Sunday Times
Tony Allen-Mills, Homestead, Florida
BERNARDO VILLELA tells a story about a fellow Guatemalan immigrant who found a job in New York and prospered for more than a decade until he was recently involved in a car accident. When the police discovered that he had no driver’s licence and had entered the country illegally, deportation proceedings began.
The man has two children, aged 10 and 11, who were born in America and are entitled to US citizenship. The New York authorities are deporting the father and his wife, but will let the children stay. The couple must now decide how badly they want their children to live out the American dream and whether they can bear to leave them in foster care.
Miguel Sambroyo had a different problem. Soon after his hike across the Mexican border, he found a job in Florida carrying boxes at a supermarket. After eight days he was told that he would not be paid. When he complained to the supervisor, the man laughed in his face: “What are you going to do — call the police?” On the streets of Homestead, Florida, last week there were countless hard luck stories as another wave of new immigrants waited on street corners for insecure jobs on the margins of the American economy.
No scare stories can keep them away. They continue to arrive in their hundreds of thousands, defying multi-billion-dollar attempts to repel them. They have begun to present President George W Bush with one of the most testing domestic challenges of his second term.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1481765,00.html