The "I" Word

This is Estela. She is my friend’s sister. About a year ago, Estela crossed into the United States illegally. She was captured almost immediately and spent three months in a border jail before being deported. Once she returned home, according to my friend, she has become depressed and thinks of nothing besides returning to the US. Her family even managed to scrape together $4,500 for her to make the trip again. (For comparison’s sake, minimum wage here is about $250/month. Estela’s trip will cost 1.5 years of minimum wage work.)
Recently, I also met Lola. Lola has tried to enter the US without papers twice. She returned from her most recent trip, after a 9-month stay in border jail, about five months ago. Lola is pregnant. Five months pregnant.
Lola and Estela have never met each other, but they have more in common than a trip across the Rio Grande. They were both held in cold cells at the border. For five days, both women were kept in a holding cell with a temperature of about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. They were allowed no sheets or blankets, only the clothes they were wearing when they had been detained.
I would like to take these two experiences as a point of departure to share two thoughts I’ve had lately.
The first is that I find it incredible (in the “difficult or impossible to believe” sense of the word) that for some people, like Estela, the best option they see for themselves is to leave, to risk their lives on an uncertain journey and an uncertain future. Is life here so bad? Are there so few options? Those are slightly rhetorical questions. Yes, life is tough. It’s hard to find a job in the pueblos. There are gangs and violence. However, I can’t help but think that the mass exodus to the United States is also part of the problem. If the young men and women of this country elected to stay here and work to make things better, maybe we would start to see less violence, more jobs, and fewer immigrants.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about lately is what it’s like to make the trip to the States. When Lola shared her story with us, I was ashamed to be an American. I consider myself a fairly well informed citizen, but I started crying because I was so shocked and upset by what she told us. What happened to the commandment "Love your neighbor"? Regardless of my (or your) political position on immigration, I think we can all agree that holding people in 40-degree temperatures is a human rights abuse. I doubt sharing this here will change anything, but at least now you all know, too.