Here But Not Here

With a hand still raw from yesterday's work, Julio Cisneros brushed aside the cobwebs of an entombed sleep, shook from beneath his ashen hair the remnants of his dreams of Mexico, and looked at his clock: 5:30 a.m. As ever, he brewed a pot of coffee, which he drank in haste after throwing on his wearied jeans, his faded shirt and jacket, his tired hat, and his boots spotted with paint—a perfect laborer's outfit—and then he set off on his day.

When his luck is bad, Julio must walk to the informal job fair stretched out daily across the west end of Bonanza Road, between Las Vegas Boulevard and Rancho Drive. But today it was good, for he caught a ride from his brother, an undocumented worker like Julio, and was dropped off in the Home Depot parking lot on Charleston and Lamb boulevards a little after 6 a.m. There Julio met with men like himself—men mostly from Mexico, but a few from Columbia and El Salvador and other corners of Latin America; men who from a long view all look alike, but from up close are individuals with unique histories and dreams, authentic values and perspectives, and incalculable trials and anguishes; men, connected by their Latin roots and more so by their native resolve, who fled intolerable circumstances in their homelands and crossed America's southern border with an austere but paperless agenda: to seek work, to strive hard at it, and to never yield hope for a better condition. And together in the back of a parking lot on the northeast side of town they began the process of waiting.

Just waiting. Waiting with his compadres for a pickup truck to offer for that scarce and sacred and sustaining job, Julio stood: short, meek, reticent and a bit round, he waited with his hands in his pockets because the morning air was chilly, and above all because this harsh world has sentenced him to a life of humility. Yet, it didn't take long for him to sit on a curb, as his legs are old now—they've been holding him up for 49 years—and no longer have the durability of his youth, when he would run around mock baseball fields well into the evening in Providencia, Sonora, Mexico.

Along with two dozen other day laborers, Julio waited for work as the sun rose from behind Frenchman mountain and baptized the new day with its golden dust: Wednesday, November 16, 2005.

Miguel Rulfo had already been there, in front of Home Depot, with his cup of coffee, long before the sun woke up. Hiring on most days doesn't occur until the home improvement store opens, as most employers—a class that includes various contractors, and even old ladies and homeowners in Seven Hills with paint jobs too large to tackle on their own—prefer to net their materials and laborers in one quick swoop. But Miguel was trying to decide his own fortune by beating the younger, more aggressive day laborers to an early job. None came. Fall is a dormant season, almost as bad as winter. Jobs come for most individuals but two or three times a week, and sometimes a man can wait at a hire site for more than 10 days before finding work. "It's a frustrating life," Miguel says.

Nevertheless he had arrived in good spirits, hopeful as ever. Plus, he was happy for the sun. He had just suffered an interminable night of icy winds bundled up in a roofless camp near the Salvation Army with some of Las Vegas' other homeless men, with no protection from those arctic gales and their sonic roars but his threadbare belongings—a blanket and two changes of clothing ("one to wear while you wash the other")—and his faithful bedtime prayers to the Lord.

Having remained in this city and these conditions for three years on account of his evanescent daily income, Miguel says that his only solace comes with the knowledge that he can endure it all. In his half century of life, he says, he has been through all of nature's unmerciful elements, the wind and heat and rain, and he has absorbed most of man's, too, the corruption and condescension and even enslavement. He says he has crossed literal snakes in the Mexican desert and figurative snakes on the Vegas streets. And he says he has been alone; has made furtive, solitary leaps over the Mexican-American border five times, has traveled alone and worked alone and slept alone for several years—and he has endured it all in good health and without complaint. And so, a weathered man with sun-baked brown skin, and wrinkles like cracks on ancient Aztec pottery creeping from his eyes to his ears, Miguel says he fears nothing except not finding work.

Therefore he wakes up by 5 a.m. every morning, save Sundays if he is tired, and makes a foodless journey by foot or bus to one of the Valley's day-laborer hire sites, like the Home Depot parking lot, where today he and Julio Cisneros and several other men sought out an employer in the vehicular waves that started to flow in at about 7 a.m.

Although the sun was up, Miguel kept his jacket on because the air was still crisp and cool, and because he is a diffident old man. As he oftentimes does, Miguel, standing and waiting among the congregation of day laborers, slipped into an ineffable solitude, dwelling upon the two matters that have persisted at the forefront of his mind for as long as he can remember: He thinks of work—earning money, eight, nine, maybe 10 dollars an hour if he's lucky, but always through sweat and toil, the only means he has ever known; and he thinks of family—his wife and nine children, as well as his parents and siblings, to many of whom he sends up to half his weekly earnings via Western Union.

"Sometimes I go without food," says Miguel, looking southward. "But I am a man, and I work hard, and I am not addicted to anything, so my family always eats."

His goal is to save $5,000—"Money that would take you 20 years to earn in Mexico"—and when he crosses that ribbon, he intends to return to his family in Mexico, and start a business.

He says, "Mexico is a very difficult place to live in." And then, without twitching a muscle:

"Much more difficult than it is to live here."

Donaldo Paz came later. A pure extrovert, he makes his way to hire sites not just to look for work but also to get out and exercise his restless energy. It's the same reason he likes to go camping, play soccer, catch a flick every now and then, in Spanish or English, or make an excursion to Lake Mead, an oasis in this arid region that reminds him of home. Moreover, Donaldo takes great pleasure in meeting with his people—"day laborers," he says, "or illegal immigrants, or Mexicans, or whatever you want to call us"—for between them there is an instantaneous bond rooted in their common struggle to endure.

"We come together and talk about everything," says Donaldo, a precocious man at 27, who as a child in Southern Mexico had wanted to apply his passion for everything animate to a career in veterinary work, but in the end followed his family to America, where by necessity manual labor and cooking became his trades. "Sometimes it's like all we got in this land is each other."

