But despite record deportations, many migrants at a shelter in Nogales, Mexico, now consider the US to be home.
By Lourdes Medrano
Christian Science Monitor
November 3, 2011
Nogales, Mexico: Day and night, hundreds of Mexican migrants stream into this border city after being deported from the US amid record deportations taking place under the Obama administration.
At one migrant shelter in Nogales, workers encourage deportees to return home rather than attempt to cross into the US illegally again, through the treacherous desert that spans both sides of the border.
“There’s a federal program that will pay for your bus ticket so you can get back home,” Valente Camacho Terraza tells a group of migrants arriving at the center, which functions both as a shelter and transportation company.
But "home" for many of them is not the interior town from which they left, but cities in the US where they have worked for a decade or two, or sometimes more. Cuauhtémoc Bravo Guerrero, a migrant at the center who was recently deported from California, says he spent 30 years in the US. He has been at the shelter for days, unsure of his next move. “I want to go back to California,” he says.
Most of the migrants get a couple days of rest and nourishment before deciding whether to return to their states of origin or head back toward the international line. Without money or family ties in Nogales, many accept the Mexican government’s offer, Mr. Camacho says.
But in the past year, he has noticed that a lot of migrants tend to stay longer – some up to a month. He attributes that to the changing make-up of the migrant population.
About five years ago, the shelter was crowded with migrants – mostly men – who kept getting caught after crossing the border repeatedly. That has changed over time to include more women and children, who are housed in another shelter for minors. The mix now includes fewer people heading north and more migrants who are being deported after spending a decade or two north of the border, Camacho says. They linger at the shelter trying to reach family members in the US and figuring out where they might go next.
“Things get complicated for them,” Camacho says.
In an outdoor waiting area, several men wait in silence. Most have just been deported after being picked up in Arizona, California, and other states. No one is eager to share names. Two young men say they were deported after spending time behind bars in Arizona. A middle-aged man who lived in the US for 20 years says he was deported after Phoenix police stopped him while driving with a broken side mirror.
A few miles away, at the downtown border crossing, a Border Patrol bus arrives mid-afternoon with another group of deportees: a boy about eight years old, 23 women and 35 men who walk toward Mexico in a single file.
Officials might try to urge them to continue heading south, but for many their roots are now behind them.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2011/1103/Amid-record-deportations-from-the-US-Mexico-urges-migrants-to-head-home
Showing posts with label Return Migration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Return Migration. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Changing face of migration on display at border
Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers determined to return to families in the U.S.
By DAMIEN CAVE
The New York Times
October 8, 2011
AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — "My wife, my son — I have to get back to them," Daniel kept telling himself, from the moment he was arrested in Seattle for driving with an expired license all the way through the deportation proceeding that delivered him to Mexico in June.
Nothing would deter him from crossing the border again. He had left his hometown at 24, he said. Twelve years later, he had an American son, a wife, near-fluency in English and three brothers in the United States. "I'll keep trying," he said, "until I'll get there."
This is increasingly the profile of illegal immigration today. Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home.
They present an enormous challenge to American policymakers, because they continue to head north despite obstacles more severe than at any time in recent history. It is not just that the American economy has little to offer; the border itself is far more threatening. On one side, fences have grown and American agents have multiplied; on the other, criminals haunt the journey at every turn.
And yet, while these factors — and better opportunities at home — have cut illegal immigration from Mexico to its lowest level in decades, they are not enough to scare off a sizable, determined cadre.
"We have it boiled down to the hardest lot," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director for policy at the Council of the Americas.
Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005. A growing percentage of deportees in recent years have also been deported before, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
For the administration of President Obama, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.
Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline. But at a time when the dynamics of immigration are changing, experts and advocates on all sides are increasingly asking if the approach, which has defined immigration policy since 9/11, still makes sense.
Deportation expensive
Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: Between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.
Some groups favoring reduced immigration say that making life harder for illegal immigrants in this country would be far more efficient. They argue that along with eliminating work opportunities by requiring employers to check the immigration status of new hires, Congress should also prohibit illegal immigrants from opening bank accounts, or even obtaining library cards.
"You'd reduce the number of people who keep coming back again and again," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The alternative, says Doris Meissner, the country's top immigration official in the mid-1990s, is to accept that illegal immigrants like Daniel "are people with fundamental ties to the United States, not where they came from."
"Our societies are so deeply connected," Meissner said, referring primarily to the United States and Mexico, the main source of illegal immigrants. "And that is not reflected at all in policy."
