Illegal immigrants feel the animosity that some Americans have for them, and they give it right back. But the opportunities offered by the rich neighbor to the north are too much to pass up | Clint Rainey
San Luís Potosí, Mexico— "Listen," Hilario Uvalde said, dropping his voice like he was confiding a secret, "don't let them fool you. It's as easy now as it was then."
His audience was rapt. The 44-year-old laborer, temporarily enjoying rock-star status, was regaling a group of young men in the San Luís Potosí bus station with his lengthy repertoire of border antics.
It all started when someone brought up a headline in La Reforma, a salacious national newspaper: "Dan paliza a ex 'migra'" ("They beat the former Border Patrol agent"). The story was about inmates who kicked Ignacio Ramos with steel-toed boots just weeks after his high-profile incarceration for shooting Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, a drug-smuggling illegal alien. The attack had come shortly after America's Most Wanted aired a profile of him.
Ten pesos and a wink
A rough trip through Mexico and some rethinking on immigration
Drift through a dozen dingy, fluorescent, look-alike Mexican bus stations, and you tend to lump them all together as one indiscrete, inseparable entity, like Pangaea. But the Querétaro station I distinctly remember.
Here, determined to make the two of us see eye-to-eye on illegal immigration before the overdue Flecha Amarilla bus showed, a spindly 63-year-old hung his hat on this Mexican proverb: It is not the fault of the mouse but of the one who offers him the cheese. I gave him points for creativity but said this was bona fide buck passing.
Several days later, after having an expensive camera stolen out from under my nose, contracting severe traveler's diarrhea, and operating under the perpetual assumption that I was with la migra—Mexicans' word for the Border Patrol, but also used nebulously to describe anyone who "colludes" to keep out illegals—I was on the brink of conceding that the proverbialist had a point.
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COVER STORY |
Issue: 
No pious baloney