Ten years before, he had come to Las Vegas with his father after a lengthy stay in Southern California, where he mixed in well with the estimated 25,000 day laborers who have made Los Angeles a pilot for other cities around the nation uncertain of how to address their own men soliciting work on street corners and parking lots. For it is no secret that the great majority of day laborers are unauthorized immigrants. In Los Angeles, Donaldo learned to work with paint, cement, granite, marble, tile, pots, pans, sheers and lawn mowers, and he also learned enough English to decipher the contentious dispute being waged over radio talk shows, op-ed pages, city council meetings, and restaurant and coffee-shop tables. He says, in a lucid English, that he learned the language well enough to understand the voices on one side of the issue which stated, Day laborers just want to work and provide for their families, and they enhance both the diversity and the economy of this nation, and the voices on the other side, which stated with no less fervency, They are illegal aliens, and thus criminals, and a heavy burden on our society. And so, while Donaldo's limbs remained busy with work, his mind was occupied by those irreconcilable voices—both loud and long-winded—and he came to at least one definite conclusion: Ignorance is at the root of the problem.

Ignorance on both sides, he says.

"A lot of Mexicans don't understand the language or law of this land, and that holds them down," says Donaldo, talking with his hands as much as with his mouth. "And a lot of people who don't want Mexicans here just don't understand who we are, or why we came, or what we contribute to this country."

But before he was exposed to the inflammable issue at its core in Los Angeles, Donaldo had come to the United States from the coastal splendor of Acapulco, Mexico, where he splurged himself with the region's natural largess: fresh fruits, organic vegetables, endless oceanic beauty and, according to Donaldo, the most hospitable people he has ever known. Back then, America didn't exist; all he knew of it was the silly tourists who frequented his city's postcard beaches. Neither in his six years at primary school, nor his three years in secondary school—a typical Mexican education—did anyone sing America's praises.

By the time he graduated high school in the mid-'90s, however, everyone in his family but his mother had immigrated into America without documents. "It takes too long to go through the process to get a visa," says Donaldo. "Sometimes you wait in a very long line to get processed, and in the end you never get it. We had no trust in the government's help." Donaldo's mother urged him to follow the flock north, arguing that she alone could not provide him protection from the many inimical forces devouring Mexico at that time. And so, after much contemplation, and consternation, he took a bus to Tijuana. There, with the complicity of a friend on the other side, and with a shot of liquid courage from a border matron who was offering bold concoctions of tea and tequila, Donaldo sidestepped inspections and crossed the border into a whole new world.

"Crossing the border is easy," Donaldo testifies. "I've been over and back twice now."

What was not so easy, however, was life inside America for the young man without official documents. He tried to join to the United States Army, but was rejected for failing to provide an authentic Social Security number. Then he tried his best to assimilate, with some success. Living with his father in Los Angeles, he worked with great ardor on buildings for American companies and homes for American people, he delved with great enthusiasm into American films and music, and he sought with great persistence to acquaint himself with America's diverse garden of girls. He gave himself to his new country. And when his father moved to Las Vegas at the turn of the millennium, Donaldo followed, and continued to keep busy in mind and body.

Miguel didn't talk about himself much.

By 9 o'clock, only one employer had come by, and he only took two men. And so that group of undocumented workers—all brown, and in modest attire, and speaking in unrepentant Spanish slang—had been very noticeable to the traffic, to the surrounding store owners and their customers, and to the patrolling Metro police officers.

As annual immigrant flows have tripled over the past generation, many citizens have expressed their concerns in letters to the editor, on radio airwaves, through phone calls and e-mails to their local representatives and, Julio says, even to the faces of the day laborers themselves. Citizens' groups like the Minutemen Project, a vigilante organization that says its gripe is with the employers and government entities who do not enforce immigration laws, and the Wake Up America Foundation, a similar group, started right here in Las Vegas in January, which encourages its 800 members to photograph day laborers and send the pictures to federal authorities, have stated that illegal aliens are, at the very least, a nuisance, and above all, lawbreakers whom have been allowed to roam unpunished.

"It's a sad day in America," Mark Edwards, founder of WAMF and host of its nighttime radio show on KDWN 720- AM, says. "When the lawmakers side with the lawbreakers against law-abiding citizens."

Businessmen with stores in the vicinity of hire sites, such as those establishments in the shopping center on Charleston and Lamb, have made formal complaints to the city, claiming day laborers intimidate their customers, and thus thwart their business. Others accuse day laborers of more tangible crimes:

"They're robbing me blind!" says Wade Bohn, managing partner at Jay's Market, a gas station and convenient store just north of Eastern Avenue and Interstate 215, which reigns as the Valley's most populated hire site. "Let's call it what it is: They're illegal immigrants—here illegally—and should be swept off the streets."

Bohn, with corroboration from other businesses, has also accused day laborers of littering, public drunkenness, harassment of women and deteriorating the landscape.

Representatives from the two establishments in that region whose type of business attracts the day laborers—Star Nursery and Moon Valley Nursery—have said that, for them, day laborers present a tough quandary: On one hand, some of their customers have been deterred by overzealous solicitors; on the other, it is their customers who are employing these men.

Metro has said that officers are for the most part powerless when it comes to complaints against day laborers, for as long as the men's actions on the street do not violate laws—which the great majority of them do not, according to Metro reports—moving them from public property is unconstitutional. And to those who say illegal immigrants' presence is, by definition, a violation of the law, and thus warrants arrest, Metro has replied: That's a federal problem, not ours.

In fact, to the consternation of some and the relief of others, Metro has initiated the Hispanic American Resource Team to establish better cultural connections with Hispanics who do not speak sufficient English, an accruing population in Las Vegas. Metro has stated that the idea of the team came in response to officers' reports that suggested many crimes against undocumented workers go unreported, due mostly to the victim's fear and ignorance of the law.

But Julio, who spent five eternal days in jail after he had been arrested for trespassing, nods his head when other day laborers say that they witness harassment from authorities on a regular basis. "Yet," Julio says with his eyebrows contracted and his eyes static, "the police are just doing their jobs, like us, and we need to respect them.

"Some people don't like us, but I think the American people, in general, are good people, and they like us, because they know we're good people too. And they know we're trying to help build and function this city."

Julio says that he doesn't like to wait for work in the back of parking lots or on public sidewalks any more than angry store owners or indignant passersby want him there. "But we don't have another choice," he says.

