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When I came to Mexico from Maine, I breezed through so easily I thought: it's depressing to be viewed as that harmless. Six-month tourist visa, no problem. Want to stay longer? Go back to the border, do a U-turn, and enjoy Mexico for a few months more.
My Spanish teacher here, a middle class Mexican woman married to a guy from the U.S., described the visa process for Mexicans wanting to enter the United States:
You make a call to an expensive 900 number, to make an appointment at the nearest U.S. consulate, a 3-hr drive away. (Not long ago, the policy was no appointments, first come, first served, and people lined up in the middle of the night.) Anyway, you go to your appointment and present the huge pile of documents demonstrating that you have family/home/job to return to in Mexico--and the paperwork you have so laboriously collected doesn't mean anything, if the interviewer's opinion is that you have designs of staying or working in the States. Because the interviewer's subjective assessment of you is the arbitrary element in the process, and the last word. The interviewers have seen it all, and have an almost psychic sense of which people are tourists and which are "undesirables."
Any Mexican with any sense knows it's pointless to apply for a visa if they're just hoping to do manual labor that U.S. workers don't want to do. But sending dollars back to a peso economy is so empowering that people literally kill themselves to do it: that's where the coyotes come in.
The hypocrisy is beyond belief: if undocumented workers all got deported, the American economy would crash and burn, because Americans have such a sense of privilege and entitlement about what kind of work they will do.
Open the fucking border.
