Go Figure, an Immigration Story

Mexico is a good place to be while contemplating migration issues between here and the U.S. One of the EEUU guys at the place where I´m staying admitted to having run out of money once while he was here, so he worked under the table as a teacher of English until he got enough money for bus fare. "I was an illegal alien worker" he said, noticing the irony of being an illegal estadounidense in Mexico rather than an illegal Mexican in the EEUU.

I spoke with an anthropologist who has been studying the same group of indigenas for fifty years. His group live in high, dry, mountain country, and for years now, their main source of civic wellbeing has been their children in the United States. There are two big communities in the U.S. where the language of this group is spoken, and many nice houses in the high, dry, mountain country financed by those who live in those communities of migrants far away.

But it was another story told by this anthropoligist and his wife that made me say "go figure," this time. This couple, the anthropologist from New England and his Mexican wife, had lived for a long time in the U.S., so long, that the wife had her green card for permanent residency. But her mother got old and sick, so for the last eight years or so, they have been living in Mexico next door to Mom, visiting their indigenas in the mountains, visiting occasionally in the U.S. place where they maintain their official residence, and generally living a pleasant life of retirement.

But a time came recently when Tio Martin, who has lived for a very long time in Southern California, stopped answering letters. At Easter, my friends traveled to California to look for him and see what was up. The first thing that happened was that the U.S. immigration folks decided the Mexican grandmother going to look up her brother in California had not been living enough in the United States to justify her having a green card. They took it and gave her a tourst visa, just for this trip, with bureaucratic followup required to be able to come again.

When they found Tio Martin, he was in terrible condition. His life companion had slid into dementia and wouldn´t let anyone in the house. In the meantime, he had started falling. She couldn´t get him up when he fell, and neither could he. He quit eating. They really found him in the nick of time. They got him to the hospital -- he has private insurance as well as medicare-- where rehydration and feeding quickly returned him to a lucid state. They straightened out his finances, which had fallen into neglect. The local caseworker was going to be able to straighten things out for his lady, and he was going to be able to go to a retirement home after he got well enough to leave the hospital.

My friends will have to go again to help him, once the tourist visa thing gets straightened out. But how could this be? You go across the border to help your family member, you lose your residency status, further visits become more difficult, and what? If she doesn´t go back, it will surely be more trouble for Tio Martin´s social workers to help him make the transition from living in his own house to living somewhere else. But heaven forbid a Mexican relative should come and smooth things out! Go figure.