That was six years ago, and Ana has yet to return to Mexico. Now 35, she has outearned most illegal immigrants by climbing the ranks of America’s service economy: from laundry folder to maid to boss of a fleet of illegal cleaning ladies. Last year Ana made $50,000. But her success has come at a price. To her children, Ana is little more than the gifts she sends home: the latest videogame, the piles of clothing and the wired cash that has turned her relatives into the royal–and resented–family of an impoverished neighborhood.
Ana usually has little interest in politics, but this week she will pay close attention. Mexican President Vicente Fox will be in Washington meeting with George W. Bush, and the top item on the agenda is immi-gration. For several months the United States and Mexico have been working on what could become the most sweeping reform to U.S. immigration policy in two decades, a plan that could legalize several million undocumented workers. Negotiating the details–particularly which immigrants would qualify–could take another year. But if the specter of a Republican president welcoming immigrants during an economic downturn is surprising, consider that in many ways such a law would simply formalize what already exists in the United States: a growing embrace of immigrants, legal and illegal.
The new attitude is partly political: Latinos will soon surpass blacks as America’s largest minority, and Bush has been under enormous pressure from U.S. Latino groups to issue a broad amnesty. But it also symbolizes a recognition that the U.S. economy has been built, in part, on the labor of foreigners who arrived without visas. The changes are everywhere. Illegals can get driver’s licenses in a small but growing number of states. In Texas, they qualify for in-state tuition at state universities. Mexican officials recently persuaded some U.S. credit unions to allow undocumented aliens to open bank accounts, which will enable their families back home to withdraw money with ATM cards and avoid costly wire fees. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has spoken of the importance of immigrant labor. Even the usually protectionist AFL-CIO trade-union confederation favors an amnesty.
And all the armed agents along the border with Mexico? They capture and return thousands of illegal entrants every day. But the story is very different for the estimated 275,000 people who make it into the interior illegally each year. Of the estimated 6 million to 8.5 million people living illegally in the United States last year, only 46,750 were deported. Precisely because the border has become more difficult to cross, illegals are staying longer than ever. And they are sending home record amounts of cash: a projected $9.3 billion this year, more than Mexico’s tourism industry is expected to generate.
The scope of any new U.S. immigration policy will be fought out in Congress over the next year. At a minimum, it is likely to create an extensive guest-worker program, which would provide temporary visas to Mexicans. Democrats and some moderate Republicans want a broader legalization that would be a first step to U.S. citizenship for all undocumented migrants who can prove they arrived in the United States before a yet-to-be-decided date. Illegals, who have little protection from swindling landlords and abusive employers and are largely stuck at the bottom rung of the U.S. economy, are thrilled with the idea, but it has sparked vitrolic reaction among conservative Republicans. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas said recently that any amnesty would occur over his “cold, dead political body.” Moreover, President Bush has to consider the threat that a plan to legalize undocumented workers could create a flood of migrants drawn by success stories like Ana’s.
Like most people who sneak into the United States, Ana was following a family trail. Relatives who had arrived illegally a few years before took her into their apartment in New York. From there, the trail quickly led Ana to a job-placement service in New York that charges $100 to find immigrants work, usually in less than a day. Stacked on the desks are thousands of index cards, each bearing the name of a restaurant or factory. On a recent morning there were 13 men waiting, most of them from Ana’s home state of Puebla, the source of most of New York’s Mexican population. Not one had papers, and not one was afraid to admit it. “If a restaurant required papers, nobody would work there,” says the woman in charge. “Whoever heard of an American dishwasher?”
Ana found a job in Manhattan, folding and delivering clothes for a laundry 12 hours a day, six days a week, for $200, paid every Wednesday in cash. It was eight times what she’d earned in a factory back home. New York proved hospitable. For the first several months a Dominican working in a bakery slipped her a free breakfast every morning. The subway system made it easy to get to work. In some Latino neighborhoods, storefront signs even advertised english spoken here, as if it were a rarity.
While many undocumented immigrants cling to that world, Ana cultivated American friends. One day on a delivery she met Christina, a young teacher who exemplified New York’s liberal values and became her entree to bigger money. Christina, who had studied Spanish on an exchange program during college, offered Ana a job cleaning her studio apartment, introduced her to friends who also needed maids and even took her home to meet her family in the suburbs. “She had nothing,” says Christina, who felt inspired by Ana. “I wanted her to see everything I had and to know that she is entitled to it too.”
