of Mexico.
"I would say it's very very interesting," she said about her living situation. "Being a Mexican, living in the United States but close to the border allows you to live in two different worlds."
Living in these two worlds has allowed Baltazar to see both sides of the immigration debate, But in the end, she said allowing illegal immigrants to somehow work toward naturalization while providing temporary work visas to more Mexicans would be the best policy.
"I understand that every country has the right to decide who is coming into the country," she said. "But, at the same time Mexico is very interested in keeping its citizens from looking like criminals. The Mexican people coming into the U.S. are mainly coming to work and to get a better job and better salary. Most of them come with good intentions even if it is by the wrong means, and it is important to not create a perception of them as criminals, because they are not."
Driving through Del Rio, the traffic spotted with green and white border patrol lock-up vans, the picture of criminality was apparent. Walking into the building located on a lonely road off of a strip of urban sprawl, I was greeted with a book dedicated to the more than one hundred patrolmen who lost their lives protecting the U.S. state line.
I entered the building with an expectation: with so many deaths and so much danger at the border, surely everyone who worked here would have it out for illegal Mexicans. The immigrants did, after all, beat the very system set up by the border patrol to keep them out. I was of course proved wrong.
Although not able to find any young patrolmen here, I did find an intern from Southwest Texas Junior College who worked at the headquarters. Despite working at a place designed to keep out illegal immigrants, Daniel Torres, 20, had a soft spot for people who risked their lives to get past his coworkers.
"If you come to this country to work hard, then I think you should have the right to come out of hiding and become citizens of this country," he said. "Being of Mexican descent, of course, affects how I look at the issue, but if anything it gives me better insight. I know for a fact that a lot of Mexicans come here only to do good for themselves, and for their family. There's no way that hurts America."
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