Some Documents Are Much Too Important

Mexican emigrant Dario Ibarra, 74, shows his electoral card before heading to Tijuana, Mexico, on a bus leaving from Huntington Park, Calif., to vote in the Mexican presidential election Sunday July 2, 2006. This is the first time in which Mexicans living abroad are able to vote. Image Credit: AP Photo/Stefano Paltera

Do you ever stop and ask yourself -- just how many people that are immigrants, like Dario Ibarra (photo), have managed to register and receive thair electoral card to vote in Mexico, but will NEVER bother to get proper documentation to reside here in the United States?

If photographers can find people who are hopping busses and planes to get to the border to vote, how come our government officals and the people we are paying to manage immigration into the United States can't find these same "target rich" environments?

Excerpts from AP via Yahoo! News -

Mexican migrants in U.S. head to polls
By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press Writer - 50 minutes ago

TIJUANA, Mexico - Thousands of Mexicans living in the United States traveled by plane, bus and car to Mexican border cities to vote in Sunday's hotly contested presidential election.

The Mexican government set up 86 polling places along the 2,000-mile border, mostly for migrants who missed out on the country's historic absentee ballot campaign.

Across the border from San Diego in Tijuana, a sprawling city of more than 1 million people, out-of-town voters arrived Sunday by bus from Los Angeles and other California cities. Many said they made the trip because they received little information about how to request absentee ballots, lacked the correct voting card, or did not fill out their applications correctly.

Maria Salome Rodriguez, a 38-year-old farm worker, drove eight hours with her husband from Fresno, Calif., and waited for two hours to vote at a polling booth outside Tijuana's airport. She and her husband decided to make the trip to the border after their applications for absentee ballots were rejected because they wrote down the wrong address.
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Lawmakers approved a law last year to allow the estimated 11 million Mexicans living in the United States to vote by mail for the first time. But the effort was thrown together to beat electoral deadlines, and only about 32,632 absentee ballots from 71 countries were mailed to the Federal Electoral Institute.

Of those, 479 did not meet requirements and were rejected, electoral officials said.
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