Soon Ana had enough clients lined up to be able to quit the laundry business. She recruited more by ringing buzzers of apartments she remembered from her delivery rounds as needing cleaning. “No more work in laundry,” she would say in halting English. “I need work.” Christina opened a bank account that Ana could use and found her more customers–as well as jobs baby-sitting and working at her friends’ cocktail parties. “We taught her how to go around with trays serving hors d’oeuvres and champagne,” Christina recalls. “Suddenly she was making more money than me.”
It was enough money to allow her to move out of her relatives’ house and into a studio apartment. Her building, which resembles a youth hostel, is a virtual hotel for undocumented workers from around the globe who don’t have the credit history, identification or references to sign rental agreements. For a while Ana hired two women to cook tortillas and sell them to her neighbors at lunch. That business put $60 a day in her pocket, but she shut it down after the building manager, whose family also cooked for the tenants, threatened to evict her. She was already breaking the building code by crowding her apartment: she and five roommates split the $150-a-week rent and slept in a three-level bunk bed, one couple on top, another on the bottom, Ana in the middle with her new boyfriend, Julio, who worked in a bar nearby and often helped her clean.
Longing for her children all the while, Ana dreamed about ways of becoming legal. In late 1996 Christina proposed marrying Julio to get him his green card (which would make him a permanent U.S. resident). The plan was eventually to divorce, allowing Julio to marry Ana so she could get her papers and bring her kids from Mexico. Christina wore gray and Julio an oversize suit. Ana went along as the witness. The judge seemed skeptical, but the deal was sealed with a ring engraved with the date, a peck on the lips and a night out dancing. But the plan quickly unraveled. Soon after the wedding Julio traveled to Mexico, and one of Ana’s cousins spotted him hand in hand with another woman in downtown Puebla. She was his wife. Furthermore, Julio and Christina failed their first interview with immigration officials, and Christina decided to divorce to avoid being charged with a crime.
Ana quickly moved on to a new boyfriend, Luis, who turned out to be another bad idea. He too was married, with a family in Mexico. And one day he beat Ana so badly she was forced to escape to the roof and climb into a neighbor’s apartment. The ambulance company still sends her collection notices for the $500 bill for the trip to the hospital. She worries more about the debt collector than she does about the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
I met Ana a few years ago while living in New York and decided she could teach me Spanish. Several nights a week I would call her apartment for instructions on where to show up the next morning. We would talk and clean for a few hours before I had to go to my real job. But I also turned out to be of great use to Ana: as a deliveryman. The first time I arrived at Ana’s house in Puebla, her daughter, Angel, was standing next to a trash pile wearing a fluorescent green miniskirt. The house, a sprawling two-story structure under construction, stood out like a monument against the backdrop of stray dogs and cinderblock shacks with curtains hanging in the doorways. Ana’s son, Misa, was inside playing with a toy car on the shiny dining-room table. Filled with plush sofas, stereos and televisions, the house was being built on the tens of thousands of dollars Ana and her siblings had wired to their mother, Rosa. (Four of Rosa’s eight children are now in the United States, all illegally.) The suitcase I carried for Ana was full of gifts: sweaters, a clock, a telephone, a “Sesame Street” doll. Later I delivered an Apple computer.
In many Mexican barrios, the difference between poor and comfortable is a relative in the United States, a division that has bred deep resentment. The six-house compound where Ana’s family lives is no exception. Her home is the only one with a telephone, and her family charges the neighbors a peso (about 10 cents) to make a local call. Misa, now 7, plays videogames several hours a day; his grandmother won’t allow poorer children inside for fear that they would steal toys and food. “I don’t have friends,” 13-year-old Angel says. “I have money. So people just want to be friends for convenience, to borrow money.” A neighbor said she was once close to Ana’s mother but that the friendship ended the moment the house started rising from the rubble. “She thinks she is better than the rest of us because of her home,” says the neighbor, a 52-year-old widow who lives in a crumbling two-room house with four adult children. “But we’ve seen how her children have left.”
