The music that plays in Mexico's background

Star-Telegram | 12/04/2005 | The music that plays in Mexico's background

PUERTO ESCONDIDO, Mexico - If you travel through the villages and towns of Mexico asking people about their lives and about the idea of crossing their country's northern border, you discover that the siren song that has brought immigrants to the United States over the centuries never stops calling, its unsettling sounds inviting and threatening at the same time.

The prospect of an odyssey across the desert beckons like a mirage of opportunity and danger. Every single person I have asked, without exception, has told me about relatives who have gone to the United States.

Everyone, without exception, has talked about having at least considered going to the country where there is money to be made, but only for those willing to go through terrifying dangers to reach an unknown land.

Noe Silva, who works in this fishermen's town on Mexico's Pacific coast, told me he makes about $4,000 a year working a variety of odd jobs. He's a waiter when the tourists come, a carpenter when they leave. And he even moved to work in neighboring Chiapas for a few years. That's where the rebel Zapatista army a few years ago declared an old-fashioned leftist revolutionary war on behalf of the poorest of the poor.

Silva has considered the trek to the United States many times. But the fear of dying in the desert keeps him from trying it. Besides, he says, this is the land he knows. This is where he walks on the beach every morning, where his father took him out fishing as a child. Where he knows everyone and everyone knows him.

For the millions who make it to the United States, a life of relatively high earnings does not mean a life of comfort. Mexican migrants send so much of what they make back to their families that remittances have become the second-largest source of revenue for Mexico, second only to oil exports.

Mexico needs the cash, but the belief that America would simply stop functioning without Mexico's millions of undocumented workers is almost universal here.

The concept was most undiplomatically expressed by the country's President Vicente Fox, when he said Mexicans do the jobs that "not even blacks will do." The statement rightly enraged African-Americans, but the thought that the United States needs Mexicans is widespread.

One conspiratorially minded Mexican explained Washington's policy this way: The United States needs Mexicans, so it makes it illegal and dangerous for them to come. That way, only the most talented and strong and determined end up making it. That's how Americans want it.

The conspiracy takes it a bit far, but the view from a man who, like many Mexicans, resents and mistrusts Washington holds the key to the Darwinian secrets of immigration.

One of the reasons that the United States has become one of the most successful countries in history is that it was built by immigrants, a self-selected group that has always included some of the most determined, driven and hard-working people from around the world.

As long as the United States needs workers and Mexico has more people than jobs, as long as Mexico remains so much poorer than the United States, Mexicans will give in to the call and seek to make their fortune in America. And as long as there is no viable legal option to enter the United States, an illegal infrastructure rather than legitimate immigration authorities will control the border.

That will make the Mexico-U.S. frontier one that will open America to anyone willing to pay cash and take the risk.