Thu Mar 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

I am not welcome here

Odyssey of an immigrant

If you have never been an undocumented immigrant on the American Central on the perilous trip by Mexico only to have to face the hate groups of the “vigilantes” and the migra on the USA frontier, then you do not know what hell is.
If you are running away from poverty or from persecution in your own country, the Mexican police will also chase you to rob you off the last nickel. If you have no money, you will wind up in a Mexican jail accused of all kinds of crimes. Then you may get tortured by the federals using techniques Guatemalan army who learned them in the School of Americas.
If because of a miracle of the perfect lining up of the planets you can get through Mexico without problems and you are lucky enough to have relatives willing and able to help you with some money, you will find yourself in the hands of the coyotes, or dealers in human beings. All these experiences will make the IV programme Survivor look like a children’s game. But all this is just a sample for what you can expect once you reach the Promised Land and just the first pages of the book on your own life.


In the USA
In the 80s, when I was twenty-odd years old, I spent sic months in the processing centre Port Isabel in Texas together with other 600 Latin American men and women escaping from civil wars and searching for a political asylum.
In Port Isabel, they left us outside in a temperature of 38 degrees while the camp was shipped by dust storms that invaded our bodies. My ears got infected and I had to spend several days complaining to get them do something about that. And yet I was lucky, for I spoke English and the others did not.
During the first days there, we were provided the basic hygiene products, such as soap and toothpaste. Since there were no movable toilets outside, we had not choice but to urinate on the ground. When the watchmen saw us from the vigilance camera, they shouted racist insults on us.
After 15 days they would call one prisoner for a trial and impose a bail between $15 000 and $35 000. The way the Mexican federals robbed us was nothing compared to what these people did to us. How can they expect poor immigrants to get such a sum of money, even if they did have relatives who worked in the USA? Many detainees suffered from fits of panic at the thought of being deported back to their countries where they were sure to be murdered by death squads.
Ill-treatment and corruption thrived. Once a guard offered me food and money to beat a detainee with whom he had had trouble a few days before. I simply walked away. On another occasion, a Salvadoran prisoner of my barrack delayed getting in when we were called for lunch. An officer beat him and made him bleed. The detainee wanted to sue him legally and spoke to the people of Liberty Project, a project for the rights of immigrants. At midnight, when lights went out, about five officials of migrations came in and took the wounded man and his witness and transported them to Houston from where they were deported.
This so-called “democratic system” treated these people badly. Constitutional rights that all human beings are supposed to have in this country regardless their race or national origin were all good for nothing.


Why do we go there?
In Mexico and Central America, 90% of the people live in an everyday struggle for survival. Many depend on farming to survive and farm on their little plots of land or they work for others. But they cannot compete against the huge amounts of farming products that enter Mexico thanks to the “free trade”.
That leaves people no choice but to flee. Those who have houses or cattle, sell everything. Others borrow money. Many lose everything during their trip north and those who are deported return to a life of squalor, worse off then they were before. What solution is there for these misers of the earth if not the revolution?
And yet, as if it were a curse, American capitalism has been standing there for what seem like eternity, a time during which the Yankee government has been preventing us from living our own destiny giving support to oligarchies and one genocide dictatorship after the other. But don’t you think that our revolutionary spirit has been weakened. Now more than ever, as we see South American movements advancing towards better societies, we feel inspired to fight.
And yet, we, the people of Mexico and Central America also expect the citizens born in the USA to fight so that we may get rid of Uncle Sam sitting on our backs and we expect them also to fight their own battle. After all, you do have a revolutionary history and perhaps you can win just one more, the one to win freedom for us all.

Original from Guatemala, Hugo Orellana is now a citizen of the USA and lives in Seattle, he works as a public servant and is an active member of his trade union.
This article was originally published in Freedom Socialist, a periodical of the FSP (Freedom Socialist Party) in the USA.

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