[Note: This is a previously posted interview. At the time it ran I don’t think it got the readership it deserved and it can be read in a new light now that Alabama has passed some ridiculously strict illegal immigration legislation.]
For this interview I sat down and talked with a member of one of the most invisible groups in the USA: illegal immigrants. For obvious reasons I agreed to call him Juan Doe instead of his real name, and wrote notes for this interview (instead of using AOL Messenger, facebook, or audio like I have for the others) so my apologies to him if what I write is not a word-for-word retelling of what he said, but I tried very hard to stay verbatim. Other than that this interview could not have gone smoother. Illegal immigrants are ready to have their stories heard.
1. Hi Juan, thanks for coming on the site. Now this is a little unusual for Friday’s interview—where no one has ever asked to use a pseudonym—but obviously most people will understand why that is. So I really do appreciate you coming to talk about something so sensitive.
Juan: Don’t worry about it man, I’m glad to be here. People need to know this stuff, and it’s best to get it direct from the source. I’ve been in America since I was a kid, but as far as most people are concerned I might as well have a cactus on my forehead I’m so Mexican.
2. It’s funny you should say the source, because I always notice whenever I watch the media handle illegal immigration it’s always somebody white arguing for it. Then somebody white arguing against it. The invisible party in this debate is the people it’s actually about.
Juan: I mean obviously a lot of us are just not going to be out there raising hell and waiting to be rounded up by ICE. [Immigration Customs Enforcement] I’m not saying they would do it right then, but if an actual illegal was being interviewed how long would it be before he was deported? Shit…no time.
3. How do you feel when you see white guys on television who might not have even met an illegal immigrant railing against “them”? It seems like they hate something they know very little about. You look at somebody like Rush Limbaugh and the closest he gets to an illegal immigrant is the maid he asks to go buy his drugs for him.
Juan: [Laughter] Most of them haven’t met one. They think we’re all a bunch of thugs and lowlifes that just…I don’t know, want to do a bunch of crazy shit. They think we’re here to murder them and steal stuff, but it doesn’t cross their minds we came to America to get away from all that.
4. You grew up here but you’ve been to Mexico several times. What can you tell us about it? How is it at this moment?
Juan: It sucks [Laughter] I’m kinda being funny, but I kinda ain’t. I’m a Mexican, and I’ve probably spent half my life in Mexico on and off but it’s never been worse. This war on the cartels is a bunch of shit and it’s just getting people killed. People that ain’t got nothing to do with drugs are winding up dead.
Look man, it’s no coincidence that Mexicans are trying to come here at the same time the situation in Mexico is so bad, and it is awful. If you got a business, you got to pay one cartel to keep them from killing you. So you pay them, but then the other cartels are going to get mad you ain’t paying them. You have to do business with one side or the other to get anything done but just by doing that, it’s like you’re taking a side. Even if you don’t give two shits if La Familia or Los Zetas is the top cartel. Just standing still is like you’re taking one side over the other…it’s crazy.
5. How successful has [Mexico’s President] Calderon’s war on the cartels been?
Juan: [Laughter] What’s less than zero? Because that’s where I would put it. Some people are going to disagree, but it’s worse than it’s ever been. And I think what he’s doing is a bunch of shit anyway.
6. How so?
Juan: It’s common knowledge in Mexico he’s working for the Sinoloa cartel and trying to get rid of the others so they can take over. Maybe not him personally, but his Army is. They fight the other 6 big cartels, take them out, and let the Sinoloa cartel take over all of it. La Familia, they won’t be around in a year or two probably, but the Sinoloa cartel and maybe the Gulf Cartel will be in Mexico forever. They have been there since before drugs [He’s referring to when the Gulf Cartel ran booze back in prohibition days] and they’ll be there after them probably. They’re older than McDonald’s. It’s just a part of the way we do things. If drugs were made legal tomorrow, the Sinoloa cartel would start selling something else…they already make a fortune off smuggling people and sex trafficking.
