'Indocumentados’: America’s undocumented migrants

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The US is home to around seven million undocumented migrants from central and south America. Many have been in the US for years, providing a vital workforce for many sectors of the US economy. But they have no health cover, or workplace benefits and many live under the constant threat of deportation back home. As Americans prepare for another presidential race where immigration is likely to figure high again on the agenda, Mike Lanchin travels to the state of Maryland, to hear about the lives of some of its large undocumented Latino population. He speaks to Maria who gets up at 5am for work, but has no holiday or sick pay. He meets Delmi, who has been using false papers to get work, and Toño who came to the US as an unaccompanied minor but now has a temporary work permit.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. Here in the US the
0:08.0	government estimates that there are some 11 million undocumented migrants
0:12.2	people living here illegally without permission.
0:15.8	It's reckoned that some 7 million of them are from Latin America.
0:20.2	Many of them have lived here for decades.
0:22.4	Others are still arriving across the southern border with Mexico.
0:26.0	A lot of people says the system is broken.
0:28.5	I have a sense that the system is working pretty much the way it's supposed to work. The economy of this nation
0:35.3	needs the workers. But without legal status, how do people get by, working, getting
0:41.9	health care, sending their kids to school.
0:45.0	When I get sick or my eldest son get sick, we use homemade remedies.
0:51.0	We only go to hospital and pay when it's really something serious.
0:57.0	With our son starting a school, we'll have to give an address.
1:01.0	And so if the authorities want to find us, they'll know exactly where we live.
1:07.0	I'm Mike Lanchin and I've been given unique access to a small group of people from El Salvador who are now
1:15.0	living without papers here in the state of Maryland, just a short distance from
1:19.3	the US capital. I'll be asking them what it's like living on the edge of society and what will
1:25.1	happen if some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the US presidential campaign
1:29.6	becomes a reality. It will be like going backwards, but living in the shadows.
1:36.0	The reality is that we just want to improve our lives here.
1:40.0	This is undocumented,
1:42.0	America's undocumented migrants.
	...

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