Affluent Mexicans pay £10 to be illegals for a night

It could be any night on the Mexican-American border, but the mud-spattered wretches huddling in the dark are more than 1,000 miles from the frontier, and only pretending to be migrants. They are in fact middle-class Mexicans trying to understand the plight of the 400,000 of their countrymen who make the illegal crossing into America every year. They have paid £10 each to spend the night being bitten by mosquitoes, running along muddy river banks and cowering in corn fields.

The scheme is the controversial brainchild of a group of Òaòu Indians, indigenous to the region for 7,000 years. In the past 25 years, about 90 per cent of the population of the tiny community in Hidalgo state, just north of the capital, have gone north, lured by higher wages.

In two years, the night hikes have attracted more than 3,000 people and employed dozens of villagers.

Critics say the project is in poor taste, making money off the suffering of migrants.