Alienation and Immigration

I was drinking Bourbon. Jose was drinking Tequila.¹ We were sitting around the fire pit of a rental house celebrating the end of an expansion project for our business. It was a good time. Jose was a friend of a friend who was helping us with the construction.

I’m not particularly gregarious. Furthermore, Jose’s English was only marginally better than my Spanish. But mix enough Bourbon and Tequila together and two people can become rather chatty.

Jose was from Mexico. He came to the United States to find work so he could send money to his family back in Chihuahua. I didn’t ask him about his immigration status because, 1. I didn’t care and 2. the Saggy Caesar was not on the throne. However, it was very…and I mean very…likely that Jose was undocumented.

He shared his story about coming to the United States walking across the Chihuahuan Desert on foot into New Mexico. As it turns out, I have spent a lot of time on the desert landscapes of the American Southwest. However, when I did so, I brought with me top of the line gear to guarantee not just my survival, but a modicum of comfort. One of my biggest expenses on such trips was my footwear.

Jose’s journey was not quite the same experience. He wasn’t enjoying the scenery. His “gear” was a gallon jug of water. His footwear, old leather work boots, were not adequate for the task of desert hiking. They all but fell apart at the seams halfway along the journey with many miles to go.

He took out his cell phone and showed me pictures of his feet as they looked by the time he made it to New Mexico. The soles of his feet were…the best descriptive is “shredded.” The pads were gone. Blisters the size of baseballs had broken open. Jose, however, persevered through the pain because stopping in the middle of the desert was certain death. More importantly, his family was hungry and crossing this desert was the only hope of feeding them. Walking on mutilated feet, for you and me, would have been impossible. For Jose, it was a necessity.

I asked Jose what he did in Mexico, before his painful journey to the United States. This is where the true weight of the push/pull factors of immigration were manifest in Jose’s biography.

Before coming to the United States, Jose worked in a maquiladora…

…assembling athletic shoes and sneakers for major American brands.

I thought about the hiking boots I wear while backpacking. Might Jose have been part of putting them together for me. I kept that to myself.

Of course, such shoes were far too expensive for Jose to purchase himself. His meager wages were not enough to even feed his family.

So, he left his home with old, hand-me-down boots that did not survive the journey. He currently works on a construction clean-up crew and hopes for an opportunity to do more skilled work in the near future. I saw with my own eyes how hard Jose worked. My friend, whom Jose was helping, is himself a talented carpenter and jack of all trades. Jose was the guy he wanted to help him on our construction projects.

Jose had no idea when he was going to be able to see his family again. At that point it had been a couple of years since he had last seen them. Unfortunately, though he had better shoes now, he dared not risk returning to Mexico. Even at that point the prospects of getting back into the United States was daunting.² So, he worked his job cleaning up construction sites. Then found odd jobs when he could for a little extra pay.

“Ni modo.” He shrugged with his hands parted, as if invoking a higher power. “¿Qué se le va a hacer?”

What can you do?

The work boots he was wearing that day were not new by any stretch. He likely purchased them at a thrift-shop or secondhand store. Maybe they were gifted to him. They were quality footwear, however.

I never saw Jose again after that night. I wonder about him now in this disgusting political climate. I hate to think that this fine, hardworking, resilient man may be rotting in a concentration camp somewhere while his family starves. That I can’t rule it out, however, leaves me nauseous and outraged.

Our nation should open its arms to a man like Jose, willing to cross a desert to work and support his family. Once upon a time, we lived in such a country. Today, an obese, silver spoon nothing who was so debilitated by heel spurs that he had to be deferred from the draft, gets to point at real men like Jose and declare them criminals. Another thirty percent of our population is so depraved that they celebrate when masked goons target people like Jose for abuse and humiliation.

So, yes. When it comes to a choice between “the law” as opposed to an embattled human being like Jose, I’ll come to the human’s defense every single time. Don’t waste my time by admonishing me about “those people” breaking “the law” and are thereby deserving of the inhuman treatment they receive at the hands of our fascist, racist government and it supporting movement. If the law would close the door on a man whose only crime is standing on shredded feet on the wrong side of a muddy river without papers that are all but impossible for a man like him to get, then I say, “fuck the law.”

I’ll put the resolve and tenacity of a man or women like Jose above a racist, inhuman law any day of the week.

I hope Jose is okay. Unfortunately, there are currently over 60,000 people like Jose who are not okay, locked away without due process, without hope of ever being released.

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Footnotes

1. It should go without saying that this person’s name was not really “Jose.” ↩︎
2. This was during President Biden’s so-called “Open Borders” period. ↩︎

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