The administration acknowledges that immigrants like Daniel are rooted in the United States and typically have otherwise-clean criminal records. But under its new plan introduced last month — suspending deportations for pending low-priority cases, including immigrants brought to the United States as children — repeat crossers are singled out for removal alongside "serious felons," "known gang members" and "individuals who pose a clear risk to national security."
Administration officials say they are trying to break the "yo-yo effect" of people bouncing back, as mandated by Congress when it made re-entry a felony in 1996.
But some experts argue that this commingling actually undermines security. After a decade of record deportations, critics argue, it has become even harder to separate the two groups that now define the border: professional criminals and experienced migrants motivated by family ties in the United States.
"If you think drug dealers and terrorists are much more dangerous than maids and gardeners, then we should get as many visas as possible to those people, so we can focus on the real threat," said David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. "Widening the gates would strengthen the walls."
Threat of drug gangs
The border crossers pouring into Arizona a decade or two ago were more numerous, but less likely to be threatening. David Jimarez, a border-patrol agent with years of experience south of Tucson, recalled that even when migrants outnumbered American authorities by 25 to 1, they did not resist. "They would just sit down and wait for us," he said.
Over the past few years, the mix has changed, with more drug smugglers and other criminals among the dwindling, but still substantial, ranks of migrants.
The impacts are far-reaching. In Mexico, less immigration means less business. Border towns like Agua Prieta, long known as a departure point, have gone from bustling to windblown. Taxis that ferried migrants to the mountains now gather dust. Restaurants and hotels, like the sunflower-themed Girasol downtown, are practically empty. On one recent afternoon, only three of the 50 rooms were occupied.
"In 2000, we were full every day," said Alejandro Rocha, the hotel manager.
New research from the University of California, San Diego, shows that crime is now the top concern for Mexicans thinking of heading north. As fear keeps many migrants home, many experienced border guides, or coyotes, have given up illegal migration for other jobs.
In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, one well-known coyote is now selling tires. In Nogales, the largest Mexican city bordering Arizona, power has shifted to tattooed young men with expensive binoculars along the border fence, while here in Agua Prieta — where Mexican officials say traffic is one-thirtieth of what it once was — the only way to get across is to deal with gangs that sometimes push migrants to carry drugs.
It is even worse in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. Just standing at the border fence brings out drug-cartel enforcers demanding $300 for the right to pass. Migrants and the organizations that assist them say cartel lieutenants roam the shelters, looking for deportees willing to work as lookouts, earning $400 a week until they have enough to pay for passage north.
"I was thinking about doing it, too," said Daniel, looking down. "But then I thought about my family."
More danger for agents
U.S. law-enforcement officials say the matrix of drugs, migration and violence has become more visible at the border and along the trails and roads heading north, where more of the immigrants being caught carry drugs or guns — making them more likely to flee, resist arrest or commit other crimes.
"There's less traffic, but traffic that's there is more threatening," Jimarez, the border agent, said.
Larry Dever, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., which sits north of Agua Prieta, agreed: "The guys smuggling people and narcotics now are more sinister."
Cochise County has been an established crossing corridor since the mid-1990s. Since 2008, the police there have tracked every crime linked to illegal immigrants, in part because state and federal officials frequently requested data, treating the county as a bellwether of border security.
Indeed, when a Cochise rancher named Robert Krentz was killed in March 2010 after radioing to his brother that he was going to help a suspected illegal immigrant, the county quickly became a flash point for a larger debate that ultimately led to SB 1070, the polarizing Arizona bill giving the police more responsibility for cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Yet, crime involving illegal immigrants is relatively rare (5 percent of all local crime). Mostly it consists of burglaries involving stolen food. And, public records show, in 11 of the 18 violent crimes linked to illegal immigrants over 18 months, immigrants were both the victims and attackers.
A recent USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states — and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2016439814_immigration09.html
By DAMIEN CAVE
The New York Times
October 8, 2011
AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — "My wife, my son — I have to get back to them," Daniel kept telling himself, from the moment he was arrested in Seattle for driving with an expired license all the way through the deportation proceeding that delivered him to Mexico in June.
Nothing would deter him from crossing the border again. He had left his hometown at 24, he said. Twelve years later, he had an American son, a wife, near-fluency in English and three brothers in the United States. "I'll keep trying," he said, "until I'll get there."
This is increasingly the profile of illegal immigration today. Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home.
They present an enormous challenge to American policymakers, because they continue to head north despite obstacles more severe than at any time in recent history. It is not just that the American economy has little to offer; the border itself is far more threatening. On one side, fences have grown and American agents have multiplied; on the other, criminals haunt the journey at every turn.