The idea of creating day-laborer centers—enclosed warehouses furnished with water fountains and bathrooms, where employers and workers can conduct business without vexing anyone—has surfaced in recent talks among city leaders, and immigrant advocates. More than 140 communities nationwide have experimented with centers, and just the mere mention of them has sparked explosive debates in cities like Herndon, Virginia, and Gaithersburg, near Washington, D.C. The first was built in Los Angeles in 1989. City authorities, after several futile attempts to sweep day laborers from its streets with various ordinances, decided to mollify the complaints coming from both opponents and supporters of day laborers by erecting an isolated hiring site.

Authorities in Clark County, who also have attempted their share of ordinances to clear city streets of day laborers in the past (and are still considering new regulations due to persistent complaints from constituents) are now waiting on advice from the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Coalition, a group comprised of representatives from each of the Valley's municipalities, to determine their next step.

Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury says that the coalition is presently researching how well day-laborer centers have worked in other communities, like Los Angeles.

"There's no perfect solution," says Woodbury, a deliberate and unrushed politician of 24 years, whose jurisdiction includes the west side of the Eastern and 215 region. "But we'll wait for the coalition's recommendation, and then we'll move forward from there."

Antonio Bernabe, a day laborer coordinator for the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA), says that, as of now, centers are the most humane and practical option, because trying to sweep day laborers off the streets is like an attempt to fight gravity or push back the ocean.

"It's economic laws, supply and demand," Bernabe has said. "They can't be stopped."

Some purists, like Edwards, say day-laborer centers aid and abet criminals. Some business owners, like Bohn, call them deplorable, and a vain endeavor. And others, such as Julio Cisneros and his fellow day laborers, as well as many conflicted businesses like Star Nursery, call it an excellent idea.

"Everyone would benefit," Julio says. "For us, specifically, we could connect with each other, and unite."

By 9:30 a.m. Donaldo had taken off his jacket, preparing himself for an indefinite wait, and watched as trucks passed along without any hint of stopping.

Donaldo says that when he lived in Los Angeles, he saw firsthand how favorable the day laborer centers were, if for nothing else than the haven they provided workers from the oppressive stares, derisive remarks, and police harassment he witnesses everyday in Las Vegas.

"People come out of nowhere and start taking your pictures," Donaldo says, unleashing his English tongue. "People look down on you like you're a criminal, and there are some people that even think you're dangerous. But it's ignorance. You're just trying to survive, just trying to be a part of this country and help build it, just like any working American, but you don't get treated like an American because of simple things like your skin, or your language, or your people"—and then he pauses, only long enough to cool his blood, resuming in an untamed Spanish—"and there are a lot of people out there—citizens born and raised here!—who do a lot of bad things, who take advantage of people and hurt them like they're animals, who take advantage of the welfare system. And all we want to do is work. To make money for ourselves and our families.

"But we can't get any peace."

To both their good and bad fortune, no one paid the day laborers much attention today—not the police nor the public nor the purveyors, and as of a quarter till 10, not any more employers either.

As 10 o' clock came and passed, it began to look as if Miguel's only fear would be realized—he would not find work today.

Which is a shame, for even in his golden year—50—Miguel possesses the strong, capable build of a man who has had to labor for his every meal since puberty, and he has an indiscriminate hunger for any job that does not exceed his skills or education, no matter the dirt or dangers inherent in the work.

Sometimes, he says, the wait for a job can be more taxing than the actual labor. His bones get stiff; his muscles, restless; and he has nothing to put his mind on but those two implacable thoughts—money and family—which had driven him to this foreign land in the first place.

He had been a boy without any dreams on a small hacienda in Zamora, an historical city in Mexico's state of Michoacan. One of 10 children born to a father who spent his better years in Zamora's interminable strawberry fields, and a mother who helped pick crops when she wasn't swamped by her full-time job bearing and raising babies, Miguel had first heard the word "America" when he was 10 years old, and the ceremonious bells surrounding it would ring in his ear for the next 30 years just as the founding fathers had intended it to: a land fertile with endless opportunities, where any individual could be responsible for his own prosperity, and a sanctuary where every man regardless of color or creed or national origin had the inalienable right to dignity and honor and freedom. But that all just seemed like a dream to Miguel back then—something like a desert mirage—because his reality in Mexico was utterly barren. According to Miguel, pestilential politics made it so that a man could work for 20 hours a day and still not get anywhere. And while people across the countryside were sweating for mere centavos, the corrupt men behind those politics would bribe them for their dignity and honor—riding into the poor towns around election time with kilos of beans and bags of groceries, and handing them out with big smiles in return for their votes, giving the masses an ephemeral harvest which they did not sow and spirit-lifting promises that would not be kept.

"Immigrating to America was not an option then, either," Miguel says, "because my family did not have money, and in Mexico you have to have money to do anything."

And so Miguel just worked. After having spent six years of school in the same grade—first—he began to toil with his father in the fields. It was an early entrance into the whirlwind of manual labor that would carry him even to this day: picking then painting then gardening, then picking then painting then gardening—on and on. It left Miguel bereft of boyhood dreams, or at least wiped out any memory he might have had of them.

"There was no time in Mexico for dreaming back then," he says. "I was too busy working."

And he kept on working, but even harder after he married at the age of 20. And then one by one over the next 20 years his nine children began to leave their mother's bosom and tug on his laborer's jeans, needing to be fed. And so he worked harder.

The cruel paradox, however, was that work became more difficult to come by. In 1994 Mexico entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, despite the voluminous warnings from Mexican intellectuals concerned about the social consequences the agreement would impart on a country with neither the terms of reference nor the international context of its neighbors up north. And it didn't take long for their fears to be realized, as Mexico fell into an economic turbulence by the end of 1994, forcing unprecedented flocks of Mexican peasants to flee famine and follow their natural instinct for survival to the north. It was during this time that the illegal superseded the legal migration. Miguel, one of the 2 million small farmers to have his work usurped by monolithic corporations, was left with no foreseeable options in Mexico. And so, like a bird with a hungry nest to feed, he flew to the land of opportunity, the name of which—America—had been resonating in his ear since he was a small, dreamless boy.

