Each morning is the same for Rodrigo Nunez. He wakes up, eats a banana and has a cup of coffee saturated with sugar and milk, and then throws on his ratty jeans and mud-caked boots, ready for yet another day of hard labor and monotony.

It will take him an hour and a half to ride the Metro bus from his Denver Harbor area apartment to get to where he needs to go, a ride that he often looks forward to because he is able to sleep on the trip to the construction site.

“The sun wakes me up on the bus right before I get there,” Nunez said. “Today we are digging a ditch to run the pipes through. It is hard because it is so hot during the day, and I still have to wear pants.”

Only for a short hour do Nunez and the rest of his six crew members get a break. They wait until around 12:30 p.m. for the sounds of the Taqueria Tacambaro, to play “La Cucaracha” on the taco truck’s high-pitched horn, and then they can break.

Rodrigo usually orders a greasy “tortuga” and a Mexican orange soda, but he can still remember when he was a child on his family’s small ranch and his diet consisted of corn tortillas and eggs.

“We had very little,” Nunez said. “We did not have any cars and I had to share a bedroom with four of my brothers.”

With such a small amount of money, it was not easy for Nunez to come up with the $1,500 he had to raise to pay the smuggler, plus the extra $500 he needed to buy his “papers” to present to an employer in the United States.

“I think there’s a challenge with controlling the employment of undocumented workers, or illegal aliens, because the country’s ambivalent about this migration,” University of Houston sociology chair Nestor Rodriguez said. “On the one hand, there are laws and national mandates to control the borders and secure the borders. On the other hand, America has depended on immigrant labor to fill certain sectors of our industries, and skilled immigrant workers have been very popular to our employers.”

Although Nunez concedes that his job is not easy work, and the pay is just above minimum wage, he is happy to have it. Nunez says that some of his friends in Mexico do not make enough money to feed their children. He does not want that to be him.

“I work very hard, but for me it is a lot of money,” Nunez said. “I miss my family, but I am happy with my life here.”

If he can, Nunez sends $200 to his remaining family in San Pablito, Puebla, Mexico, and saves the rest to support his wife and his eight-year-old daughter, Mariana. Although he would like to return to Mexico someday, when he has made enough money, Nunez knows his daughter will have a better education and a better future here.

“I hope that she will become a doctor someday,” Nunez said. “She is very intelligent, I can see that already.”

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the two "magnets" which attract illegal aliens are jobs and family connections. The typical Mexican worker earns one dime to the dollar of his American counterpart, and many American businesses are willing to hire inexpensive labor from abroad, they say. CIS also believes that businesses are seldom punished because the United States lacks a viable system to verify new hires' work eligibility.

“Many [illegal immigrants] have few options,” Rodriguez said. “You either stay in economies back home with few opportunities; pay is low. Your children are going to eat little. If somebody gets ill there’ll probably be no money for health care. So then you throw yourself into this labor stream, hoping to catch some job on the U.S. side.”

Edna Alvarez, another illegal immigrant, is a caretaker for an elderly woman in Montgomery County. After Annette Jones’s 75 year-old mother became bedridden after a fall a year and a half ago, the family was in need of some help.

“We knew that we didn’t want to put my mom in a nursing home, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to be able to take care of her on my own,” Jones said. “We had the option of hiring a registered nurse for several hours a day, but that just wasn’t going to be something that we were going to be able to afford. I now had both my mother, who I was going to have to take care of, as well as my little sister, who is handicapped. We couldn’t do it.”

Faced with a dilemma, Jones started to ask around. She had heard stories from some of her neighbors of the Latin American ladies who clean houses, many of whom had friends who would be willing stay with a family, working for much less money than it would be to hire someone who had more experience – someone who was legal.

Alvarez came into Texas by swimming across the Rio Grande in 1983, after paying $2000 to a “coyote” – a person who provides transportation from the border deeper into the United States. Since that time, Alvarez has gotten married, had three children, worked numerous service-oriented jobs and now owns a small trailer outside of Conroe. Her husband is a trash collector who wakes up a 3:30 a.m. every day. She has been working for the Joneses for nearly a year, cooking, cleaning and taking care of the family. Alvarez also administers medication, oxygen and daily prayer sessions to the elderly woman.

“I like working here,” Alvarez said. “The family is very nice to me. Once I lived with an old woman who was very mean to me. I had been hired by her son to live with her and take care of her because she could not walk well or take care of herself. Many times she would scream at me and try to hit me with the cane that she had. I remember sometimes when she would urinate and defecate on the floor on purpose, so that I would have to clean it up. She was a horrible person.”

The Census Bureau estimates that at the time of the 2000 Census, the illegal immigrant population was about 8 million. Using this number, it can be concluded that the illegal alien population grew by almost half a million per year in the 1990s. This conclusion is taken from a draft report given to the House immigration subcommittee, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which estimated the illegal population was 3.5 million in 1990. For the undocumented population to have reached 8 million by the year 2000, the net increase would have been 400,000 to 500,000 every year during the 1990s.


“I hope that I do not ever have to go back to Mexico,” Alvarez said. “The life I have in this place is better for me and for my family. If I was ever forced to leave the country, I do not know what I would do.”

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