On the Backs Of the Poor

摘要

Shielded by bulletproof glass, the crowded scheck-cashing outlet on Anaheim Street in Wilmington, a Hispanic neighborhood in southern Los Angeles, functions as lifeline and financial center for the thousands of illegal immigrants who visit it. Open seven days a week, it caters to the unbanked-people who are too poor, or too illegal, to have a bank account. It offers them "free money orders," welfare-benefit pickups, prepaid phone cards and the real clincher: money transfers to relatives overseas. They pay hefty fees-almost a day's wages in some cases-for a transaction that costs $3 to $6 to process. A few blocks away a young woman named Teresa stands in her tiny, dirt-packed front yard and passes judgment on the store's fees: "Way too much," she says in Spanish, as some of her seven children scamper barefoot among strewn toys and a battered van propped up on jacks. Teresa, who doesn't want her last name used, is poor and illegal, having slipped into Arizona from Mexico a year ago.