And yet, while these factors — and better opportunities at home — have cut illegal immigration from Mexico to its lowest level in decades, they are not enough to scare off a sizable, determined cadre.
"We have it boiled down to the hardest lot," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director for policy at the Council of the Americas.
Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005. A growing percentage of deportees in recent years have also been deported before, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
For the administration of President Obama, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.
Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline. But at a time when the dynamics of immigration are changing, experts and advocates on all sides are increasingly asking if the approach, which has defined immigration policy since 9/11, still makes sense.
Deportation expensive
Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: Between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.
Some groups favoring reduced immigration say that making life harder for illegal immigrants in this country would be far more efficient. They argue that along with eliminating work opportunities by requiring employers to check the immigration status of new hires, Congress should also prohibit illegal immigrants from opening bank accounts, or even obtaining library cards.
"You'd reduce the number of people who keep coming back again and again," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The alternative, says Doris Meissner, the country's top immigration official in the mid-1990s, is to accept that illegal immigrants like Daniel "are people with fundamental ties to the United States, not where they came from."
"Our societies are so deeply connected," Meissner said, referring primarily to the United States and Mexico, the main source of illegal immigrants. "And that is not reflected at all in policy."
The administration acknowledges that immigrants like Daniel are rooted in the United States and typically have otherwise-clean criminal records. But under its new plan introduced last month — suspending deportations for pending low-priority cases, including immigrants brought to the United States as children — repeat crossers are singled out for removal alongside "serious felons," "known gang members" and "individuals who pose a clear risk to national security."
Administration officials say they are trying to break the "yo-yo effect" of people bouncing back, as mandated by Congress when it made re-entry a felony in 1996.
But some experts argue that this commingling actually undermines security. After a decade of record deportations, critics argue, it has become even harder to separate the two groups that now define the border: professional criminals and experienced migrants motivated by family ties in the United States.
"If you think drug dealers and terrorists are much more dangerous than maids and gardeners, then we should get as many visas as possible to those people, so we can focus on the real threat," said David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. "Widening the gates would strengthen the walls."
Threat of drug gangs
The border crossers pouring into Arizona a decade or two ago were more numerous, but less likely to be threatening. David Jimarez, a border-patrol agent with years of experience south of Tucson, recalled that even when migrants outnumbered American authorities by 25 to 1, they did not resist. "They would just sit down and wait for us," he said.
Over the past few years, the mix has changed, with more drug smugglers and other criminals among the dwindling, but still substantial, ranks of migrants.
The impacts are far-reaching. In Mexico, less immigration means less business. Border towns like Agua Prieta, long known as a departure point, have gone from bustling to windblown. Taxis that ferried migrants to the mountains now gather dust. Restaurants and hotels, like the sunflower-themed Girasol downtown, are practically empty. On one recent afternoon, only three of the 50 rooms were occupied.
"In 2000, we were full every day," said Alejandro Rocha, the hotel manager.
New research from the University of California, San Diego, shows that crime is now the top concern for Mexicans thinking of heading north. As fear keeps many migrants home, many experienced border guides, or coyotes, have given up illegal migration for other jobs.
In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, one well-known coyote is now selling tires. In Nogales, the largest Mexican city bordering Arizona, power has shifted to tattooed young men with expensive binoculars along the border fence, while here in Agua Prieta — where Mexican officials say traffic is one-thirtieth of what it once was — the only way to get across is to deal with gangs that sometimes push migrants to carry drugs.
It is even worse in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. Just standing at the border fence brings out drug-cartel enforcers demanding $300 for the right to pass. Migrants and the organizations that assist them say cartel lieutenants roam the shelters, looking for deportees willing to work as lookouts, earning $400 a week until they have enough to pay for passage north.
"I was thinking about doing it, too," said Daniel, looking down. "But then I thought about my family."
More danger for agents
U.S. law-enforcement officials say the matrix of drugs, migration and violence has become more visible at the border and along the trails and roads heading north, where more of the immigrants being caught carry drugs or guns — making them more likely to flee, resist arrest or commit other crimes.
"There's less traffic, but traffic that's there is more threatening," Jimarez, the border agent, said.
Larry Dever, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., which sits north of Agua Prieta, agreed: "The guys smuggling people and narcotics now are more sinister."
Cochise County has been an established crossing corridor since the mid-1990s. Since 2008, the police there have tracked every crime linked to illegal immigrants, in part because state and federal officials frequently requested data, treating the county as a bellwether of border security.
