Desperate migrants help prop up the U.S. economy; I went to meet some of them at the border

Migrants stand at a gap in the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Yuma, Arizona after traveling from Haiti via South America. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

I recently traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border from Wisconsin, a state that is heavily dependent on immigrant labor. A University of Wisconsin study estimates that 70% of the workers who milk cows in America’s Dairyland are undocumented immigrants. Other Wisconsin industries, including meatpacking, hospitality and construction, also lean heavily on migrant laborers. Yet a Marquette University law school poll recently found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree with Republican politicians who say “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country.” This was an opportunity to see for myself. 

We met Terron in a refugee camp on the U.S. side of the border just south of Tucson, Arizona. A former college student, he had been traveling for three months by boat, bus, train and on foot after fleeing the violence in Sierra Leone after an attempted coup. Terron was patiently waiting for the border patrol with nine others, one from Cameroon, the others from Central America, in a tent city organized by immigrant support groups from the Tucson area. 

We had driven to the border over the rough, desolate desert terrain with the Green Valley-Suhaurita Samaritans led by their dynamic Pastor Randy Mayer. 

We provided the men with granola bars, water, winter caps, gloves, and blankets from the back of our 4×4. While it is illegal to help immigrants cross the border into the U.S., it is legal and humane to provide assistance that helps keep them alive and safe once they are in this country. 

This was our second visit to the border with the Samaritans. Much has changed since our last visit 12 months ago. Last year there was little trash, no encampments, fewer people seeking refuge, and the cartels had little presence. But this year the numbers have increased, discarded clothes and shoes, empty bottles and food wrappers were scattered by the wall, and, Pastor Mayer said, the cartels dominate the border. 

One thing that remained the same was the fear and desperation driving the people we met to leave their homes and loved ones.

During our first visit, as we descended into a valley, we had observed a solitary figure sitting alone by a stream next to the border wall. Reynaldo’s shoes were wet, his pants dirty from his week-long journey. Speaking softly through tears, he explained that he had survived by drinking water from the stream. A 42-year-old bus driver, he left Oaxaca, despite his wife’s objections, after being assaulted and robbed twice. There was no other work for him in Oaxaca. He was desperate to help his two daughters pay for their education and to support his family, so desperate he had given a coyote (guide) a downpayment of $4,000 on a total payment of $8,000. 

Reynaldo had been abandoned by the coyote after he fell and injured his knee. Nonetheless he had successfully crossed into the U.S. But after two cold days and nights, including an unusual March snowfall for which he was unprepared, he returned to the side of the stream to wait. He explained he had never seen snow and was terrified by the cold.  

We gave him a packet of food, water and some clean, dry socks and offered to take him to the U.S. immigration authorities. They would facilitate his return home or at least return him to a border town in Mexico. He climbed in the front seat beside Mayer. He was ready to go home.  

Gaps in the wall

From a distance, the border wall in Arizona looks like a black snake crawling across the desert. It consists of 30-foot-tall steel bollards filled with concrete and is 232 miles long. The bollards are six inches wide and separated from each other by four inches of space. The spacing is designed to allow Border Patrol agents to see activity on the Mexico side of the border. Yet, during our entire 30-mile drive along the wall we never saw a single agent. The wall is topped with anti-climbing plates, and the foundation only extends about three to four feet underground to thwart tunneling.

A year ago, we observed more than 30 huge gaps in the wall, openings wide enough for large groups of people to easily walk through into the United States. 

As we drove parallel to the wall, Mayer would bring the car to a stop, whistling and shouting, “Necesitas Ayuda?” “Do you need help?” in Spanish. If no one appeared we continued our journey.  

At one gap, five young men dressed in camouflage clothing appeared. They were careful to stay on the Mexican side of the border. One, with a single crutch, limped forward. The group’s youthful leader explained that José had broken his ankle traversing the desert’s treacherous terrain. It was discolored and as large as a grapefruit. He asked if we could help. Mayer agreed and José hobbled across the border through the wall’s opening. 

José had been an Uber driver in Guatemala, a corrupt and violent U.S. backed anti-democratic narco-kleptocracy. He left after he was robbed, beaten and his vehicle stolen for the second time. After the border patrol picked him up, his ankle was operated on, and he was sent home. 

