Learning the reality from the game

Yesterday, I helped a group of students from Minnesota play the immigration simulation game. Each was given a role: Mexican family, farm owner, landowner, storeowner, factory employer, coyote, bus driver, border patrol, etc. Mexican families had to start from the Mexican countryside (which was the parking lot), move to the border city (which was the lounge), and finally migrate to the US (which was the kitchen). Other players had their own roles; for example, farm owner in Mexican countryside checked whether families worked hard enough and paid them accordingly. I was a timekeeper in the border city, telling people to buy food and pay the rent as every month, which was actually seven minutes, passed.


What interested me was that it was much more realistic than I had expected.


Mexican families in the countryside had to pick beans in the scorching sun for months to earn money just to pay off their debts and interests.
Mexican families in the border city barely made enough money to send some to families left in Mexico and to save some to pay coyotes for migrating to the US.
Some people had to cheat or steal others’ money just to make livings.
People had absolutely no power to resist even though landowners or storeowners priced unreasonably or discriminatorily.
People could not trust anyone except their own family members.
Though they had enough money to pay coyotes for themselves, most people rather chose to stay at the border city longer to wait for their other family members to come and join.
Though they end up working in the US, people had to live in fear of border patrols every day.
Coyotes did not earn that much money, which actually surprised me.


Of course, it was just a game played for about an hour. Still, it reflected the reality: it is not easy and desirable at all for people to migrate, especially without documents, to the US. Especially because I was in the border city, I could see people having difficulties even before they cross the border – they had to pay bus drivers to come to the border city, ask for factory owner’s mercy to get jobs, or deal with how to buy food, pay the rent, and send money back to family members in the countryside at the same time.