Indeed, when a Cochise rancher named Robert Krentz was killed in March 2010 after radioing to his brother that he was going to help a suspected illegal immigrant, the county quickly became a flash point for a larger debate that ultimately led to SB 1070, the polarizing Arizona bill giving the police more responsibility for cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Yet, crime involving illegal immigrants is relatively rare (5 percent of all local crime). Mostly it consists of burglaries involving stolen food. And, public records show, in 11 of the 18 violent crimes linked to illegal immigrants over 18 months, immigrants were both the victims and attackers.
A recent USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states — and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2016439814_immigration09.html
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Improving Mexican economy draws undocumented immigrants home from California
By Stephen Magagnini
Sacramento Bee
Jul. 28, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 1B
There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.
"It's now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico," Sacramento's Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. "We have become a middle-class country."
Mexico's unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.
An estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants have left California since 2008, though the remaining 2.6 million still make up 7 percent of the population and 9 percent of the labor force, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Among metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, Sacramento County ranks among the lowest, with an unauthorized population of 4.6 percent of its 1.4 million residents in 2008, according to Laura Hill, a demographer with the PPIC.
The Sacramento region, suffering from 12.3 percent unemployment and the construction bust, may have triggered a large exodus of undocumented immigrants, González Gutiérrez said.
The best-paid jobs for undocumented migrants are in the building industry, "and because of the severe crisis in the construction business here, their first response has been to move into the service industry," González Gutiérrez said. "But that has its limits. Then, they move to other areas in the U.S. to find better jobs – or back to Mexico."
Hill said it's hard to know whether the benefit of having fewer undocumented migrants outweighs the cost to employers and taxpayers.
California may have to provide less free education to the children of undocumented immigrants and less emergency medical care, she said, but it will also get less tax revenue.
In 2008, at least 836,100 undocumented immigrants filed U.S. tax returns in California using tax identification numbers known as I-10s, said Hill, who conducted the tax survey.
Based on those tax returns, the study found there were 65,000 undocumented immigrants in Sacramento County that year, far fewer than in many other big counties.
Sacramento's undocumented population ranked 10th in the state that year, behind Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Santa Clara, San Bernardino, Riverside, Alameda, Contra Costa and Ventura.
There were an estimated 12,000 undocumented immigrants in Yolo County; 9,000 in the Sutter-Yuba area; and 8,000 in Placer County.
An analysis of local ZIP codes showed that Sacramento (95815, 95823, 95824), West Sacramento (95605), Clarksburg (95612), Esparto (95627), Guinda (95637), Knights Landing (95645), Winters (95694) and Woodland (95776) each had an undocumented population of 10 percent to 15 percent.
Yolo County relies heavily on migrant workers to grow and harvest crops.
"People in construction are now turning to agriculture; it's the start of the tomato season so the harvesters will be jump-started pretty soon," said Woodland Mayor Art Pimentel, whose 55,000 residents are 48 percent Latino, some of them undocumented.
Some aren't sticking around for the upcoming tomato harvest, said Sylvina Frausto, secretary of Holy Rosary Church in Woodland. "Some have a small parcel in Mexico. They own their own home there, so instead of renting here they go back to their small business there."
Many raise animals, run grocery stores or sell fruits and goods on street corners.
"They're going back home because they can't get medical help or government assistance anymore," Frausto said, "And when it's getting so difficult for them to find a job without proper documentation, it's pushing them away."
Anita Barnes, director of La Familia Counseling Center on Franklin Boulevard in Sacramento, said she recently spoke to a high school graduate who had lost his job in a restaurant and was thinking of going back to Mexico.
"He came over with his mom, who was in the process of losing her restaurant job," Barnes said. "It's frightening, especially for the children. They feel this is their country, they don't know anything else, and they find they can't get driver's licenses or jobs."
As its economy rebounds, Mexico "is becoming a better option than it was in the past, but you still have to find a job and reconnect," Barnes said.
While the weakened U.S. economy, rising deportations and tougher border enforcement have led to fewer undocumented migrants, changes in Mexico are playing a significant role, González Gutiérrez said.
Mexico's average standard of living – including health, education and per capita income – is now higher than those in Russia, China and India, according to the United Nations.
Mexico's growing middle class "reduces the appetites to come because there are simply many more options" at home, González Gutiérrez said. "Most people who decided to migrate already have a job in Mexico and tend to be the most ambitious and attracted to the income gap between the U.S. and Mexico."
