wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents after crossing into Arizona from Mexico on May 11. Cardozo and her mom, Cora, are referred to by abbreviated names because they fear punishment for working without authorization. “It wasn’t anything compared to what we suffered in Venezuela,” Cardozo’s mother, Cora, said in Spanish. “I was worried because I’m the only provider in my family, and there isn’t food, and they don’t want to pay me,” she said.Įven so, Cardozo’s work challenges are a small sacrifice to be safe in the United States. Then, she said her job let her go all of a sudden and refused to pay her for her last two months of work - around $6,000. She got COVID several times while testing the large numbers of people, but still she thought it was a good job since she hadn’t yet received her work permit. Sometimes we wouldn’t get through all of them by the end of the day,” she said. “We would see a lot of people doing tests. They paid her per COVID-19 test, and she brought home about $3,000 a month.
That job was overwhelming, she said, but she had studied medicine back home. Later, when a better-paid position came along - testing people for COVID-19 - she accepted. Then a grocery store hired her the job treated her well, but pay was just $9 an hour. I cried,” Cardozo said in Spanish, “I thought many times about reporting him, but I didn’t want to go through that process having arrived so recently.”
As “punishment,” she said her boss asked her to take off her top. During Cardozo’s first week on the job at the Houston restaurant, she arrived late to work. Though it was easy to find work, Cardozo’s entry into the U.S. Her story is one of millions of migrants who have come to the southwest border over the last few years and know that a job and better life awaits them on the other side in the largest economy in the world. She said her family fled their country after a series of politically motivated violent attacks and have asked for asylum and temporary protected status. Wil Cardozo, a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, found a job days after crossing the border and arriving in Houston in early 2021. “Migrants come here because employers in this country want them,” said Dilip Ratha, leading migration expert with the World Bank Group. In its place, the Biden administration is implementing a patchwork of old and new border policies aimed at deterring and managing border crossings while creating limited legal avenues for asylum seekers.īut whatever mitigation measures President Joe Biden introduces, one major factor will continue to drive people to the United States: the strength of the economy. to quickly expel migrants from the country. An increasing number of migrants are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border as the United States ends Title 42, the pandemic-era rule that allowed the U.S.
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