Word: margaritos
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Mayo's bill has won him plenty of enemies among the illegal immigrants I spoke with. None knew him personally, but they spoke of him with equal parts fear and resentment. "That is the man who started this racism," says Margarito's uncle Ramón. "He is the Deceiver...
Choosing to Stay All this could be putting St. Helens at a competitive disadvantage to other towns in neighboring counties. Because the choice facing Margarito in the absence of a federal plan on immigration, it turns out, isn't St. Helens vs. Mexico but St. Helens vs. Woodburn, a heavily Hispanic town 60 miles (about 100 km) south with businesses that are still hiring (including at least one firm that just relocated from St. Helens...
...Margarito and his wife would not have chosen to go back to Mexico anyway. Margarito's 8-year-old son, one of four U.S.-born children, is autistic. They've tried to find a program in Mexico that would work for him. There was a trip to Puerto Vallarta for dolphin therapy, which yielded little. They went to Morelia - the hometown of Margarito's wife - and found that the public schools would offer him only one hour of special education every three days, compared with 24 hours each week in St. Helens. All of which they could handle...
...they have no such guarantees. So Margarito and his wife will stay in Oregon, but not in St. Helens. One of the couple's last paid assignments in the town was a typical task for people who have been made unemployable by 5-190: a store manager hired them and a friend to clean out the back of the store overnight. "It was disgusting work," says Margarito. At the end of the five-hour job, they were given $60 total, or about $4 an hour for each worker. Margarito cajoled $20 more out of the boss for the three...
Over drinks at El Tapatio, a half-empty restaurant near the highway, Margarito, his wife and uncle talked about the financial crisis - how Wall Street had binged on mortgages while Washington looked the other way. The parallels to immigration were pointed: during the boom years, the U.S. binged on cheap labor while politicians neither legalized workers nor prevented them from sneaking across the border. It was a grossly laissez-faire policy that has left everyone - Americans and immigrants alike - with a postboom hangover...