Open Borders

Elia Velásquez fled the violence and poverty that plagued her native El Salvador in the 1990s. “I saw how my family was suffering, so I said to myself, ​‘If I leave, I can work and help them,’ ” the 55-year-old hotel worker in Washington, D.C, tells In These Times during a phone interview in Spanish. ​“That would be better for them.” El Salvador was deep into a fratricidal civil war, partially instigated and funded by the United States, that left the country in shambles when it ended in 1992. Velásquez came to the United States and initially worked in a packaging facility in the Washington, D.C., area. There, workers did not even get ​“a glass of water” from the managers, she says.