Caught Between Two Worlds: Living in Mexico, Studying in the US Lyndsey Layton - The Washington Post
go to original January 6, 2014

A border town in the US is trying stop school children from Mexico using its education system. Every day, hundreds of children cross the border into Arizona. Many were born in the US but their parents now live in Mexico. Al Jazeera's Alan Fisher reports from Douglas, Arizona. (AlJazeeraEnglish)

AT THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER – The mothers, holding the small hands of their children, can go only as far as the glass door, where Mexico ends and the United States begins. They lean down and send off their little ones with a kiss and a silent prayer.

The children file into the U.S. port of entry, chatting in Spanish as they pull U.S. birth certificates covered in protective plastic from Barbie and SpongeBob backpacks. Armed U.S. border officers wave them onto American soil and the yellow buses waiting to take them to school in Luna County, N.M.

This is the daily ritual of the schoolchildren of Palomas, Mexico, a phenomenon that dates back six decades and has helped blur the international border here.

The tide of students washing over the border has drawn muted complaints from some local residents over the cost to U.S. taxpayers. But most accept the arrangement as a simple fact of life on the border, which feels like an artificial divide between communities laced together by bloodlines, marriage and commerce.

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