Editorial: The human side of ‘illegals’

Tuesday, May 2, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

Sixty miles or so southwest of Nogales, Mexico, in the tiny town of Altar, hundreds of men and women every day wait for their chance to move north across the Arizona border. They've endured it all - hunger, thirst, exhaustion - in traveling sometimes hundreds and even thousands of miles to reach this town, known as a staging area for the final push toward their goal. That goal is a new life in the United States, where decent jobs pay several dollars an hour instead of the two or three dollars a day they've been getting for their hard labors.

We know this because Las Vegas Sun reporter Timothy Pratt traveled there for a report that appeared Sunday. He wrote of women traveling with their children. He wrote of a woman who had been turned back five times by the U.S. Border Patrol, but was determined to keep trying. He wrote of groups of 15, sharing two gallons of water among them. He wrote of a teenage boy vomiting from dehydration.

He wrote of expenses the desperate people encounter once reaching outposts such as Altar - $3 for a flophouse room, a $3 toll to cross a private road, $1,000 for a "coyote" to guide them the rest of the way. And he wrote of the Minutemen, American volunteers who intimidate the surviving would-be undocumented immigrants as they finally haul themselves over the border.

We believe it is important, during the current border debate, to keep in mind just who these "illegal aliens" are. They are desperate people looking for a better life, just like the forefathers of all Americans.