And in America he found life to be difficult—but endurable. Difficult because he wasn't getting any younger, and his living conditions—homeless and lonely—were grueling; endurable because the economic opportunities embedded in the land provided him with a bottomless well of hope.

But his industrious bones found no work by 10 o'clock on Wednesday. And so he continued to wait.

Donaldo did find work. A quarter past 10, a heavy-duty white pickup truck with tinted windows and no identity save for its Dodge emblem and Nevada license plates, pulled up in front of Donaldo and a few others. The driver, a man who demanded to remain nameless and faceless lest he take his jobs elsewhere, needed a few men to dig ditches for the day.

Now, Donaldo in busier seasons is a shrewd businessman, setting for himself a standard wage of $8 an hour. But in more desperate times, like this fall, he is more flexible, and so today he settled for $7. He was just happy to have a job.

Of course, Donaldo asked for his pay up front, because he, like every day laborer, has several anecdotes on the tip of his tongue about employers who worked him hard under the unsigned agreement of $10 or $12 or $15 an hour, only to stiff him at the end of the day. And these anecdotes all end with the same rhetorical question, asked with a sigh:

"Hey, what can we do?"

Not much, says Victor Espinoza, an agent for Laborer's Local 872 who works with a predominately Hispanic (but documented) population. "Lots of the employers don't want employees, they want servants," he claims. "Day laborers get exploited every day."

The reality is that most day laborers suffer from their own ignorance, according to landmark research conducted by Abel Valenzuela, the head of UCLA's Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, who has spent the last decade surveying day laborers nationwide, including hundreds here in Las Vegas. He found that more than half had not finished high school, and 80 percent had limited English at best.

Plus, the law has sided with the employers before. In an influential case before the United States Supreme Court in 2002, titled Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB, the court ruled that undocumented workers are not entitled to the same labor laws as workers with legal status, setting a precedent which many critics of the case say has filled employers with a sense of power, and undocumented workers with a sense of vulnerability.

"Employers know we don't have papers," says Donaldo, "And yeah, some blackmail us."

David Thronson, codirector of the Immigration Law Clinic at UNLV, says that undocumented workers lack a voice.

"Las Vegas is unique in that we are a metropolitan city with a large immigrant population, but small public and institutional interest in their side of the story," says Thronson. "There are not a lot of people out there right now to represent them."

Donaldo wasn't paid up front, but he took the job anyway. Without any preambles, he and a few other day laborers jumped into the cab of the truck and disappeared into the booming Las Vegas Valley.

My name is Joshua Longobardy and I am a young man striving with all my might and marbles to make it as a writer, and if it weren't for illegal immigrants I would not be here today. Not in Las Vegas nor America.

My great-grandparents fled their homeland in Durango, Mexico during one of the country's chronic revolutions and crossed the border without authorization or sponsor, but with only the irrepressible desire for freedom and a complete understanding of the hard work and responsibility it requires. In America they gave birth to nine of their 10 children, including my grandfather, Salvador Rodriguez, a brazen man who served in the United States military, who worked many unenviable jobs to survive, including one for the United States government, and who by some miracle or divine intervention won the marital hand of Josefina Cervantez, a beautiful, fair-skinned daughter of an inexhaustible patriarch and his compassionate wife, both of whom had also fled Mexico during turbulent times and crossed into America without any papers. In Madera, California, a small town in the Central Valley, where Salvador and Josefina spent endless days picking crops just to get by, the couple gave birth to three girls: One was born with Down syndrome, another would die in a horrific accident at the age of 7, and the oldest, Yvonne Rodriguez, my mother, an endearing woman with a skin tone lighter than her father's but darker than her mother's, would go on to marry a white man and birth three children with skin showing no hint of its immigrant ancestry, but whose blood would carry on its Mexican lineage in the American Southwest.

In speaking about Mexico with Donaldo, Miguel, and Julio, it didn't take long to discover my many commonalities with them. By following a trail of names and places, we arrived at our connections. This is very typical of Mexico, where everything and everyone, in one way or another, seem to be connected. Not just by geography or language or history, but also by the shared values placed on family and industriousness. Just ask any Mexican: It is a connection so strong and so inherent that it transcends all borders.

And so it is not a stretch by any means to say that I, a Mexican-American writer, am connected in this case to the people whom I have the privilege and even duty to write about: Donaldo, Miguel and Julio—the men whose flesh and blood help comprise a very debatable issue, not just in Southern Nevada but all across America.

An enthusiast of the masterful writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio told stories, reaching far back to retrieve a tale about the formation of his day-laborer's character. It occurred when he was just a young boy, about this high, he said, his hand against his hip, palm downward, and it went something like this:

It was Little League, in Mexico, and I was 11. My neighbor was my coach. A good man, he was, my coach. He taught the team to work hard, and be good boys. And we did, and were.

We lost every single game that year. But that didn't matter much. What was important were the opportunities.

Not just the opportunity to play baseball at practices and games, where I had the opportunity to come together and unite with boys with similar goals, the opportunity to improve myself each time out, and the opportunity, every time I stepped into the lonely batters box, where no one was responsible for my success but me myself, to help my team prevail—but also the opportunity to make good on those opportunities. That was the important thing.

Zero for 1967, my team went. But that was OK. No one cried; no one complained.

Digging ditches is not easy, Donaldo says, and sometimes it's downright dangerous. The fact is, most work available to Donaldo is perilous in nature, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose latest reports show that of the 10 riskiest jobs in America, based on injuries and deaths reported (which the undocumented population often does not do), typical day-laborer jobs such as agriculture and construction rank near the top. Yet, like most day laborers, Donaldo says that he has never received a word of caution from any of his employers.

If he were to get hurt, Donaldo says he would seek medical care at one of the Valley's 11 UMC Quick Care locations, even though he has no insurance nor means to cover a medical bill. Which is a big problem, and one of the major reasons America's estimated 11 million undocumented workers are viewed as a burden to taxpayers.

"Listen: We just can't afford to have them here; they're pushing out the middle class," says Mark Edwards, a stern man so passionate about the issue that he has forsaken a placid retirement on Las Vegas' plush golf courses to lead the dynamic WUAF. "It's the young people who are going to pay for it—I'm 75—I'm working for the future."

