Are you personally fine with those who cross the border illegally to come to this country?

[Cleita]

73. I'm not fine with it, but I have great sympathy for the plight of those people

who desperately seek a better life. Living in California most of my life I have worked alongside these people, particularly in restaurants, and have gotten to know them. They aren't here to exploit our social services and get free stuff. They just want to work for a better wage than they got in the country of their origins. One sixteen year old working in the kitchen of a business I worked as bookkeeper for told me that he was working in a tile factory in Mexico since he was ten years old. He made $1.75 a day. He heard that he could make $3.75 an hour in the USA so he crossed over illegally. This was back in the early eighties. He found out how hard it was to be considered illegal and how white people often treated Mexicans like they weren't really human beings.

He received amnesty when Reagan offered it and has lived and worked here with his family ever since. The real problem is we need to make our neighbors to the south fix their employment and poverty problems, so people don't want to leave, yet when some leaders attempt to do just that like the late Hugo Chavez, they are vilified as tinpot dictators by our medial moguls. I think our industrial giants like being able to exploit the cheap labor and don't want this fixed at all.