Mexico's economy is growing at 4 percent to 5 percent, benefiting from low inflation, exports and a strong banking system, the consul said.
Mexico's birthrate is also declining sharply. "As a natural consequence of us transforming from a rural to an urban society, we are running out of Mexicans to export," González Gutiérrez said. "Our society's growing at a rate of 2.1 children per woman – in the 1970s it was more than five."
Once the U.S. economy recovers, the flow of migrants moving north "may go up again, although most likely they will not reach the peak levels we saw in the first half of the decade," González Gutiérrez said.
WORKSHOP TODAY
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will host a free information session in Spanish at 650 Capitol Mall, second floor, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. today on how to avoid scams. Immigrants who can't come in person or access the workshop online can call (800) 857-4862 and provide the pass code SERVICIO when asked for a password.
• For more information, visit www.uscis.gov/enlace.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/28/3799513/improving-mexican-economy-draws.html#ixzz1TPA5Bbwn
Sacramento Bee
Jul. 28, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 1B
There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.
"It's now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico," Sacramento's Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. "We have become a middle-class country."
Mexico's unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.
An estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants have left California since 2008, though the remaining 2.6 million still make up 7 percent of the population and 9 percent of the labor force, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Among metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, Sacramento County ranks among the lowest, with an unauthorized population of 4.6 percent of its 1.4 million residents in 2008, according to Laura Hill, a demographer with the PPIC.
The Sacramento region, suffering from 12.3 percent unemployment and the construction bust, may have triggered a large exodus of undocumented immigrants, González Gutiérrez said.
The best-paid jobs for undocumented migrants are in the building industry, "and because of the severe crisis in the construction business here, their first response has been to move into the service industry," González Gutiérrez said. "But that has its limits. Then, they move to other areas in the U.S. to find better jobs – or back to Mexico."
Hill said it's hard to know whether the benefit of having fewer undocumented migrants outweighs the cost to employers and taxpayers.
California may have to provide less free education to the children of undocumented immigrants and less emergency medical care, she said, but it will also get less tax revenue.
In 2008, at least 836,100 undocumented immigrants filed U.S. tax returns in California using tax identification numbers known as I-10s, said Hill, who conducted the tax survey.
Based on those tax returns, the study found there were 65,000 undocumented immigrants in Sacramento County that year, far fewer than in many other big counties.
Sacramento's undocumented population ranked 10th in the state that year, behind Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Santa Clara, San Bernardino, Riverside, Alameda, Contra Costa and Ventura.
There were an estimated 12,000 undocumented immigrants in Yolo County; 9,000 in the Sutter-Yuba area; and 8,000 in Placer County.
An analysis of local ZIP codes showed that Sacramento (95815, 95823, 95824), West Sacramento (95605), Clarksburg (95612), Esparto (95627), Guinda (95637), Knights Landing (95645), Winters (95694) and Woodland (95776) each had an undocumented population of 10 percent to 15 percent.
Yolo County relies heavily on migrant workers to grow and harvest crops.
"People in construction are now turning to agriculture; it's the start of the tomato season so the harvesters will be jump-started pretty soon," said Woodland Mayor Art Pimentel, whose 55,000 residents are 48 percent Latino, some of them undocumented.
Some aren't sticking around for the upcoming tomato harvest, said Sylvina Frausto, secretary of Holy Rosary Church in Woodland. "Some have a small parcel in Mexico. They own their own home there, so instead of renting here they go back to their small business there."
Many raise animals, run grocery stores or sell fruits and goods on street corners.
"They're going back home because they can't get medical help or government assistance anymore," Frausto said, "And when it's getting so difficult for them to find a job without proper documentation, it's pushing them away."
Anita Barnes, director of La Familia Counseling Center on Franklin Boulevard in Sacramento, said she recently spoke to a high school graduate who had lost his job in a restaurant and was thinking of going back to Mexico.
"He came over with his mom, who was in the process of losing her restaurant job," Barnes said. "It's frightening, especially for the children. They feel this is their country, they don't know anything else, and they find they can't get driver's licenses or jobs."
As its economy rebounds, Mexico "is becoming a better option than it was in the past, but you still have to find a job and reconnect," Barnes said.
While the weakened U.S. economy, rising deportations and tougher border enforcement have led to fewer undocumented migrants, changes in Mexico are playing a significant role, González Gutiérrez said.
Mexico's average standard of living – including health, education and per capita income – is now higher than those in Russia, China and India, according to the United Nations.
