Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Alfredo Alvarez’s weathered brown hands clutch a crumpled lottery ticket. The silver is scratched off, the losing numbers taunting him about the dollar he just wasted.

The tattered ticket, much like the dilapidated apartment complex behind him and the day he spent waiting, is just another indicator of his broken dreams.

His wife and three children live in Guatemala, the place he spent $7,000 to leave, hoping to return as soon as he saved enough money.

Five years later, he’s in the same League City apartment shared with Guatemalan friends, hoping to scrape together enough money to climb out of the pit into which he threw himself.

Life is sad and hard without his family, he said in Spanish, but he still clings to a shred of hope that the solutions are just around the corner.

So he waits. One hour. Four hours. Seven hours. However long it takes.

He waits for a truck to turn into the lot, pick him up and carry him away to a job. Any job.

He spends more time at the Lucky Chief Minit Market on FM 518 than he does at his apartment — which could be why he decided to make it a little more like home.

Behind the convenience store where he stations himself every morning, he planted a garden with four rows of pink blooms.

“Because … just because I had to,” he said, trying to explain the tiny garden.

The Wait

The convenience store, nicknamed “La Chicken” by the day laborers who gather there every morning, is the home office of almost 40 workers.

They are among a population of about 11 million in the United States and 1.5 million in Texas, according to the Pew Research Center. Texas ranks second only to California, where the population is estimated at about 2.6 million, according to the Pew Center.

Some arrive before dawn; others stagger to the corner at 10 a.m., hair still tousled from sleep and bodies still aching from the previous day’s work.

It’s cold outside, and they huddle in clusters, sipping 50-cent cups of noodle soup.

Occasionally, they step inside to warm up. They joke with the morning clerk, Nanette Curry, while keeping one eye on the parking lot.

A truck rolls in the lot and they snap to attention. Some approach cautiously, but others, the hungry ones, run full speed toward the truck.

An Issue

Such transactions occur thousands of times a day on street corners and in parking lots across the county. More formal versions occur in restaurant kitchens, on construction sites, in meat packing plants, garment factories, on farms and everywhere else a cheap pair of hands is a marketable commodity.

The issue of undocumented workers was one of the hottest of the 2006 political season. Virtually every candidate for state and federal office campaigned on it. Border state governors called it a crisis. Hispanics protested what they described as the demonization of illegal workers. High school students rallied. The U.S. Congress tried but failed to address the issues. President Bush got crosswise with the right wing of his party for suggesting a guest worker program, and there are plans to build a 700-mile fence between the United States and Mexico.

Through it all, the men at La Chicken sipped noodle soup and waited for the truck.

Six-finger Income

The crowd of brown faces encircles the driver’s window, and he holds up six fingers, indicating he’ll pay $6 an hour.

Then some of the workers walk off, content to wait for a higher payer.

Many of the workers won’t accept less than $8 an hour, but for that price, they’re willing to do almost anything: break apart concrete, remodel homes, dig ditches or paint houses.

But despite their willingness to work, most said that business has slowed since illegal immigration became a hot political issue this year.

The people hiring the workers either ignore the fact that they’re hiring illegally or think they aren’t doing anything wrong.

“I’m just hiring good people for one day of work,” said one man, who refused to give his name. “It’s just one day.”

As Good As It Gets

Most of the workers don’t have papers; some don’t want them. They say they can make more money as laborers than any job they’d be offered as a citizen.

“They look at them and they see darker skin,” Curry said. “They don’t want to pay them. They might give him $4 an hour to wash dishes, but that’s about as good as it gets.”

Curry, who watches the workers every day, understands their plight more than some of them realize.

She’s married to an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

Her husband never sought citizenship, even though he could as the spouse of a citizen.

“Most of them don’t care about (citizenship),” she said. “They just want to work to make money for their families.”

Some of the men who tried to enter the country legally gave up when the desire to make money outweighed any qualms they had with immigrating illegally.

‘It Ain’t Easy’

“It ain’t easy,” Jesus Rodriguez said. “You apply and apply and apply and it never comes. So instead of waiting years, you just come.”

But Rodriguez, a regular presence at the store, found that coming over illegally has its consequences.

The 20-year-old Clear Creek High School graduate came to Texas with his family when he was 13. He speaks fluent English but without a valid Social Security number, he might as well not.

When Rodriguez was fresh out of high school, he took a job delivering and assembling furniture for new schools and businesses.

He traveled all across Texas, but his boss wouldn’t risk taking him farther.

When the company moved on, he had to stay behind.

“Going from to one place to another — that’s what I like,” he said. “Getting to know all different places.”

Instead, he shows up almost every day at the store.

Most weeks, he makes about $300. On busy weeks, he earns $400.

Sometimes, he gets more money because he speaks English, but he’s been ripped off before.

The promise of $10 an hour has turned out to be $30 for the day.

But at the end of the day, some money is better than none.

“They will come in to the store, proud that they have just a little money to spend,” Curry said. “What can I do? Break someone’s spirit and tell them they aren’t getting enough? Or just smile and tell them they did a good job?”

Still, It’s Better

Still, the chances of making money in the United States are better than Mexico, Vicente Amorales said.

Although he only makes about $300 a week, more than half of which goes to feed his family in Mexico, that’s more than he’d make in a month back home.

There, he worked at a fabric factory earning 700 pesos a week, or about $65 for more than 40 hours of labor.

So, usually seven days a week, they come and wait. They’re cautious around strangers, aware that “La Migra” — the Spanish phrase for immigration officials — could take them away.

Immigration officials came to the store once the past year, deporting any of the men with a criminal record.

The rest were allowed to stay, left with the memory of their close call.

“They treated us like animals,” Rodriguez said. “We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

In their eyes, they weren’t. Curry and the storeowner, James Resh, say they’ve never had problems with the workers.

But other residents don’t see it that way. Customers often expect Curry to hate them, she said.

“People will come in here and tell me to get rid of these ‘damn Mexicans,’” she said. “They’re not all just Mexicans, and they’re not damn people. They’re people just trying to make a living.”