While immigration reform languishes in Washington, Mexicans from around the ranch keep marching on north, illegally, to look for work. The last departures were two of Félix’ three brothers. One forty-year-old brother left eight days ago and already called from Dallas to report that he’s alive, well and working at a construction site. A twenty-three-year-old sibling left yesterday.

I’d thought that stricter border patrolling by the U.S., which made illegal crossings more dangerous, and better job opportunities in Mexico’s growing economy might have dampened the urge for workers to take such a chancy and dangerous route to a better life.

That equation may be true at the macroeconomic level but clearly not among the poorest of the poor in the countryside around us. For these desperate people, too uneducated and unskilled to benefit from Mexico’s improving economy, the only way to survive still is to head north where there is demand for their labor and well paying jobs.

As Félix describes it, the trip north is almost like going on a rough camping trip. Both Félix and his brother had gone to work near Dallas about five years ago, at a construction site building Walmart stores. (Even wonder how Walmart makes its billions of dollars in profits? Squeezing their employees with low wages and marginal or no benefits and using building contractors who hire cheap illegal labor from Mexico may be part of the answer.)

Félix came back after several months. I sense he was homesick. When we hired him five years ago I remember him asking if ours was going to be a permanent gig because otherwise he was ready to go back to Texas. We’re grateful he decided to stay, and probably so is he.

According to Félix, smuggling workers to Texas is still a very lively business. Each town has one or more coyotes or polleros who will take anywhere from four to as many as twenty or thirty workers across the Rio Grande. His brother went up in a small group of four, and had to pay $2,500 dollars to the coyote, plus his bus fare across Mexico up to the border.

“Dollars” is in italics because that is a fortune for people around here who work only occasionally and then in back-breaking agricultural or construction jobs that most often pay as little as $80 a week. When workers start their jobs in the U.S. they gradually pay off their coyote fees. In fact, it was Félix’s former employer, a subcontractor with a construction company, who called him and his brothers three weeks ago and offered them jobs.

Despite the billions spent by the U.S. in personnel and high-tech surveillance gadgetry along the border, crossing the Rio Grande and getting into Texas still sounds almost like a B-grade adventure movie. On the Mexican side, entrepreneurs sell rides to the other side on horses, boats or on homemade contraptions. Unless flooded, the river is a modest stream. Once on land, the coyote takes his clients across open fields, and sometimes private land, to a meeting point along a road where they get picked up by a smuggler and taken to their final destination.

The coyote who took Félix’ older brother is still doing good business though there are reports of heightened security. For example, closed-circuit cameras now are mounted on the windmills used for pumping water that illegal immigrants drink. Despite this and other obstacles, his brother made the trip across the northern third of Mexico and to Dallas in a little more than a week.

Still, it must be a wrenching decision to leave one’s family and children and undertake a trek north whose outcome is anything for certain. It also reflects the continuing desperation of many Mexican workers untouched by the apparent prosperity gushing around them.