Smuggled by 'Coyotes': An Immigrant's Journey to Arizona

July 29, 2010— -- Juan Garcia talks openly about his illicit, harrowing overnight excursion through the Sonoran desert from Mexico into Arizona.

"I was very, very afraid," said Garcia, in elementary English, of the night he and a dozen others set out, walking single-file through the sand. "I didn't know what was going to happen after I walked five miles from where I was." He was 16 at the time.

Two human smugglers, so-called "coyotes," led the way through the frigid February darkness to the U.S. border, Garcia said. He had paid $500 down and would owe $1,800 more on the other side, if he made it.

"I didn't know if they would hit me or kill me or if I was going to die," he said, "but I didn't have a choice."

Garcia and an estimated one million Mexican migrants who entered the U.S. via the southwest border in 2006, the peak of illegal crossings there, have been at the heart of the immigration debate in Arizona, where a federal judge yesterday blocked parts of the state's new immigration law.

Sixty-two percent of all illegal immigrants in the U.S. are from Mexico, including roughly 460,000 who live in Arizona. But statistics show the human flow from Mexico has slowed significantly in recent years, due to a down economy and stepped up enforcement, officials say.

Immigration opponents say Garcia and other undocumented Mexican migrants are taking American jobs and "draining" the economy by sending wages home to their families instead of spending dollars here.

But Garcia, now 20 and living in Atlanta, said the decision to leave his home in the southwest Mexican state of Oaxaca was a desperate one, following the sudden death of his father in a bicycle accident just three months before.

With limited job opportunities for young teens and scant savings from his father's knife-sharpening business, Garcia said migrating to the U.S. was the best chance to provide for his three siblings.

"I was the one who had to concentrate on feeding them and taking care of them," he said.

Four years later, Garcia says America has transformed his life.

The recent high school graduate who has been living with an adoptive family he met through a concerned public school teacher says his goal in the U.S. is now no longer simply to send money to Mexico -- it's to make the country he's come to love a better place.