this is my first glimpse

into the lives of the (immigrant) sheep herders. you bet your bottom dollar those that yell and scream about OTHER immigrants entering our country are all too happy to have their borregueros here. seems to me something is stinking really badly and it AIN'T the borregueros. at the very least this is an interesting read. at the very most, it's sad and telling about greedy hypocritical OUR SOCIETY

In Loneliness, Immigrants Tend the Flock
By DAN FROSCH
ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo. — Somewhere in Wyoming’s vast, barren sagebrush country, Lorenzo Cortez Vargas pokes his head out of the rickety camper where he lives and stares into the dirt.

Mr. Vargas, a sheepherder from Chile, spends his days and nights on lonesome stretches of the Rockies, driving 2,000 sheep across Colorado and Wyoming as part of a federal temporary worker program he signed up for more than a year ago.

But like the other sheepherders, or “borregueros,” in the West, Mr. Vargas has barely any contact with his new country, where he earns $750 a month for working round the clock without a day off.

He lives alone in the crude 5-foot-by-10-foot “campito” with no running water, toilet or electricity, save for a car battery he has rigged to a small radio. A sputtering wood-burning stove is his only source of heat in winter, a collection of faded telephone cards his only connection to home.

“They never tell you exactly what it’s going to be like,” Mr. Vargas, 28, said in Spanish. “But you’ve got to stick it out here. What are you going to do?”..............

picture:

Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

José Ruiz, a former sheepherder from Chile, at a “campito” in Wyoming. The harsh lives of foreign sheepherders in the American West have long been unchanged.