Example PowerPoint This PowerPoint was created for the Great Depression. Use this format for your Visual Constitution.

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success." - John Steinbeck, “The Grapes Of Wrath” ch.25.

"We was starved out and we live on perhaps. We could maybe find a little work if we could afford to roll.” – Dust Bowl refugee

"And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed." -John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath,” ch.19.

There were 8.7 million illegal immigrants in the US in million, or 44 percent were Mexican.

"There is great concern in the agricultural industries that once a Mexican immigrant is legalized, he or she will stop working on the farms." - Jose Peterria, immigration lawyer

“Immigrant workers are a big part of the workforce in jobs people take for granted, but don't really see. They clean the linen from hotels and restaurants patronized by millions, pick fruit for the tables of almost every family, load cargo on and off ships plying the globe, and make a million necessary articles of daily life. They do this work in conditions determined more by their class than by their location.” –David Bacon, photographer

“The clampdown on the border has unintentionally (but expectedly) spurred the growth of a migration black market, as migrants increasingly have come to rely on professional smugglers to find their way past border guards. The result? Too many migrants die trying to cross into the United States, too many hardworking immigrants who do make it here are subject to exploitation, and too many decent employers in the United States are undercut by unscrupulous competitors who exploit unauthorized immigrants.” - National Immigration Forum, “Mexico-US Immigration: A shared responsibility”

“Most of the deaths are caused by heat in the desert in the summer, drowning in the All American canal and hypothermia in the mountains. Even in the summer months it gets very cold in the canyons. When you cross the border in the Campo area you are almost up to the 2,000 foot level already. Many large groups of migrants have been found (14, 15, 16) caught in the snow and rain up to the 4,000 foot level, Mount Laguna. They get lost. Or they get abandoned by the coyotes, the smugglers. I just heard recently that during the summer a lot of them died from snake bites and other kinds of infections from animal bites.” -Roberto Martinez, human rights activist

“All the deaths on the border aren’t going to discourage them. I know. I have asked them…I ask them ‘Where did you come from?’ They say ‘From Mexicali’. I say, ‘What happened?’ They say, ‘We are being sent back by the U.S. authorities’. I said, ‘Well, are you aware that crossing the desert is dangerous?’ And they had little boys as young as ten years old. They were all men but also little boys. They said, ‘We know, but there is nothing at home. There is no work. We have to feed our families’. Even the prospect of dying in the desert is not going to deter them.” - Roberto Martinez

“Border Patrol shot four migrants here in San Ysidro, killing three of them. Supposedly for threatening to throw rocks. They didn’t throw any rocks, but they shot and killed them anyway. Many of the shootings that we see here over the years the migrants were running back to Mexico and were shot in the back.” - Roberto Martinez

An average of 370 people a year die along the U.S. / Mexico border. In the last seven years close to 2,000 have died.

"How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him-- he has known a fear beyond every other." John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19