The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

Mexico itself was spending eighty cents from every earned dollar on foreign debt. The vast money machine that was Pemex gasoline and oil bled more pesos than it put into the national economy. The even bigger narco money never made it out of clandestine mansions.

Gangs are so in control now that walkers who want to go alone, without a pollero to guide them, must pay a fee just to enter the desert.

Later, she calculated that the dead men’s flight alone had cost over sixty-eight thousand dollars. “What if,” she asked, “somebody had simply invested that amount in their villages to begin with?”

Each tower costs six thousand dollars. Environmentalists tried to stop them: towers would ruin the landscape. Critics railed against the towers, like they criticized the Samaritan groups out rescuing walkers, or the humanitarian outfits placing bottled water and canned food in marked locations for them, and still, conservative pundits try to get their constituents to believe the American Taxpayer, that mythical and handy beast, is funding lifesaving towers foisted on them by the lily-livered INS, which, by the way, allowed hijackers to blow up New York. Instead of closed and secure borders, “orange freeway cones,” comfort stations, and expensive light towers. Wrong. In fact, the towers are built, raised, maintained, and paid for out-of-pocket by those bleeding-heart liberals, the Border Patrol agents themselves.

Consul Flores Vizcarra says it isn’t the desert that kills immigrants. It isn’t Coyotes. It isn’t even the Border Patrol. “What kills the people,” he says, “is the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border.”

The Border Patrol’s lifesaving tactics are “like throwing a child in the ocean and then throwing in floaties afterward. It’s not sufficient, and we think it’s disingenuous to say they’re making it safer. Our border policies are the direct cause of those fourteen deaths.”

Although the federal tax figure is decried in some of the reports as minimal—after all, these are poor folks who make $4.50 an hour—it is still worth considering. If there are eight million tonks slaving away in the United States right now (and one of the Mexican pols interviewed for this book crowed, “We have inserted twelve million workers into the United States—it is already Mexico! We have won the war!”), most of those workers pay federal income tax: shaved right off the top. No choice, just like you. They pay state taxes: shaved right off the top. They get tapped for Social Security and FICA. There’s a whole lot of shaving going on. If you multiply $4.50 an hour by eight million workers, that would mean there are 36 million taxable dollars being accrued every hour by illegals getting tapped for some percentage by Uncle Sam. Those workers will not receive a refund.

But they take away our jobs! Interestingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Satistics has reported that by 2008, there will be five million more jobs in the United States than people to do them. This is after the tides of illegals. After the post-Iraq economic doldrums. Even if we vacuum up the homeless and set them to sweeping and frying, we’ll have a few million vacancies. Who you gonna call?

“undocumented immigrants” contributed “at least $300 billion per year to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).” If you put their numbers at a mere 4.5 million, they still add between $154 million and $220 billion,

“although conservative groups claim that undocumented immigrants are a social burden,” illegals tend to shy away from seeking social services because they don’t want to be deported.

“Mexican immigrants paid nearly $600 million in federal taxes and sales taxes in 2002… Mexican immigrants use about $250 million in social services such as Medicaid and food stamps… Another $31 million in uncompensated health care.…” That leaves a profit of $319 million.