According to benchmark reports published by the U.S. Center for Immigration Studies, the unauthorized population in America, who pay state but not federal taxes, creates a deficit of more than $4.5 billion in the federal budget on account of emergency medical treatment alone.

Some 84 hospitals in the Southwest have claimed bankruptcy or closed down in the past decade, citing the high number of uninsured immigrants, whom by American law and universal ethics can not be refused treatment, as a large contributing factor. The latest research shows that four out of five undocumented workers lack any coverage.

The other major cross undocumented immigrants place on the backs of taxpayers is public education. The children of immigrants, whom by American law and universal ethics cannot be denied entrance into school, benefit from a tax pool to which their parents did not fully contribute. And it's a generous gift: to send a child through kindergarten and 12 grades of Nevada public school costs about $65,000.

Moreover, kids struggling with the English language are assigned to ESL (English as a second language) classes, which cost the Clark County School District more than $10 million to operate last year, according to CCSD's budgeting director.

The CIS study found that in all, illegal immigrants and their children create a deficit in the federal budget of at least $10.4 billion, a figure which has strengthened the argument of people like Edwards when they say illegal immigration is first and foremost an economic crisis.

The study, however, concedes that "the primary reason illegal immigrants create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and low incomes, and consequent low tax payments, not their legal status, [unwillingness to work], or heavy use of most social services." Which is why Donaldo wonders what results would have been yielded if the researchers had studied any of the poor native populations.

Nevertheless, he says, it's all too much to think about when you're just trying to do the simple things in life, like working and eating.

"A friend of my mother asked me to go with her to America," Julio said, diving headfirst into his tale in the back of the Taco Bell adjacent to Home Depot, where the 2 o'clock diners ate absorbed in their own lives, uninterested in his story. "She was a nice lady, but not very beautiful."

Prior to that request, he said, his thoughts had never been on America. Yes, yes, he had heard of it, and he had always thought of America and opportunities in the same sentence, but all he thought he knew of the powerful country up north was the indecipherable lyrics and universal rhythms that exploded off of Beatles albums. As a matter of fact, he had even once shunned an opportunity to obtain a visa. His heart was set firmly at home. And with his mother, who gave birth to Julio's five sisters (one of whom lives in Las Vegas) and four brothers (one of whom Julio lives with today).

A couple of decades earlier Julio had completed the standard nine years of public schooling, and he had also gained an education in agriculture during his many adventures to the dry wheat fields of Yaqui Valley with his father, a hard worker and humble man whose funeral four years ago went unattended by a brokenhearted Julio, who could not risk crossing the border once again.

And though Julio would develop eye problems as he grew older, he saw clearly back then the state of his country: destitute and dejected, just like a land of people who had been conquered time and time again—from within and without.

But he was never afraid in Mexico. Yes, yes, finding employment was difficult, and jobs that paid enough for your family to eat even more so—if you bought chicken you went without bread and beans, and vice versa—but he still loved his land, and above all his people. His only fear then, which persists today, especially when taking on a perilous job digging ditches or working construction, was having an accident that might leave him disabled. For the thought of not being able to work for your own bread haunted his manhood.

That was his state of mind when he was asked by his mother's friend to accompany her to Mexico. She said that she liked him, that she wanted to start a new life with him in America, and that it really was a good idea if he thought about it.

And so that's what he did—thinking not of the woman but of the myriad opportunities in America, for so long, in fact, that the woman had to ask him three more times before he came to his final answer.

"It was hard for me, because I'm a shy guy, and a bit of a mamma's boy," said Julio, 43 years old at the time. "But I told my mother, I said: 'This is a good opportunity, and I will take advantage of it."

And just like that, Julio and his lady friend were on a bus to Nogales, Sonora, right across the border from its namesake in Arizona. It was two years and four months before the terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York prompted the American government to aggrandize its border patrol by 1,900 agents, one for every mile of the southern border, bringing its total enforcement to 11,000. And so jumping the border without documents was not as tough back then. The scariest part was crossing the monotonous Sonora desert, with all of its creeping snakes and phantasmal resonances, in the middle of the night.

Because the migratory pattern of Mexicans parallels the birds', spring is a busy season at the border. They found a coyote—an immigrant smuggler—and with 60 others he escorted Julio and his lady friend across the border by foot for a nonnegotiable fee of $1,200 each.

Si, si, Julio said, it was nighttime, and all we did was go right around inspection—las calabazas—and it was as simple as that. Muy facil. Today, he couldn't, because there are Minutemen patrolling the border now with their cameras and flashlights and guns.

Once in America, they wiggled into a car with 20 other people and traversed the Santa Rita Mountains, only to find themselves bathed in the warm tangerine splendor of Tucson's sunrise the following day. Then, the couple made their own way to Las Vegas.

A trip to the indoor swap meet on Bonanza and Eastern, and $50 is all it took then to secure false identification. Today, crackdowns have driven several peddlers to sell their commodity on public buses, and inflation has nearly doubled the price for the fraudulent cards—la blanca o la mica—which are imprinted, laminated and impeccable to anyone who doesn't scrutinize too hard.

Because federal law permits employers to verify the merits of an employee's identification themselves, Julio encountered several bosses who couldn't penetrate the sophisticated fraudulence of his ID cards, and many more who couldn't care less that he had them in the first place. And so he worked.

As did his lady friend, who became his wife and thus was able to afford, through the insurance she received from her employer, an operation on Julio's cataracts, a problem that had been plaguing him for years. It was good that he had the work done then, for his marriage was ephemeral, and today, he said, he would have no means to pay for the surgery. Plus, he knows that as an unauthorized immigrant he does not qualify for any government assistance.

It is a difficult task to navigate the system of taxes paid and services received by undocumented workers in America, but this much Julio said he knows:

He knows that he and his brother—who works a stable job on the books—both pay state taxes when they buy something from the store (sales tax) or pay rent (income tax), but that neither he nor his brother—both without legitimate Social Security numbers—pay any federal taxes. He knows that as unauthorized immigrants he and his brother are ineligible for all services except help at the hospital (emergency Medicare) and public-school education, the latter of which does not impact childless Julio but does his brother, who has two children with him in Las Vegas.

