Hammer Mill Days

No, man - that's just not acceptable. We have a budget, remember? A very tight budget. We just can't afford something that ostentatious. Perhaps a step or two down from that, like ... like maybe a pole barn. Or a shed. Oh, hi. Yeah, you've caught us in the midst of the sort of dilemma all bands face at some point in their careers - finding another place to live because the squat-house you've been occupying for twenty years has been taken over by ne'er-do-wells. Don't you just HATE when that happens? It's kind of what we went through back in the late nineties, when we were evicted from our beloved lean-to in Sri Lanka. Oh, the memories. Sad was the day when that thing collapsed. (As a famous cartoonist once put it, it leaned fro. Or perhaps closer to the mark, it leaned-too much.) So, once again, we are in search of lodgings. Our upstairs neighbors are simply insufferable. And honestly - we're not super picky people. We didn't get our hair in knot...

Not so very long ago - within the span of many Americans' lifetimes - crossing the southern border wasn't that big of a deal. People from Mexico and points south would make their way into the U.S. for seasonal work mostly, do the jobs Americans tend not to want to do, then make their way back. Most of them wouldn't stay very long because they had families back in Mexico, so they might travel back and forth as their work allowed, bringing their meager earnings back with them. There was an explicit guest worker program during World War II, but otherwise it was kind of an informal, administrative matter for many years. Gradually, though, immigration across the southern border became more heavily policed. The option to harass migrant workers and other visitors was always available to law enforcement, but in more recent decades it became a matter of policy. As PBS journalist John Carlos Frey details in his new book, Blood and Sand , the crackdown really began in earnest during...