Togetherness has long been a part of Mexican culture, but it is slowly eroding as another value takes hold: materialism. Ana hasn’t seen her son since he was a baby. Her daughter made the trip across the border–with false papers–to New York with a family friend in late 1996. But amid Ana’s men troubles, Angel became rebellious, and after a few months she flew home courtesy of the Mexican consulate. The way Ana sees it, she can either be with her children or take care of them. “If I want to continue giving them a better life, I can’t be in Mexico,” she says. “I would not be able to pay the bills. I have to be here.”
Angel says she understands her mother’s decision: “She wants to give us what we want–a better life, enough food… PlayStation 2.” But her grandmother sometimes wonders whether the family is paying too high a price for its prosperity. “It was better before,” Rosa says. “Although we were poor, we were content. Now we have everything, thanks to them”– her children in the United States–“but they are not here.”
It is generally assumed that most undocumented Mexicans would stay in their own country if there was more opportunity there. But that’s questionable. Though not many illegals build lives as profitable as Ana’s, many do find the United States much more hospitable than they had imagined. Ana, for one, has been sucked into the culture of consumerism. A better life to her is a stereo and a North Face jacket. The solitary pair of shoes she had when she arrived has multiplied to 60. The shelves of her apartment are filled with videos, including almost anything starring Julia Roberts. Her new tastes–perhaps as much as the fact that her return would mean cutting off her family’s main source of income–keeps her in the United States. “Our families in Mexico don’t give us the freedom we have here. We don’t know what to do with it,” Ana says. “Mexico is a strange country to me now. I am part of here.”
When did she change? Perhaps it was the moment she bought a cell phone. Maybe when she started ordering $3.50 cappuccinos and, in an act that would be inconceivable back home, started drinking them while walking down the street. Or perhaps it was in 1998, three months after Luis got her pregnant, when she showed up at Christina’s house in tears and decided to have an abortion: “I am Catholic. I was afraid.”
Today Ana holds the keys to 70 Manhattan apartments. Her business cards have gotten around the city, bringing in so much work that she has had to give some clients to her sister. Ana rarely cleans anymore. Instead, she sends other Mexican illegals, most of them recently arrived, on jobs and pays them each $200 a week. “They can’t communicate at all with the clients,” says Ana, who is just starting to string phrases into sentences in her new language. To avoid these language problems, she recently bought a fax machine so her customers can send her instructions and maps. Ana’s share of the cleaning business often tops more than $1,000 a week–more at Passover, with spring cleaning for Jewish customers, and at Christmas, when New Yorkers dole out holiday bonuses to the service people in their lives. “New York is my gold mine,” says Ana.
She remains in the same apartment, which is slightly less cramped now, with three tenants, including her new boyfriend, Manuel, also without papers. The two met at a folk-dancing class he was teaching in Harlem. But she hasn’t given up her quest for a green card. The latest attempt looked promising at first–a man she cleans for agreed to marry her for $6,000–but now the prospective groom is getting nervous. And Ana is thinking the money might better be spent on renting a place of her own, especially since she and Manuel are expecting a baby in February. She is receiving free prenatal care compliments of a federal welfare program she recently enrolled in. “All the people take advantage of the United States,” she says. “So why not me?”
On a recent afternoon Ana and I sit and talk on a bench in Central Park as police and in-line skaters pass by. A family pulls up on scooters, a golden retriever panting behind, and joins us on the bench. Ana’s cell phone rings. Her daughter, Angel, is on the line. “Why aren’t you in school?” Ana asks. “I got home late yesterday.” An aunt had taken her to Acapulco for the weekend. The conversation lasts a few more minutes.
She is happy to chat with her daughter, but this day she is awaiting a more urgent call. Her cousin left Puebla for the border a few day ago, and Ana is expecting a call from the smuggler, instructing her to send a $1,600 money order to Phoenix, Arizona. (Migrants no longer have to pay in advance. They are held in safe houses on the U.S. side of the border until a relative pays the bill.) Ana has agreed to put up the money, as her sister did for her. But it is the week after 14 migrants died crossing the Arizona desert, so Ana is worried about her cousin.
The call finally comes, Ana sends the money and a week later the cousin arrives on a plane from Los Angeles. He is not planning to stay long.
