When I made plans to stay in Brownsville, I wanted to do a day trip over to Matamoros, in Mexico. But all the travel websites said “don’t go there”, and even the State Department has warnings that it ain’t safe for gringos.
But when I asked about it at the border control station, they told me it was safe for tourists as long as you don’t go wandering around by yourself. So I went to the local tourism visitors center and got the contact info for a company that does day-tours into Matamoros, and signed up. I ended up spending the day in Mexico with two tourists from Minneapolis and our tour guide David (who has dual American/Mexican citizenship). Had a great time, did not get kidnapped or robbed, and saw the world from a different perspective. (There were a lot of VERY heavily-armed Mexican Marines patrolling the streets, although photographing them is not a good idea so I didn’t try. The Border Agents on the US side also don’t like to be photo’d.)
Some interesting things our tour guide related about the immigration issue (he has family on both sides of the border). Nearly all of the people who try to cross the border illegally, he told us, are Central or South Americans who have traveled up through Mexico. They each pay the equivalent of several thousand US dollars, most of which goes to the Mexican cartels, for whom human smuggling is a side job to drug smuggling. Mexican citizens, by contrast, can obtain a simple tourist visa for just a tiny fraction of that and enter the US unhindered. Nearly all of the undocumented Mexicans in the US, therefore, are people who have overstayed their tourist visa. (The exceptions to this are those who have already tried it and got caught and deported—once a Mexican citizen is deported they cannot get another tourist visa, and so if they want to go back to the US again they have to cross the border some other way.)
The vast majority of Mexicans who enter the US do not want to stay here permanently—they simply want to work here for a year or two and then go back to Mexico (a year’s wages in the US is a shitload of money in Mexico, where even the elite auto workers in the Matamoros maquiladora factories are paid only a dollar an hour—most workers in Mexico get paid about half of that). So by working in the US for a couple years (even at sub-minimum wages), people can save enough to go back to Mexico and live comfortably for many years, and that is their real intention. From the Mexican point of view, what the US really needs in order to solve much of the problem is a “work visa” that allows people from Mexico to enter the US and work legally for a set period, and then return. Currently there is no such thing (the US has agreements with other countries for this, but not with Mexico).
It was an interesting point of view, since in the entire US debate over “The Wall” and “illegals oh noez!!” we virtually never hear the Mexican side of the story. The Mexicans also, btw, blame “El Norte” for the entire immense problem of criminal cartels and the accompanying violence and corruption, since virtually all of the cartel’s money comes from the United States, paid for by people who smoke pot and do coke.
(Now, here’s hoping that this idiotic shutdown ends soon so I can go visit the Mexican War battlefield parks.)
Some photos from a day in Mexico.
For those who don’t know, I live in a campervan and travel around the country posting photo diaries of places I visit. :)