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BorderLinks |
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BorderLinks Field Trip On the trip to Mexico, I was quite surprised at the Maquiladoras. I was expecting to see a factory that looked run down and old. However, it was completely opposite of that. The factory was very new and every think was clean and orderly. If I did not know the factory was in Mexico I would swear that it was an American factory. The only thing that was different was the wages that the workers made. Most of the workers made around $1 an hour and that is double the minimum wage of Mexico. An article in the Borderlinks Reading Packet called “We are Not Machines” Talks about how the conditions used to be much worse then they are right now. This is hard to believe, because as it is Mexican workers have to work 3 hours to buy one carton of milk at the store. In the U.S. I would only have to work about a half an hour to buy a gallon of milk. Most of the people live in Colonias that are extremely poor. Some do not even have electricity or running water. It is no wonder that so many people are trying to cross the borders to get to the U.S.. With the conditions that most of the immigrants live in in their own country almost anything they can find here is better than their own country. During the summer months I go camping with my parent in the mountains, generally only for a few days. However, the conditions I am in while camping are far better than those of the immigrants who are leaving their country for work. I love to camp but I would not want to have to live my life that way. The article “Border Death Trap” from the Borderlinks Reading Packet talks about how on average one-immigrant dies every 1.4 days trying to cross the deserts to get into the United States, and nothing is really being done to stop this. The Border Patrol agents we spoke with claims that they are reducing the number of illegal immigrants crossing into the country. But increasing the border security is also causing the death rate of the immigrants to increase. This is because since Operation Gatekeeper they have to move away from the towns and into the remote deserts to try and make it across. I feel there must be a better solution to the entire thing but the only way that will happen is if the Mexican government fixes the way their system works. Until that day the immigrants will continue to come to the U.S. for work because they can not find any in their homeland.
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