7. The cartels do pretty much control human smuggling. What experiences with coyotes have you personally had?
Juan: I was so young I barely remember, but for most people it’s terrible. There’s probably more people that have died trying to get to America as people are here right now. I think people got no idea…maybe they do but don’t care. To get across the border you do business with a lot of bad people. You have to because it’s illegal. Criminals go where the illegal stuff is. You ain’t gonna see the Red Cross smuggling people and breaking laws, so you deal with whoever will.
See, this is what I’m saying: Instead of us paying some coyote 5 or 10 thousand to get across, and maybe not even make it across, maybe die instead, let us just pay America 10 thousand. We’d pay more if we knew we could count on getting here and not go through all this hassle.
8. You think people that are already here would pay for citizenship?
Juan: No question about it. A couple years back they wanted to do that. Have us pay to become citizens since we’re already here and you really can’t keep us from coming. Then that just kind of…disappeared.
9. Some conservatives put pressure on John McCain—who sponsored that plan—and he completely abandoned it. So now we have this limbo that doesn’t really work, when every single one of the roughly 15 million illegal immigrants who is here could be a citizen now. Of course, some would say they shouldn’t be here and should be sent back, but is that ever really going to happen?
Juan: Why hell no. And it wouldn’t matter if it did because there’s just going to be 15 million more pop up to take their place. Those of us that get deported just try to come back. We might lose every penny we’ve ever had trying to get back across the border. I’ve met some that have spent almost 20,000 because they’ve tried to cross, like, three times. All of that money they would have paid to the US if they’d had a choice. Instead it’s all sitting back in Mexico to help cartels buy weapons to kill us with [Laughter].
10. People that come are pretty determined to stay huh?
Juan: Shit, if you’d ever been to Mexico you’d see why. I’m not talking about a tourist resort, I mean the real Mexico. The people that are here ain’t from Cancun, they’re deep in La Familia territory. You will do anything to get to the US if you’re from a town the cartel more or less owns.
11. If you were to get deported what would you be going back to? What would a young man like you specifically be going to?
Juan: That’s just it. There ain’t nothing to go back to. Everybody’s experience is a little different but for a young man in Mexico…no, you don’t want to be there. You join the army or join a cartel. There is no opportunity for a young guy in Mexico that doesn’t involve carrying a gun.
And people are getting killed for crazy shit. This friend told me a guy he knew died because he was wearing a nice pair of shoes. I’m not kidding. Somebody wanted his sneakers and he got killed for them. What he have in America, I mean it’s not a whole lot, but at least we’re able to buy a decent pair of shoes without somebody getting so jealous they kill us. Sending a young guy back to Mexico can be a death sentence.
12. Jealousy seems to be a big thing here though. People say illegal Mexicans have it made, that they have all this money and ride around in nice cars because they don’t pay taxes.
Juan: Yeah, well some people have no clue. They really don’t know what we do and have no idea—just, honestly shit like that makes me the maddest. The argument is that they hire Mexicans because they’re cheap, work long hours, and will work in conditions a dog wouldn’t work in, but then the idea is that somehow we’re living the “good” life taking up all the money. You’ve got to be fucking out of your mind.
People here sleep in shifts. I know so many guys that the second they get up to go to work. Somebody else is just getting off and sleeps in their bed. If two other people are sleeping in your bed when you ain’t even it, that’s not the good life. That’s more like being a slave.
13. What would you say to people who think you’re rolling in the dough though?
Juan: It just looks that way because we can’t buy anything. We can’t buy anything you need government paperwork for like insurance or health insurance and most of us just have to rent a house instead of having a mortgage. You have a lot of free cash to blow on stupid shit like cars and rims when you can’t do the paperwork to buy things that are more serious.
14. Then people say you’re welfare bums and the Mexicans are always asking for WIC or food stamps.
Juan: That’s another thing that makes no sense. It’s either we’re so hardworking we’re here doing the jobs people won’t do or we’re a bunch of damn bums and freeloaders up at the welfare office. It can’t be both. So if we’re really just freeloading I don’t think we’d be working these jobs in the first place.
