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Gordon Hanson Quoted in The Fresno Bee

Illegal immigrants flock to Valley despite risks

11/14/2010
Chris Collins, The Fresno Bee

Nine-year-old Yrene returned from school one day to her rural home in central Mexico to learn that her father had died of a heart attack.

As a legal U.S. resident, the family's only breadwinner had split his time between Mexico and the United States, working in the fields to keep his wife and nine children from drowning in poverty. But now he was gone.

Yrene's mother, who did not have a permit to work in the United States, was desperate to provide for her family, so she took a risk. She drove to the border and told U.S. customs agents that she and her children were tourists. They got in.

Two decades later, Yrene is a single mother with three girls, ages 6 to 12. She's spent the last nine years sorting and labeling peaches, plums and apricots at a Tulare County packinghouse, working her way up to supervisor.

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Gordon Hanson is the director of the Center on Pacific Economies and is a professor of economics at UC San Diego, where he holds faculty positions in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics.  He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a senior research fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development.

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