It’s a real fine piece of writing done by Colleen Kenney of the Lincoln Journal Star, talking to migrant workers on the day the President passes through town.
“One man said he’d ask the president to adopt him. That made the other men laugh,” writes Kenney, reporting from a day-labor site.
“I definitely would benefit (from Bush’s immigration proposal),” says a grocery worker from El Salvador who hasn’t seen her five children in five years. “I would appreciate that opportunity. It’s a good objective — so all people without papers can get jobs.”
About eight blocks north on 24th Street is the NPDodge office where Jose Correa sells homes.
Jose, 46, came to the United States in 1977 unable to speak English. He loaded coffee from railroad cars at the Beechnut plant downtown, making $2.65 an hour. Then he got a job making $3 an hour at a south Omaha meatpacking plant, rising to superintendent. He taught himself English by reading free newspapers at the plant.
In 1986, he said, everything changed economically for him and other Hispanics when President Reagan signed an immigration reform law that made immigrants like him legal.
After that, instead of buying land in Mexico as he’d planned, he bought a house in south Omaha for $12,000. He asked his agent a lot of questions. He didn’t know of any bilingual real estate agents, so he decided to study it.
It paid off. He doesn’t want to reveal how much money he makes.
“He makes a lot!” fellow agent Estela Torres shouted from her desk.
Nice work.
Texas Civil Rights Review 
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