Guardian of the Green Card

Recently, Mercer's landlord paid for a new roof on the building housing her diner. She fed every member of the crew, except for two who stayed in the trailer. She later learned that they did not have green cards.

"If I'd have seen them, I would have reported them," she said.

Benefits for Both

In a dimly lit alley behind a row of restaurants in Alexandria, workers slipped out of back doors to smoke or haul heavy trash bins to a dumpster. The alley was slick with fetid puddles and dirty with discarded cigarette butts. The only light shone through the bars of an adjacent parking garage.

Nelson Posada emerged from a restaurant door into the alley dragging a garbage can. Originally from Honduras, he crossed the border illegally, traversing the Arizona desert in 1994. He left behind a 6-month-old boy who knows his father only from phone conversations and the money he wires home.

Posada, who works two full-time jobs six days a week, has relatives who talk of following him here. He tells them the border is not what it used to be when he crossed by paying smugglers $2,000.

Now, immigrants face a beefed-up U.S. Border Patrol and private citizens scouring the desert, on the lookout for undocumented foreigners.

"I'd like for the United States to give us papers," he said. "We come to work, and that benefits us both."

Seated at a table in a seafood restaurant just off the alley, Mercer ordered her dinner from a menu that featured on the back the photographs and names of a half-dozen employees with Latino names and their years of service.

It is a rare dinner out for Mercer, who on principle has cut back on patronizing restaurants.

"I stopped, because wherever you go, you constantly find people are working there illegally," she said. "I'm not saying that's the case here. But if 80 percent of the kitchen staff is from another country, you wonder."

'People Keep Crossing'

After a breakfast omelet served yesterday by a waiter from Pakistan, Mercer went sightseeing at the Jefferson Memorial. Near the end of a biographical film on Jefferson, the movie showed the Statue of Liberty and Jefferson's words, "Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?"

Mercer purchased two pamphlets, one on the U.S. Constitution and one on the Founding Fathers, from a Filipina cashier in the gift shop.