Norma Cortez is fifty nine years old, she harvests lettuce heads in the fields of Yum, Arizona. Tough job little pay, but that's not the worst part. The worst part is the commute. The commute takes around seven hours. Most of the time is spent waiting to get across the border. “The life of a farm worker is hard enough,” Norma says, “but the waiting time to get to work is worse.”
Rush hour for the wait is at 4:30 a.m., eight to ten thousand people are sometimes waiting in line to get across the border to go work. You can just imagine what the scene must be like. People who step out of line lose there spot and will not get it back. There are no bathrooms available so before entering the long wait people urinate at the entrance of the tunnel. The whole area has a terrible stench of urine.
Because there are so many people waiting to get across eagerly, people are jam packed in line. A worker named Monica, 29, said she is often fondled in the crush of people. “The lines are so packed it’s hard to see who’s doing the touching to be able to do anything about it,” she says. “Sometimes we don’t even want to come to work because we know it’s going to happen. But we don’t have a choice.”
The question is this activity of all these people wanting to come work good or bad? I think its alright I guess because California's Imperial Valley and Yuma, Arizona have the highest unemployment rates in the nation (23-27%). United States citizens don't like to take the minimum wage harvest jobs. Therefore I think if they aren't going to do it might as well let the people who are willing to do it.
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