Patrolling the Border

Mitch, Elizabeth, and Lauren shot two stories down at the border. Check out this one about the towns that are popping up on the Mexico side of the border because of migrants passing through on their way to the U.S.:
http://current.com/items/border-boom-town/76293362

At the end of the day on which we shot this, we stopped at the large Border Patrol office in Nogales, Arizona, and Elizabeth, and Lauren Cerre--the other producer--had already become legendary among Border Patrol officers for their ability to get apprehended illegal migrants to talk with them on camera. This is because, at the beginning of the day, we were informed that the conventional wisdom was that most of these people won't talk... As you see in this piece, we learned various things with the cooperation that that Elizabeth and Lauren were able to elicit, but what struck me was that a lot of what we were seeing was pretty routine. Most of the dozens of apprehended illegal migrants whom we saw had already been in the U.S. They'd gone back to Mexico for the Christmas holidays, and were now trying to cross back to get to their jobs. This was their commute--albeit, dangerous, expensive, and only once a year, but they were commuters. When you read estimates that there are 12 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. and that something over five percent of the U.S. workforce is made of illegal workers, it can seem like just numbers. Obviously, across the political spectrum, from liberal immigration rights backers, to conservative business owners who depend on migrant labor to stay afloat, these numbers are real. But to the rest of you, actually seeing the people who've made a routine of crossing back and forth, suggests that, whether you support a crackdown on illegal immigration, or you don't, what the U.S. is dealing with here seems to be a well-entrenched system.