30 Days - Illegal Immigration

Hey guys,

So today in my Economics class we watched an episode of 30 days, a show where they take a person, couple, or small group of people and put them through some sort of hardship they are not used to in their daily lives. This episode was about how a man named Frank, a minuteman, who gathers a small group of other minutemen every weekend to head to the U.S. and Mexican border to help patrol it and to report any sightings of Mexican citizens trying to illegally cross the border to the border patrol. Frank, a legal immigrant from Cuba as a child, when pulled aside to explain his viewpoints, stated that he firmly believes that it is his and his wife's job as United States citizens to protect our nation's citizenship from illegal immigrants. He claimed that if people in other countries want to become U.S. citizens, they should do it the legal way. Point made. Frank was assigned a task to live with a family of 7 in Los Angeles, CA in which, 5 are undocumented. He was to leave all forms of identification behind at home. Upon the first few days staying witht he family, He found that a father, mother, and 5 children ages ranging from 7 to 18 shared a small one bedroom apartment. He stood firm in his beliefs stating to the eldest daughter (18yrs, undocumented) that if he could, he would probably call the INS and have the family picked up right away. It was intense! Now some may agree or disagree on the topic of illegal immigrants but I am not trying to get political.

15 days into the stay, Maria and Rigo, parents of the 5 children, started talking to Frank on how it is hard living in a foreign country trying to make a living when they have the rest of their family back in Mexico who really dont have a living. Like all immigrants, although they wish to someday go back to visit their family relatives and most of all their parents before their passing, the fear always lingers of leaving the U.S. and not being able to come back. So they decided to send Frank to visit their family in Mexico. So he did! He was able to see the house that Maria and Rigo lived in. Met their parents, brothers, and sisters. He realized that the house they used to live in wasn't even a house. It wasn't livable. It was worse than a shack! It had no roof and their water supply came from either a hose that was topped off from an untreated water source or from a well that had the dirtiest water he or even I have ever seen. He saw the hardships that his family had to go through and that by coming to the U.S. they were simply seeking a better life.

The point I am trying to make is that when I go to Ecuador, I will be going into probably one of the poorest parts of the country where people don't even have sneaking across the border into the U.S. for hopes of a better life as an option. They live just to survive each day and barely survive each day just to live. Living without most of the very basic things we don't care to cherish about, these people strive & struggle just to meet what their daily lives need. It is a hard life for them especially when individual heads-of-thehouseholds must support a whole family! Live is hard and yet, they still find the strength to carry on. I hope I can make a difference in the lives of local villagers of Ecuador. Imagine when we all get to heaven and there will be no more struggling to live each day and where we will have everything we need to be happy and live a sinless life!