None of that bothers Julio much, he said, for he left his mom and family in Mexico six years ago to work, not to receive social services.

Miguel didn't find work. It was 1 o' clock and experience had taught him to resign. Few employers come fishing beyond then, he knows, and waiting for a straggler requires more effort than it's worth.

Miguel departed the work site, and began his journey back to where he had come from. His stomach felt hollow with hunger—he hadn't eaten all day—and so he took a few dollars from the money he had saved in his pocket—some $4,980 short of his goal—and stopped at one of the Valley's many taco shops, where he says he can buy food that reminds him of Mexico, from people who remind him of home.

Without fail that is where his thoughts, in his workless times, return: Home. Mexico. Michoacan. His wife of 30 years, and his nine children, who persist in his memory as a nest of baby birds even though half of them now live and work in the United States.

Being away from them, he says, has not gotten any easier over the years; it is much harder now than it was when he left. He knew that he had to find adequate work, at any cost, but that he wasn't going to find it anywhere in his native country, for it is common knowledge in Mexico that old men don't receive many job offers. The age of Christ is, more or less, the cutoff line.

In Miguel's mind, his only option was to cross the border to America without legal documentation, a move that ignites the frustration of the multitudes like Mark Edwards.

"All I'm saying is, don't go in the back door," Edwards says. "Go through the front door."

A man who believes that American media, by and large, does not shine truth on the issues of illegal immigration, Edwards says that the general public needs to be made aware of what's really going on:

"These illegal aliens—let's not be politically correct: They're illegal aliens—are bringing in all kinds of diseases, they're committing serious crimes that land them in federal prison (which we're paying for), they're bringing drugs and gangs like the M-13s across the border. This country would be much safer if it made sure everyone went through the front door, and the front door only."

Yet, as an uneducated man without any close family ties to residents with legal immigration status, for Miguel there was no plausible means to enter the United States through the front door. The United States Citizen and Immigration Services has established a prioritizing system that excludes men like Miguel. According to the USCIS (formerly known as the INS), for an immigrant to attain legal documents he or she must be the spouse or a child of a lawful permanent resident of the United States, or prove to have "extraordinary abilities," such as is the case with "outstanding professors and researchers, multinational executives and mangers, professionals holding advanced degrees or those with religious vocations." In both cases, a sponsor (relative or employer) must submit a petition requesting the immigrant's entrance into America.

"There's a myth that says undocumented immigrants are cutting in line," says David Thronson. "But a man who has no close family with legal immigration status and no highly specialized skills or degree"—like Miguel—"the system doesn't give that person a line."

Thus, for Miguel there was essentially no legal process to circumvent when he entered America without papers. "What would you do?" Miguel asks.

At any rate, crossing was not fun for Miguel. He has been over and back five times, and it has become riskier each time. One reason is that government has blocked off certain historic crossing points, pushing immigrants into the desert. Which is exactly what happened to Miguel.

By bus he traveled from Zamora to San Luis, Sonora, a border town with an inspection point open 24 hours. With no hope of crossing there, Miguel walked across the Sonora desert for two days on little food and less water, stopping only when nature called. At one point, he saw a man lying dead in his tracks. It was one of the hundreds of Mexican immigrants who die each year in failed attempts to cross the border. Miguel reached into the pockets of the carcass and discovered that the dead man had come from Michoacan, Miguel's home state.

Nevertheless, Miguel persisted. He walked, avoiding the snakes and coyotes, until he arrived in a little town called Algudonias, in the Mexican state of Baja California, where by his good fortune he found a freight train that took him to Los Angeles. He did not stay long, opting instead to take a bus to Madera, California, where he found work in the same fields in which Josefina Rodriguez and her family had toiled a half a century earlier. If he doesn't earn much in Las Vegas, he made a little less than nothing in Madera. But that was OK with him, for the cost of housing was cheap, and there he was surrounded by brown men who still wore cowboy hats, listened to classical Mexican ballads, and lived by an infallible maxim: Take it eeeeeeasy. Soon, however, harvest season came to an end, and after a fruitless stay in San Bernardino, California, he came to Las Vegas, where he says he knew people.

"The only problem was," he says, laughing at himself, "they were in the same condition as me."

That is: Miguel's friends were also Mexicans searching for daily work, but all too often walking home without any—just as Miguel was doing now, on Wednesday, as the Las Vegas sun had begun its westward descent.

He finished working at 3 o'clock sharp. To his good fortune, he was given a ride back to the Home Depot parking lot, which is a courtesy not always granted to day laborers.

Being a day laborer is neither glorious nor fun, but it's a living, Donaldo says. He has never calculated his yearly income; all he knows is that he tries to remain busy every day, and in the end it's much better than what he would be making if he were in Mexico.

As Miguel Barrientos, the president of the Mexican American Political Association in Las Vegas, puts it:

"You can build a wall from one end of the border to the other, 20 feet high and 20 feet underground, and Mexicans will just find a 21-foot ladder or dig 21 feet deep. You can't stop the human spirit."

Mark Edwards disagrees. He says, if the government did what it is supposed to do—protect America's borders from foreign invasion with iron rigor—this country would be much better off.

"There's a lot more than meets the eye," says Edwards, an ex-Marine and Korean War vet who esteems the United States Constitution above all else. "I get e-mails and calls from a lot of people who want our borders to be better protected, including border patrol people and Metro officers. They're on our side."

Mark Kirkorian, a reputable critic on illegal immigration and ex-director of U.S. Immigration Studies, says that a strategy of attrition can and must be implemented by the government, which has never been committed to enforcing its immigration laws. Kirkorian proposes a three-part process: impermeable border enforcement to halt any more immigrants from entering without documentation; allowance of unauthorized immigrants already in the United States to deport themselves by means of their own volition, by breaking the law, by obtaining citizenship, or by death; and, above all, a more zealous effort to root out undocumented workers from city streets.

Edwards and his Wake Up America Foundation agree:

"We plan to really put the heat on our so-called elected representatives, and on the employers who hire these criminals—we'll take down their license plates and check them out—and when we see a yard full of Mexicans, we'll go and check things out, make it real uncomfortable for them to be here," says Edwards, a natural soliloquist. "And I'm not trying to pick on Mexicans, I don't have a racist bone in my body, it's just that Mexico happens to be the country right next to us, sending floods of criminals."

