2 posts tagged “immigration”
Bill Hing is a noted immigration scholar and was part of our successful Crossing East team. Here, I learned of another talent.
I'm trying to figure out the best way for me to remember what I learn from the reading I do. I often only hold on to the larger idea of the book and forget the details that help make the argument. So here it goes online:
The Devil's Highway is a deadly stretch of desert that many migrants take to enter the US. Urrea takes us back in time to remind us that this migration northward started with the Europeans as they settled Mexico. Then he adds:
The Devil's Highway is a deadly stretch of desert that many migrants take to enter the US. Urrea takes us back in time to remind us that this migration northward started with the Europeans as they settled Mexico. Then he adds:
"The first illegal immigrants to be hunted down in Desolation [the horrible desert the book covers] by the earliest form of the Border Patrol were Chinese. In the 1880s, American railroad barons needed cheap skilled labor to help 'tame our continent.' Mexico's Chinese hordes could be hired for cheap, yet they could earn more in the United Statees than in Mexico, even at cut rates. Jobs opened, word went out, the illegals came north." p. 8
