Excerpt from a BBC report on the border

Next door, there were five Latin American men grappling with long ladders. They had come to clear our neighbour's gutters, still clogged with autumn leaves.
They were wearing blue jackets emblazoned with the company logo, The Gutter Gang - and were trying to understand what their employer was saying in broken Spanish.
On the other side of the road, two Mexicans - or were they from Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala or El Salvador, it is hard to tell - were using a machine to blow leaves into a large heap.
Antonio the tree man was due to turn up at our house at ten o'clock, to cut some dead branches. He is from Colombia. His partner Jose comes from Chile. Our plumber Francisco is from Bolivia. His wife Rosa works at a McDonalds in Maryland.
There is a film out this year called A Day Without Mexicans. Based in California, it imagines how the Golden State wakes up one day to find that all of its Mexican migrants have disappeared. There is no one left to flip the burgers, clean the loos, blow the leaves or nanny the children.
For 24 hours, life in California grinds to a halt. Mass hysteria breaks out.

--Matt Frei, BBC Washington correspondent, 12/18/04