Let me clear up what may be some misconceptions about my position.
I was born in Houston in 1959, moved to El Paso in the first grade and lived there until the seventh grade. I spoke practically fluent spanish and most of my teachers and half of my friends and neighbors were mexican americans.
I moved to South Carolina in the middle of the seventh grade and then to Connecticut in my junior year of high school.
Eight months later I moved back to El Paso where I finished high school and then attended the University of Texas at El Paso, or Harvard on the Border as we called it.
The campus of UTEP sits right on the Rio Grande river which most of the time is nothing more than a dry riverbed some 40 to 50 feet wide with a small shallow stream of water running down the center, it is easy to cross.
I think it was called Harvard on the Border because of the contrast between the big new university full of privileged students sitting on a rise overlooking the cardboard shacks that lined the mexican side of the Rio Grande. I'm not exagerating there either, they were literally built from scraps scavanged from construction site dumps on the american side.
Scrap lumber, rusted re-enforcing wire grid used in concrete pours and cardboard boxes carefully broken down and laid flat piled high on the back of old pickup trucks crossing daily back into mexico where they no doubt sold it to people to patch their houses with.
Not all of Juarez was like that but the poorer sections along the river were. Squatters mostly, guys that moved up from the interior of mexico to work in the big american city, crossing each morning, holding there shoes and socks in hand when they ran across the river then dodging cars on the freeway and the Border Patrol that always seemed to turn around to give chase too late to catch anything. Everyday, cross to work, every evening, cross back to sleep in the hut. Day after day then once in a while, maybe every other month they would take the bus back to the interior to be with their family. Hell who couldn't feel for these guys living like that and hardly ever without smile on their face. Great people.
The last job I had in El Paso before moving back here to South Carolina after dropping out of school was in a cabinet shop and I was one of the only two gringos, of twelve guys only three of us were legal residents and only four of us spoke english. I was trained by a guy named Rudolpho who was from some dirt road village deep in mexico, he spoke no english.
I loved working with those guys and learned a lot from them, and I developed an appreciation for all the relative wealth and opportunity my family had provided for me from watching them, the way they valued the simplest things in life, never wasting anything, always checking the trash cans at work to see what the crazy gringos had thrown away....
How many people do you know that will reuse the same paper bag to carry their lunch in every day until it finally wears out?
Often I'd skip eating lunch to save cash for weed or guitar strings and never would they let me go hungry someone would always pull an extra burrito out of their pail or sack. Have you ever eaten bulls balls and stewed tomatoes?
At night, sitting in my yard I'd look down into the valley and you could clearly see where the river was because on the american side it was lined with all types of electric lights, street lights, houses with porch lights on, cars running up and down I-10 and then there was a definite dividing line in the hue of the light where it all went dim and yellow. It was the kerosene and candle light that was on the mexican side of the river where the cardboard shacks were. And you knew they were there sleeping in the heat, or the cold (the temperature can really drop in the desert sometimes you can get a fifty degree swing from day to night.
I spent countless days with friends blazing down dirt roads all over Mexico, New Mexico and Texas, there really was no border out there. In all my years I was only stopped once! One time out of literally hundreds of trips across the border into mexico and back I was way the hell out there around 2:00 in the morning, red eyed and half drunk and all the guy did was peek into the car with a flashlight, asked our citizenship and said go ahead!
We had big keg parties and bonfires at Border Marker Number One where you could piss in three states and two countries just by pissing while you walked around the big cement marker. If you go there you'll find a certain telephone pole standing near by, beside the train track, you'll know it's the right one when you see the stubs of the other poles that were once standing there. Each one shot so full of holes at the chest high mark that they eventually fell down and were subsequently replaced. when I was there last there were 3 stubs and one pole standing that wasn't going to last long.
I loved the desert and El Paso and all the mexican influence and Freds sandwiches with Dos Equis in Juarez where the cops didn't carry guns and a five dollar bill would get you out of almost any kind of trouble. I never really thought much about it at all back then because all I wanted to do was have fun.
Now I have children and I know their future is my responsibility and when I talk to my old friends back on the border I'm not encouraged. There is no reminiscing about the good old days where the border was our playground and the literal border was some unimportant footnote in a geography book I never read. Now it's a defining line. It's ground zero.
Now I'm told that my friends don't go out to a lot of those places in the desert anymore because it's too dangerous. The Border Patrol is being shot at with automatic weapons by the drug smugglers or the mexican army when they try to stop trucks full of drugs from crossing. Soldiers....smugglers....there is really no difference anymore down there.
I think at last count they've found over 100 bodies of young girls, supposedly murdered prostitutes buried along the border by the new breed. As well as numerous bodies of those that might be law enforcement or informants and of course the bodies that result from one cartel bumping heads with a rival cartel.
The crime rate within the border area is up relative to the interior parts of Texas, the burden on the schools and healthcare facilities and all forms of welfare type programs are over run with the influx of illegals. the rate at which they are coming in is increasing and the mexican american activists are chanting that same old \"Viva La Raza\" line that I heard so long ago. That pro mexican race chant that I so naively thought was just harmless pride. Now I'm listening and now I'm paying attention. Now when I read stories like
this one I actually get it.
Now I'm concerned instead of stoned and stupid.
It's not the mexicans I dislike. I still love them best of all and welcome everyone who made it here. I wouldn't dream of sending one of them back unless he's a felon. but enough is enough!
I want the damn door shut and proper entrance procedures followed.
I want a controlled influx of immigrants.
I want my buddy from England who has been trying for over 7 years to get a green card to get one. He already owns a house here but he's not allowed to live in it for more than a visit!
He's a talented musician who can easily support himself with his performance as well as being a vintage instrument guru who can fix anything that that uses electricity to make music, for which he can earn a prime dollar for that skill as well. But he can't work here because it's illegal.
He has to leave every six months and stay in england for about that long before he can return. He's been trying to move here legally and he's pissed off that taliban get to go to Yale and mexicans not only walk in freely but they are handed benefits if they don't find work. He asked me why we let the criminals come in and get special treatment but he can't even stay in his own house here. I don't have a good answer for him.
I want the congress to quit pandering to their special interests, industry, latino voting blocks and misguided politically correct bedwetters and either shut the hell up about the border or actually do what the hell we pay them for! Uphold the law for a change. I want america to return to being a place where the people who live here are proud to be american instead of being consumed with getting their pound of flesh from the carcass of what used to be a great place.
Hell yes I want to protect my way of life, the way of life I was lucky enough to be born into. The way of life that draws so many people from all places that we take in more legal immigrants than all the rest of the world combined!!! Check that again. We take in, in legal immigration,
more immigrants than all the other countries in the world
combined!!
And then we get bum rushed by another 10 or 20 million illegals on top of that?!?!!
Hell yes I'm concerned. Hell yes it's a big deal.
Many Texas communities, such as San Antonio and El Paso, focus on their Mexican heritage. Fredricksburg, New Braunfels and other communites emphasise their German background. 
at Minutemen there, sneaks back.