Immigration Part 1: Carlos

Carlos is the second person I have met here who was deported from the U.S (The first was Alex ). He is my hired driver to take me from Izalco to the school in Caluco five days a week. Here is his story as he's told me so far:

He lived in the U.S. for ten years before he was deported. He lived in Springfield, Missouri and worked for a construction company. In order to get to the U.S., he traveled through Guatemala and Mexico, hopping trains and buses. He crossed the U.S./Mexico border illegally by swimming across the Rio Grande into Texas, where he paid some Mexican men $400 to take him to a town south of San Antonio to meet a friend. How he got to Missouri and how he got his workers permit, I don't know, but he then lived in Missouri for ten years and worked in construction. During that time, he got into a relationship with a woman, and they were living together. I'm not sure if they were married or just a couple, but eventually they had a child together, a daughter named Carlina after Carlos. The skinny of the story, according to Carlos' side of events, is that his girlfriend/wife got into drugs and alcohol in a bad way. Carlos tried to talk her out of drinking and using, but she would just get furious at him and scream and yell and throw things and the like. Eventually, they separated but Carlos kept calling her mom's place to ask to see his daughter and such, and the girlfriend's parents told him to never call again. Well, he did keep calling, and his girlfriend/mother of his child called immigration on him. He was arrested and deported, even though he tried to explain that he had a daughter in the U.S. and needed to be there to care for her. Now, his daughter is now 8 or 9 years old, he says, and he's had a girlfriend here in El Salvador for 7 years, so I'm assuming that he was deported 7 years ago. He says he would like to go back to the U.S. someday, but he has to save up money, first. His goal is to move to Virginia, where he says he hears there is a lot of work available in construction.
I asked him if he was planning on emigrating illegally again or if he was going to try to become a legal citizen, and he said he would have to go illegally because it's too complicated and expensive to go through legal channels. I wonder how much it costs to emigrate legally to the U.S. and become a citizen, because he says he needs somewhere around $3,200 to make the trip alone and illegally. He said that the system here makes it almost impossible to emigrate legally from El Salvador. He wants to go back to the U.S. because he says that's where dreaming can become a reality. Here in El Salvador, says Carlos, you can work super hard and never get anything because wages are so low and prices so (relatively) high. In the U.S., though, he can buy a good car for $4,000 after three month's work, while here he still has another 5 or 6 years to pay off his truck, which is literally falling apart. Trust me, I can see the road through the floorboards and the fuel line leaks and the ignition key isn't even in the shifting column anymore, but is dangling by the wire. Six years of hard work to pay off a piece of crap like that, all the while he keeps having to buy more parts to keep it running. He says that he can do the same hard work in the U.S. and make good enough money to live comfortably.