A Mexican Farmer Worker in USA Essay -- Immigration Immigrant Essays P

A Mexican Farmer Worker in USA The first immigrant I interviewed will be referred to as â€Å"Jess†. Jess is from Guanajuato which is in southern Mexico. Jess, his five brothers and sisters, and his parents were farmers. They grew corn as their main crop. Jess’s family lived in a three-bedroom brick house in Mexico. Their house surprisingly had water and electricity. He only made 100 pesos a day ($10.00 U.S.). According to Jess, this was not enough money to get by on his own. He said that the average person in Mexico needs at least 150 pesos per day to live on their own and someone raising a family needs much more than this. This is why in 1985, at the age of 18, he came to Arizona to find a better job and to help his family. Jess paid the coyotes $150.00 to get him across the border, walking through the desert for 12 hours and riding in the back of a truck for the rest of the way. The coyotes that helped him were a very nice family and they were not threatening at all. He says that cro ssing the dessert was a scary experience and that he feared they would be burglarized, but claims that he made it across without running into trouble. It only took Jess two days after arriving in Phoenix to find a landscaping job. According to the statistics in Transnational Villagers, between 1996 and 1999, 60.3% of Non-Dominican Hispanics, like Jess, were employed in the U.S. and 45.3% of them worked full time. Jess did not require the help of job agencies to find work. Of course, he was undocumented at the time but this was not a problem in the landscaping business. With the money from this job, he was able to buy his first car which he paid $300 for. Landscaping paid $4.00 per hour which was minimum wage back then. He remain... ...ct each other. Its first objective was to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants. The second objective was to provide undocumented immigrants already working in the U.S. with a chance to become legal and obtain rights. The Act established employer sanctions against businesses that knowingly employed undocumented immigrants. It also provided those immigrants who had been living illegally in the U.S. since 1982 with a chance to obtain temporary resident status. The United States is slowly realizing how important these immigrants are to the U.S. economy. There service to the United States deserves the respect and gratitude of every U.S. citizen. Works Cited Chang, Grace. Disposable Domestics, South End Press: Cambridge, MA. 2000. Levitt, Peggy. The Transnational Villagers, University of California Press: Berkley, CA. 2001.