This year most of the gaps in the wall have been closed. But Paster Mayer pointed to several places where, he said, cartels had sawed through the wall creating new entryways. Neither the wall nor closing the gaps, has prevented people from immigrating. The numbers speak for themselves. Fear, and the violence they are fleeing, are powerful motivators. But filling the gaps has ironically empowered and enriched the cartels which now control the crossing, charging $8,000 per person.

We also encountered two children sitting on the U.S. side of the wall. They were 9 and 13 years old. Like thousands of young children, they were brought to the border in an effort to reunite with a parent living in the United States. They wore New York T-shirts and hats. The older boy held a crumpled piece of paper with his father’s name and Brooklyn address. The Samaritans took the children to the border patrol who helped reunite the family.   

The people we met were not the “animals, thugs and drug dealers” of Donald Trump’s imagination. They were people desperately fleeing violence, crime, and corruption, seeking economic opportunity and a better life for themselves and their families. Their circumstances and motivations were no different than the thousands of African Americans who left the violence and terror of the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration or many suburbanites who have relocated to safer communities seeking improved educational opportunities for their children.

They are no more “poisoning the blood of our country” than my own grandparents who fled czarist Russia and antisemitic pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century. Hardy “parasites,” my grandfathers became successful small business owners after first working in factories. Several of their children graduated from college and all contributed to the nation’s post World War II prosperity.      

A ‘mini United Nations’

We met 84-year-old Jim Chilton, a fourth generation rancher whose property has five and a half miles bordering Mexico. He told us the encampments resembled a mini-United Nations in the middle of nowhere. He didn’t rail against the people who crossed his property. He shook his head, explaining that the border was experiencing “a humanitarian crisis.” 

Chilton was at the wall checking on the Mexican and American cowboys who were rounding up cows that had walked through the wall openings to return them to Mexico. This small example of international cooperation stood in sharp contrast to the hysterical anti-immigrant political rhetoric of Wisconsin politicians like U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany, and Glen Grothman who have traveled to the border for sensational photo opps.    

Scapegoating immigrants is as American as apple pie. From the early days of the Know Nothing movement’s demonization of Irish Catholic immigrants through the Chinese Exclusion Act to the xenophobic attacks on the southern and eastern European immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century to the Japanese internment camps, demagogues have routinely employed nativist rhetoric. Their goal was and remains to divide the multicultural working class by creating fear of the other, obscuring the central role immigrants play in the U.S. economy.   

Attacks on 21st century immigrants and refugees are equally misguided. The recent surge in immigration is a major contributor to the U.S. economy’s ability to continue rapid job growth without runaway inflation.  According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, immigrants are largely responsible for the nation’s recent robust economic growth. The CBO projects that the increased immigration will add about 2% to real G.D.P. by 2034 because immigrants are overwhelmingly working-age adults.

Only a few years ago during the pandemic the very same immigrant workers Trump has accused of “poisoning the blood of the country” were praised as essential workers, as heroes! These men and women aren’t causing paper mills to close or relocate. They aren’t taking jobs from native born workers. A recent analysis by none other than Goldman Sachs shows no rise in native-born unemployment during the recent immigration surge.  

Immigrant workers pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, helping keep these systems solvent. In 2019, for example, immigrants contributed $165.9 billion into Social Security and $45.1 billion in Medicare. A recent study found that immigrants’ contributions to Medicare helped prolong the solvency of the system and subsidized its care for 60 million seniors and disabled individuals. Yet many immigrants will never be eligible for these benefits. 

“It is a brutal world for the migrants at every turn,” said Pastor Mayer. “But it is huge money for everyone along the way, even in the U.S., somebody is making a dollar on them — including the U.S. government.” Three big beneficiaries of the flow of cheap labor across the border are private prisons, the Social Security system and U.S. employers,” he added. “Because of migrant labor the U.S. economy is strong. But the migrants get no credit, just demonized and used.”

The men and women we met at the border simply want to live, work and take care of their families. 

Traveling home, I thought about the six immigrant workers who fell to their deaths while working on Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed last month. They came from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. They died engaged in backbreaking work in the middle of the night so that other people could drive safely to their offices and jobs and back home to their families. 

Like Reynaldo, José, and Terron. They fled the violence of their homelands and migrated to this country to put their minds and muscles to work for their families and for all of us. We should recognize and embrace them for their courage and sacrifice. They represent what is best about the United States of America.     

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