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What to do about illegal immigrants in this country?

By Carl Heintze

This essay is about a young woman I know. I'll call her Elena, although that's not really her name.

Elena is single, attractive, with brown hair and brown eyes, somewhere in her 30s, slim, with almond, almost Asian eyes. She works at taking care of other people's children, and she does a good job.

She has, however, one overriding problem. She's an illegal.

About six years ago she crossed the border from Mexico pretending she was from Guatemala in the hope that she might be taken for a political refugee--the civil war was still on there. But she wasn't. She was born in a Mexican state not far from the Guatemalan border, one of half a dozen children.

I've never asked her how she crossed the border or where, but she made it to California successfully--she has relatives here--and she has been here ever since.

In the half dozen years since she arrived, she has learned English passably well, has somehow gotten a driver's license and a bank account and settled in. I've never asked where she lives, but she has a telephone.

She is pretty much a part of California. Nevertheless, she would dearly love to go back to Mexico. That's because her father is ill and has been for several years. But Elena can't risk going home to see him because she is afraid she would not be able to get back across the border into California.

She sends money home to her family every month and talks to them on the telephone, particularly her father. Now and then when she talks about him tears well up in her eyes.

I admire Elena's courage. I am sad about her inability to get home to see her father before he dies. I think about her every time I pass Home Depot and see dozens of young Mexicans, most of them, I'm sure, illegals. I wonder how many of their stories are like Elena's.

Together they represent the great dilemma in which the United States finds itself these days. Elena is one, only one, of millions of illegal immigrants living and working in the United States. I used to think all of them were like Elena, from Mexico, and almost all of them were in California.

But that's not true. Most of the 10 million or so--no one really knows how many there really are--are Mexicans, but dozens of other countries are represented in the mix. And they now live all over the United States, in every state, except perhaps Hawaii and Alaska.

Depending on your experience, or perhaps your political persuasion, you either love, tolerate or hate this arrangement.

Illegal aliens (and their children, who usually are citizens because they were born here) crowd our schools, trickle into our hospitals and are glad to do the work we don't want to do--stoop labor, gardening, construction. They have emptied much of Mexico. The flood never seems to stop despite death, deportation and so-called Minutemen along the border.

And we alternately love what they're doing--because we don't have to--and rail at them for sending money out of the country, taxing our social and political system and existing, mostly unseen, right before our eyes.

On the one hand we tend to think there is something wrong with having entered the country illegally. On the other, we feel sorry for them, we admire their ability to work and we wish they would learn English faster.

It never occurs to us that we could learn a smattering of Spanish.

All in all, we don't know what to do about it.

I certainly don't know what to do about it, although I think making being here illegally a felony is an unlikely way to solve the problem. It's also probably impossible to enforce. Are we going to send all the parents (illegals) back to Mexico and somehow keep their children here?

And who will we get to replace the thousands who now work in the construction industry? The only likely source seems to be more illegals.

Mexico seems unlikely to do anything about its part of the problem. The money Mexicans in the United States send home is now Mexico's largest single source of income. Nor am I sure what the Mexicans can do about it.

So there you have it. We--and our illegals--are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

In some ways it reminds us of the United States before the Civil War, when slavery was the great dilemma before the nation. Neither side would yield. Neither side did yield, and civil war followed.

I hope that drastic remedy does not happen in this century. I hope somehow Elena not only finds a way to get home to see her dying father, but finds a way to get back here again.

But at the moment I don't see how she is going to do either one.