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GRIEGO: Mexican visitor's lament: Our best hands are here

Published October 25, 2007 at midnight

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And so I am driving around the city last week talking to immigrants and baseball fans when my colleague, a visiting journalist from Mexico City, turns to me and says: It is my dream to end illegal immigration.

With that sentence a door opens and a view from the other side of the border revealed.

Evangelina Hernández is a co-editor at El Universal, a major Mexican daily. She is 42; her father is a tractor-trailer driver, her mother stayed home to raise Evangelina and her four siblings. Evangelina received her master's degree in politics and communication and has been a journalist for 22 years.

That's the resume. The person herself is intelligent and opinionated and confident enough to corner Colorado's newly assigned Mexican consul general and tell him to get out of his office and visit his countrymen because they are lonely and afraid.

He said he is trying, she told me.

Evangelina has been in Denver almost two weeks. In that time she has spoken with many Spanish-speaking immigrants, legal and illegal, and she says what has affected her most is the fear she hears in their voices. The mother in Greeley who sends her American-born children to the store because she is afraid to go out; the Guatemalan wife of a man who has permission to work here one more year and then must leave.

You will spend $8,000 on fines and attorneys to stay here one more year, Evangelina told the couple, recounting the conversation. Why not take that money and go back to Guatemala?

"Y despues?" the woman responded. And then? There is no work, no opportunity. Shall I watch my children starve?

"It is too sad," Evangelina tells me. "All the time I am talking to people here, I want to say, 'Don't worry about returning to Mexico because there is something for you there.' But, I can't. It's a lie. And what can I do? It's the big question inside me. As an editor, I tell my reporters, 'When you write a story try to offer the readers something positive, something to do.' And now, I am looking in my mind for something positive, something special to offer my people here and I have nothing."

She describes a Mexican town's annual Immigrant Day celebration. In this town, she says, all the boys and most of the girls leave for the United States, crossing illegally, before they are out of middle school.

"There is no thought about education," she says. "It's sad for me, and embarrassing, too, to recognize that we receive a lot of money from immigrants. The remittances are second only to oil. That's why when these immigrants come back to Mexico, it's oh, how wonderful, and we don't think about the cost to us as a country. And you know what else is so sad? Here, in this country, they are not valued, but when they return to their small towns, with their dollars and their big trucks and their presents, they are big and proud. They are someone."

She wishes the $500 million sought by President Bush to help Mexico fight drug traffickers could go to education. The solution to illegal immigration is education, she says.

"The huge job for (Mexican president Felipe) Calderon is to create opportunities for his people in his country. The 20 million people here illegally, sure, they send money home, but most of it, they spend here. They pay rent, they buy groceries, they buy clothes, they pay taxes every single day. And what happens to your country's economy if 20 million people go away?

"I know they go to school and they use services, but it's not free and it's ignorance to suggest Mexican people here receive everything free. They are making money for this country without any rights, without a single right. Nuestras mejores manos, las más trabajadoras, están aqu'. Our best hands are working here. We miss them. We need them."

Why hasn't there been that investment in Mexico, I ask her and she sums up decades of history with, "the greatest enemy of Mexico is corruption." But people there now are demanding the government create more opportunity.

"Every day people of conscience work for something new, something better. My son is in a better school than I attended. That is the future."

A wall along the border will not stop people, she says. "This is a problem we have to work on together and not as the U.S. looking at Mexico and saying, 'We are a strong country and you are our little neighbor.' No more."

A few days ago, Evangelina met a Greeley worker caught in the Swift raids. He went to court and agreed to return to Mexico in November. He told her he was from Camargo, Chihuahua.

"That is where my mother was born," Evangelina told him, excited. "She still has a sister who lives in Camargo. I'll call her. Maybe she can find a job for you."

She called her mother that night. Oh, her mother said, the factories have left. No hay nada en Camargo. There is nothing in Camargo.