One thing that Donaldo and Barrientos and Edwards and Kirkorian agree upon is that America's immigration system is a train wreck, as well as the source of great political tension.

Republicans are split between those who seek to remain traditional on strict border enforcement and those whose biggest financial supporters are the businesses making mountainous profits on cheap labor provided by undocumented workers. Democrats, who are striving with a field worker's resolve to garner the Hispanic vote, do not want to offend potential family members of undocumented workers, but also do not want to be branded with the scarlet A of politics for insinuating amnesty.

Everyone is looking to Washington for a definitive answer.

President Bush, who at the beginning of his administration propounded the idea of "earned legalization," but who has been heavily criticized for having not yet taken any pragmatic action on immigration reform, has urged Congress to consider a two-front attack on the issue: tighter border enforcement and a guest-worker program that would employ undocumented immigrants in the jobs they are already doing, and then send them home after three to six years.

A similar idea, with a few critical differences, has already picked up much more momentum.

Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., two men who believe that immigration reform is the most important issue facing America today, have introduced the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005, a bill that has gained bipartisan support, as well as the blessing of Donaldo and most other day laborers.

The bill calls for stricter border enforcement and temporary visas for potential immigrants and undocumented workers already in the United States, but differs from Bush's plan in that it does not close the door on workers after their sixth year. Instead, workers would be permitted to apply for permanent residency—given that they remained responsible, having kept a clean record and enrolled in English courses—before their sixth year is up. This would then smooth the way for immigrants to bring over their families, and it would permit them to visit their families during their six years.

Julio says he is aware of McCain's bill, and that he is, without equivocation, for it.

Because America needs Mexican labor, he says. According to several sources, that is true. Farming officials in Central California, who make no secret of their reliance on undocumented labor, have stated that due to immigration policies that left them 40,000 workers shorter than normal, bounds of crops remained on the vine this year, jeopardizing a $29 billion industry. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which has stated that over the past year 80,000 jobs were created in Las Vegas, and many more were vacant, came together in agreement on immigration reform with their bitter rivals, the Culinary Workers Union, which said it supports McCain's bill because it would provide legal status to many of their employees. "I see it every day," says Victor Espinoza, whose Laborer's Local 872 represents construction workers, highway builders and maintenance and environmental laborers in Las Vegas. "Hispanic labor is the backbone of the economy here, and without them there would be no growth."

Plus, Julio argues, strict enforcement, whether on the border or throughout America's city streets, does not work by itself. According to David Thronson, evidence shows that enforcement—into which hundreds of millions of dollars had been channeled after the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act passed, and then again after the terrorist attacks of 9/11—does little but force desperate and determined immigrants, like Julio, into the nefarious hands of coyotes, whose exploits and brutalities bring back to American memory the rumrunners of the catastrophic prohibition period. Or, as was the case with Miguel, it forces them to make improvised journeys through the desert, where in the past year more than 450 people have died trying to cross, and where humanitarian accounts detail the most pitiful outcomes: men with illiquid eyes and desiccated skin, suffering from severe dehydration; women delirious from dog bites and vanquished by exhaustion; and countless others wandering listlessly through the wasteland. Once in America, Miguel Barrientos says, strict enforcement only makes their condition worse, marginalizing undocumented workers into a state of constant fear, ignorance and impotence. "Let them work in America like our ancestors did," Barrientos says, referring in particular to the Bracero program of the 1940s, which summoned Mexican labor while American men were at war. "But let them work like men—not with no breaks and no pay: That's slavery."

Julio says he is for McCain's bill because "earned legalization" is compatible with the day laborer's character. Barrientos says that if you talk to enough undocumented Mexican workers, you will see that their wish is the American Dream.

"It's simple," Barrientos says. "Let's first just take care of the ones here. If you steal, do drugs, urinate on the street, beat your girlfriend, you're out—but let the hard-working ones stay in and continue to do what they do."

"I don't have a television," confesses Miguel. "I don't really know about it."

But David Thronson does, and he thinks highly of McCain's bill: "It's not a panacea, but it's the best we have right now, and it's an honest step in the right direction."

As of right now, Thronson says, there is a discrepancy between America's laws and its reality in regard to immigration. He says that the punishments assessed to immigrants who have been of unlawful status for half a year (misdemeanor, deported, barred from achieving legal immigration status for three years), or for a whole year (misdemeanor, deported, barred from achieving legal status for 10 years), is analogous to suspending a man's driver's license for a year because he went 5 mph over the speed limit, in a zone that had not previously been enforced.

Not only are these types of punishments unjust, but they also bring irreparable damage upon families, according to Thronson.

"When people talk about immigration issues, they often overlook the families," Thronson says. "It's crucial to keep in mind the extent to which undocumented immigrants are a part of U.S. families, not just the U.S. economy."

According to the well-regarded reports from the PEW Hispanic Center, a research group in Washington, the majority of illegal workers are married, and live with family in America. In Thronson's latest study, "Of Borders and Best Interests: Examining the Experiences of Undocumented Immigrants in U.S. Family Courts," he states that one out of every 10 children in the United States lives in a household in which family members do not share the same immigration status or citizenship. And the ratio is higher in Clark County, where the undocumented population is estimated to be anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people.

"We need to come up with a system that humanely enfolds them into America," says Thronson. "The McCain bill has potential, it takes a humane step toward addressing the issue."

"First of all, all that bill is amnesty," says Mark Edwards. "And if it goes through, this country is done for, we're all through."

Edwards repudiates the bill and its proponents in full. He says that the flexible and adaptive American economy would do just fine without Hispanics, and in fact the American people would be better off, for they could get their jobs back, and at a fair wage. He argues that strict enforcement can, in time, resolve the issue, and if not by the American government then by citizens, citing the success the Minutemen have had at deterring potential immigrants along the border. He calls "earned legalization" a pretext for hidden, corrupt agendas, and hints that it could give fanatical Mexicans who still do not recognize the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, the gumption to chase their dream of reclaiming power in the American Southwest. And Edwards says that undocumented workers (given amnesty) having children in America—or, as he calls them, "anchor babies"—is abominable, for he says this country is already becoming a Babel with its Spanish signs in banks and hospitals, and it doesn't need any more overcrowded schools or scourged welfare systems.

