These People Are Desperate

I sat in the airport ten days ago with my large backpack and sleeping mat rolled up at my feet. Friends on either side disposed of similar camp-style gear as we awaited our flight to Tucson. A middle-aged man near us sat forward in curiosity, elbows on knees and moustache twitching. "What are you all fixing to do out near Tucson?" he asked.

"We're camping!" my friend responded cheerfully. "We're going to check out the border situation and will camp in the desert for a night."

The gentleman was horrified. "You don't want to do that!" he exclaimed. "The people out there are desperate."

"We know," she said. "That's why we want to check out the situation and see if we can help."

"I hate to see this," he said. "You ladies out there unprotected against God knows what. I can take it, because I'm armed, but I don't like to see this." He sat back in disgust.

The interchange stuck in my mind throughout my uneventful (safety-wise) weekend in and around Tucson. We saw hardly anyone at our camp near Arivaca; the only danger we suffered from was frost-bitten toes as we slept on our mats and sleeping bags under the star-filled desert sky. We thought of immigrants who might have been crossing the rocky desert at that time, fighting off cold and darkness as they plunged headlong down rocky paths through washes and canyons that we could barely traverse in broad daylight, with good shoes.

The immigrants I've met in Mexico are desperate, all right; desperate for work, desperate to feed their hungry children, desperate to reunite their families, desperate to fulfill the hopes of family members left behind who sacrificed a year's income to pay for their dangerous passage. I don't mean to glamorize immigration, but you should understand that the majority of folks who come across are hard workers who leave out of necessity. Certainly there are dangerous folks crossing who belong to the narcotraficantes or to the human smuggling operations; strangely, even they have been no threat to humanitarian aid groups which observe common sense like staying off the trails at night and refusing to carry weapons.

"But they're stealing our jobs!" I hear over and over again. Not so. In a Denver Post article this week local farmers describe how difficult it is to obtain local workers to do the work of harvesting fruit, even when they are supposedly desperate for work. For example, "John Harold of Tuxedo Corn in Olathe said he gets few local applicants because word has gotten around that his work days begin at 6am. 'It's amazing how few have applied this year,' he said." Denver Post, 4/19, (http://www.denverpost.com/newsheadlines/ci_14911550) Another farmer, Bruce Talbott, noted that the locals on his fruit operation worked 37 - 55 hours per week while the H-2A workers were in the orchards for about 70 hours over the same time period. Desperate can mean hard-working, willing to do boring work for long hours without stopping or without complaining.

"Well, immigration is flooding our country with poor, unskilled people who drain our resources," I hear. Again, this does not appear to be the case. In an April 16 article, the New York Times reported the following:

"In 14 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York and San Francisco, more immigrants are employed in white-collar occupations than in lower-wage work like construction, manufacturing or cleaning.

The data belie a common perception in the nation’s hard-fought debate over immigration — articulated by lawmakers, pundits and advocates on all sides of the issue — that the surge in immigration in the last two decades has overwhelmed the United States with low-wage foreign laborers." (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16skilled.html)

I'll tell you my experience of desperate people. Several years ago I met two young men in the desert. They had been walking for five days - in circles, we discovered - and had only made it ten miles. They had had no water for a day or two and no food for three. I took some food packs out of my backpack and gave one to each of the young men. They opened the bags eagerly and prepared to tear in, then stopped. One of them held a granola bar out to me, saying in halting English, "Do you want one?" I assured him that I was exceptionally well fed, and encouraged him to dig in.

Another story is told by John Fife, one of the founders of No More Deaths. He and several volunteers were on patrol in the desert one hot day, yelling out "We have food, water, medicine." If any were desperate enough to need help, they might answer. Suddenly, a group of heads popped up from the mesquite bushes. They said, "we don't have much, but you are welcome to share what food and water we have." A misunderstanding which illustrates the generosity, the compassion, and the heart of desperate people. What does desperate look like to you?