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On both sides of the border, life is unfair -- but what you make of it is up to you

Ruben Navarrette Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- Beware of those who complain about broken promises. They sometimes get carried away and start to think they're entitled to certain things when no one owes them anything.

Here's how life works. People make half-baked assumptions about how their lives are going to turn out. They convince themselves that a project, venture or decision will pay off. And when things don't work out, and they need someone to blame who can't be found in the mirror, their natural instinct is to claim they're the victim of a raw deal. They'll insist they were lied to, misled or bamboozled. Someone took unfair advantage of them, they'll say.

Maybe they should have known better or been more suspicious. They would have been well served to remember what their mother said about things that sound too good to be true. Instead, they put their trust in this make-believe promise only to be disappointed by a little thing called reality. And when they get slapped in the face, they'll say they were deceived and cheated. It's easier to cast blame than to take responsibility for what went wrong.

It's human nature. And you find it in every country on the planet.

Consider the heart-wrenching tale of 29-year-old Guatemalan immigrant Carlos Joaquin Salinas. It comes to us courtesy of my friend Alfredo Corchado, an expert storyteller who covers Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border region for the Dallas Morning News. Salinas traveled more than a thousand miles, with his 10-year-old son, on a promise from a smuggler that entering the United States would be "like going to Disneyland" and there would be jobs aplenty.

We interrupt this story for an important message: Note that, despite what you hear from racist hard-liners who know nothing about immigrants, the promise was work -- not welfare and free stuff. Don't forget it.

 

According to the article, the agreed-upon transport fee was $6,000 for both father and son, which Salinas cobbled together by selling land and farm animals, borrowing from family and friends, and owing the rest to the kind of people to whom you don't want to owe money. The coyote took them -- via bus -- to Ciudad Juarez on the U.S.-Mexico border, where he pointed north and instructed Salinas and his son to turn themselves into Border Patrol agents and get ready to live the American dream.

Of course, what followed was a nightmare -- detained, housed in a temporary shelter, tossed cold sandwiches like, as Salinas put it, "caged animals" in a zoo as they waited to go before a judge and plead their case for asylum. But such pleas often fall on deaf ears.

Salinas is broke and broken, disillusioned and debt-strapped, defeated and ashamed for buying into the hype of America. He just wants to go home to Guatemala. Hopefully, he'll get his wish -- and be able to take his son with him.

Hundreds of other would-be refugees have not been so lucky. They had their children kidnapped by the Trump administration, which now can't put back together the families it so clumsily shattered.

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