Yes, it is a real problem here Scott. Not so much here where I am but down closer to the border. I see some of them sometimes but they are usually headed north towards you guys.

I grew up on a farm during the time of the Bracerro program. This was a legitimate foreign worker program, not like what the senate wants to do today. My father used the Bracerro program when I was about seven. These men were amazing. They walked in sandles made of old tires and wore heavy sombrerros. These true sombrerros are much heavier and stronger than what you might imagine. The men who worked our fields would actually surround and run down jack rabbits, killing them with blows from the sombrerros. This was their supper for the night.

Every Saturday night my father would take all of them to town so they could buy their comidas (groceries). They bought very little. Most of everything they made they sent home to their families. In a way some of these men became my heroes even though I could speak no Spanish and they could speak no English. The sacrifices they made for their families defined the word macho for me long before it came to have the meaning it does today.

Sadly, those days are long gone and the men and women who illegally cross our borders today are, for the most part, looking for a free ride or smuggling drugs or worse. There are mexican hit men who come across the border, kill and then slip back across unscene. They are almost never caught. Mexican women cross over to bare children in the hospitals and taxpayer expense. They come for the sole purpose of bearing a child that will, by law, be an American. Then they settle in as parents of an American child to collect all the benefits our society so generously intended for our citizens.

Of course not all of the people who cross our borders are like this, but those who are have soured most native born Texans against all of them. America really must close our borders and protect our citizens. The sherriffs I cited in The Border, as a Texas Sheriff Sees  and Border Towns Under Siege were pleading with the federal government to step in. It doesn't seem the senate listened, or cared.