I have known some Mexicans to draw government help, but not most. And the ones that do are just trying to survive. What they make in pay…shit…it’s nothing. They can’t live off that so they do draw a little bit I guess. The only reason some of us get government money is because we make so little we qualify for it. You ain’t making shit if you qualify for WIC, that’s the whole point.
15. It seems like all the focus is on just rounding you up and sending you back even though that’s useless but the employers that hire you mostly skate. If these employers wouldn’t hire you just to pay garbage wages that would seem to me to be more effective than just sending people back who are determined to be here.
Juan: If we didn’t get hired, we wouldn’t be here. It would make more sense to go after the people hiring us, but it’s easier just to send the Mexicans back to Mexico because nobody really cares about us. However, I will say that I’m grateful people will hire me, so I can’t really say they should go after the employers you know what I mean?
16. Sending back illegal immigrants seems very expensive.
Juan: It is! You got to give ICE and immigration all the money to watch us and arrest us. Then you got to detain us for a trial which takes time. Then you got to have a trial which takes money. Then you got to put us on a bus which takes money. It’s all very expensive. And that’s just for Mexicans. For people from, like, South America they put you on a plane. Sometimes with an agent so you’re paying two plane tickets.
And just about the second we get back to wherever, we’re thinking on a way to come back here. So it’s just a hell of a lot of money wasted. We pay the coyotes too much when we could pay America to get here. Then America spends all this money. It’s ridiculous if you really think about it.
17. Some people are going to read that and say “Well, we shouldn’t be giving them a trial and a plane ticket or detaining them. We should just send them back right after they’re arrested in the cheapest way possible.” Like you can just put a human in a fucking box and mail them back to Mexico or something. Don’t you feel like some people are just irrational about this because they really hate Mexicans? I asked a couple months ago if we’d really care about illegal immigrants that much if it was 6 foot blue eyed Czech models. Do you feel like you’re targeted?
Juan: I know we are. And most of those people who hate us don’t have nothing to do with Mexicans. They don’t know them and just hate them for no good reason. They think we’re thugs just because the TV tells them we are. Mexicans are smarter than that. We know we’ll be sent back if we start killing white people so we kind of avoid them too. We stay out of sight as much as possible because we don’t know who will turn us in. Some people will pretend to be all friendly, but get jealous or something, and turn us in. I’m the only Mexican I know who really has a lot of white friends. And I don’t just mean the illegals because there’s not much difference to people around here.
This one guy I know, he’s never been in no kind of trouble, but he got arrested with a little bit of cocaine. It wasn’t much at all, but they asked to see his papers. Well he’s got no papers because he was born here. He just had to show them a birth certificate, but if he couldn’t have found it they might have tried to deport him. That’s why I’m saying most of us try hard not to get in trouble.
19. How big a role is money in all this?
Juan: Huge. I’ve known guys who didn’t have a pot to piss in and were sent back almost as quick as they got arrested. Then I know my dad, he’s really my stepdad but I call him my dad, he paid a little bit of money and got to stay. First they said there was nothing that could be done, but when he paid up, all the sudden he was able to stay. Although, sometimes a lawyer will just take your money and not really do anything. There’s all kinds of lawyers, cops, whatever that just take your money. And if you tell somebody that and start naming names, you are definitely on the first bus to Mexico. That’s probably the biggest reason I’m not using my real name…I’m not going to name names, but if I did I would be gone in a week.
20. What’s it like, psychologically, living as an illegal?
Juan: You never know if you could be sent back. The first year or two you’re on edge but also kind of excited to be in this new place. It’s a strange feeling, but then eventually you sort of get comfortable. You have to learn how to live with the nerves. You can’t take it for granted you’ll be here forever, because I’ve known old ladies to get sent back after they’ve been here forty, fifty years. But you can’t let it keep you awake at night because then there’s no point being here. If you’re going to be walking around scared all the time, you might as well be back in Mexico.
I am glad that you reran this interview. With everything going on it does make me wonder how everything will end. Arizonia tough laws and now Alabama……….what will happen?
Great article and good luck to Juan.