"I think as a citizen you should be prioritized," he states. "I think you've earned it by being here.

Congress has delayed debate on the bill until early next year. Barrientos' MAPA and Edward's WUAF have each begun preparations for movements that they hope will help Washington see their respective views of the right answer.

Just before sunset, Donaldo returned home, which for him is not just the small house in which he lives with his father in the northeast side of Las Vegas, but also America in large, as well as his mother country, Mexico.

A studious reader of pre-colonial Mexican history, Donaldo says that he feels a sense of belonging here that is both historical and innate: the former because in the distant past his people were born and bred in the American Southwest, and in the recent past he has helped to construct the region; the latter because he believes it's the human impulse to want to better your condition, wherever that desire might take you.

"Most Mexicans, in my experience, just want to become part of the country, integrate into the society," says Barrientos. "But of course they want to keep their culture, and share it. Isn't that what this country is about?"

Stepping off the bus, Julio—humble, noiseless, and not a centimeter more than 5 feet, 6 inches—began to walk the last mile to his apartment near 14th Street and Bonanza Road, while the Las Vegas twilight remained suspended at his back. It was 4:45 p.m.

He felt tranquil. He was unafraid. Unlike most of his friends who have never gone a moment in America—sleeping or awake—without the cross of paranoia on their backs, Julio says he has nothing to fear.

"Why should I be scared when I haven't done anything wrong?"

His brother was already in the apartment. Julio gave him his day's wage, as he and his brother pool their money together to cover rent and food, sending what's left back to their family in Mexico. Also at the apartment was the wife of Julio's brother, whose cooking had filled the house with the smell of Mexico, and their two children.

After dinner Julio watched television, and as always on the news they mentioned immigration reform in the United States. Julio is mindful of the politics, and he is hopeful for some new ideas, like McCain's legislation, but just like every other undocumented Mexican worker living in America, he knows the ultimate resolution must come from Mexico.

He still has hope for his homeland, he says, and he would still like to trail better times back there some day.

According to Julio, Mexico has all the raw material it needs to build itself into a great nation, right in its own back yard: oil, gold, silver, abundant minerals, tireless labor, fundamental family values, relentless national pride and some of the world's smartest people—but now needs the right leadership to bring it all together, toward a new country from which even the most lucrative paradises in the world cannot lure its people.

"Listen, brother: Mexico's politics are changing," says Barrientos. "We're at the beginning of a new era. The peasants are starting it themselves, they don't want their children to grow in the same system they did. Things are changing."

Barrientos believes that despite Mexico's long history of fruitless revolutions, within the next 25 years—or "three to four elections, you watch"—Mexico will be flourishing.

Before turning in for the night, Julio exhausted the remaining minutes on his phone card talking to his family back home in Mexico, and they kept awake in his memory everything he loves about his homeland.

It had just gone dark in the Valley, and Miguel stood above his makeshift bed. He was alone. Most of the other homeless men who sleep there were gone, in line across the street for a charitable meal at the Salvation Army.

He had awakened before the sun, took off for the Home Depot parking lot on Charleston and Lamb, where he had failed to find a job for today but where he will again seek work tomorrow, and then made the long journey back.

While riding the bus, he had thought about his family, wondering what they were up to right then, hoping that they were doing well for themselves, thinking of how much he missed them and how if he could only save $5,000 he could go back home to them.

As he got off the bus he took a deep breath. He felt a deep emptiness in his chest—the space in a working man typically reserved for a job well done—but he walked home with relative ease because his health is good, which he attributes to clean living and divine intervention (considering that the last time he saw a doctor of any discipline was too long ago to remember). He also felt satisfied that he had kept his dignity intact for yet another day. He did not stick his hand out in asking for alms nor take up a job peddling lewd cards (which would have been like a perpetual thorn in his Catholic flesh), and he in all certainty found a casino or gas station or taco shop when he had to go the bathroom, for only animals piss in public.

Yet, there he was at 5:30 p.m., standing before his makeshift bed, a long, monotonous succession of sunrises and sunsets behind him, thinking:

Nobody said it was easy; but no one ever said it would be this hard.

But that's OK, he thought. I'm a working man, and I can endure anything. And then he went to sleep.

Julio Cisneros, Miguel Rulfo and Donaldo Paz: Their stories have an inextricable connection to my great-grandparents, and this is what I mean:

All immovable Catholics, my four great-grandparents came to America, where they would each obtain their papers but not their citizenship, and they worked hard, hoping to make it out of this life with a little property to call their own, a better condition to bequeath to their children, and the serenity of owing no man anything. They must have taken it as a commandment directed specifically to them when they read in the book of Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it," because that's exactly what they did: Eugenio and Maria Rodriguez gave life to five girls and five boys, including my grandfather; and Jose and Petra Cervantez, to eight girls and seven boys, and probably would have had 15 more if nature had permitted it; and all their children, with no exception, were taught to fear neither sweat nor dirt, as that is our heritage, but consider it good fortune to have the opportunity to work in a land as fertile with opportunities as America.

From the seeds of those four who were born and raised in Mexico and then brought their work ethic and sense of family to Madera, California, came a whole tribe of men and women whose contributions to America have been manifold: doctors, teachers, and inexhaustible public school administrators; mad poets and stellar collegiate athletes; lauded and unlauded United States war veterans; businessmen, missionaries, architects, construction workers, painters, roofers, gardeners, and even me, a young man dedicated to the craft of writing with few pretensions but many impulses, the most pressing of which is an imminent and irrevocable urge to give a people for whom I feel great affinities in not just my blood but also my heart and mind a name and a face and voice—Donaldo Paz, Miguel Rulfo and Julio Cisneros—not to pick sides of an issue or to say what is right and what is wrong, but to redeem the existence of these Mexican day laborers, just as my great grandparents redeemed mine when they crossed the Mexican-American border without permission or regret.