Mexico's growing middle class "reduces the appetites to come because there are simply many more options" at home, González Gutiérrez said. "Most people who decided to migrate already have a job in Mexico and tend to be the most ambitious and attracted to the income gap between the U.S. and Mexico."
Mexico's economy is growing at 4 percent to 5 percent, benefiting from low inflation, exports and a strong banking system, the consul said.
Mexico's birthrate is also declining sharply. "As a natural consequence of us transforming from a rural to an urban society, we are running out of Mexicans to export," González Gutiérrez said. "Our society's growing at a rate of 2.1 children per woman – in the 1970s it was more than five."
Once the U.S. economy recovers, the flow of migrants moving north "may go up again, although most likely they will not reach the peak levels we saw in the first half of the decade," González Gutiérrez said.
WORKSHOP TODAY
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will host a free information session in Spanish at 650 Capitol Mall, second floor, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. today on how to avoid scams. Immigrants who can't come in person or access the workshop online can call (800) 857-4862 and provide the pass code SERVICIO when asked for a password.
• For more information, visit www.uscis.gov/enlace.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/28/3799513/improving-mexican-economy-draws.html#ixzz1TPA5Bbwn
Friday, January 21, 2011
Improved economy has many Latinos returning to Mexico
REBECCA HUVAL
Napa Valley Register
January 19, 2011
Marbin Escalante, 26, and Olman Martínez, 32, both of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, sit together for a dinner of beans and tortillas on a recent night at the Calistoga Farmworker Housing Center.
The workers reminisced about their recent holiday spent at home and the family and friends they left behind. They estimate about 20 regulars at the Calistoga center from Mexico don’t plan to return to the Napa Valley this year.
“They spent some time here and they haven’t come back,” Escalante said. “They have their family, or they stayed to get married. Some don’t have papers and returning is very difficult.”
Seasonal workers from Mexico have more reason to stay home this year as the Mexican economy improves. While Napa and the rest of the U.S. struggle to add jobs and jolt the economy back to pre-recession levels, Mexico created 730,348 jobs in 2010, the highest number in 14 years, Mexican officials announced this month.
At the same time, a record number of people were deported from the U.S. in 2010.
Some friends who usually make the trip back to Napa Valley vineyards for pruning season have stayed home, the diners at the Calistoga Farmworker Housing Center said.
Daniel Alvarez-Garcia, 19, of Mexico City, mentioned two friends who will stay in Mexico this year to work as a taxi driver and a florist instead of making the trek to Calistoga.
They’ll stay in Mexico “not so much because the economy is good, but because rent and food is so expensive here,” he said.
Despite the high cost of living in Calistoga, Garcia plans to send $800 a month home to his family in El Centro, the central neighborhood of Mexico City.
The employment outlook in Mexico might not be as rosy as the job-creation number suggests. The manufacturing, service and commerce sectors in Mexico were the top creators of jobs in 2010, but the average salary for those new jobs was only $19.29 (232 pesos) a day.
Many seasonal workers at the Calistoga Farmworker Housing Center plan to keep sending money to families south of the border, they said.
Unemployment in Mexico persists. It fell slightly to 5 percent at the end of 2010 from a peak of 6.4 percent in September 2009, according to the Mexican government.
By comparison, Napa County’s unemployment rate was 10 percent in November, the most recent number released by state officials.
While it’s difficult to understand the full impact of an improved Mexican economy on Napa County, it does have the power to stimulate business locally, said Lisa Batto, CEO of the Napa Chamber of Commerce.
“Because we are 45 percent Latino, that has ramifications for Napa,” Batto said. “Our economy can grow.”
Often, workers who came to Napa yearly for jobs are now staying in Mexico due to the danger of border crossing or because they were deported, local immigration experts said.
The U.S. reported a record number of deportations — 392,862 — in the 2010 fiscal year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Immigration officials attribute this increase to Secure Communities, the program in U.S. jails that enforces the checking of fingerprints against immigration records with every inmate booked. Secure Communities was implemented in Napa County Jail last August.
As a result, the largest increase in U.S. deportations was among convicted criminals. There was a 46.6 percent increase in convicted criminals deported from the U.S. to Mexico from fiscal year 2009 to 2010, according to ICE data.
Out of the San Francisco ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Office, which is also responsible for Napa County, the overall number of deported criminals increased slightly to 9,684 and non-criminal deportations decreased slightly to 6,055 in 2010.
Once deported, the newly repatriated “don’t have any other option than to start their own business,” said Teresa Foster, an immigration consultant in Napa. “A lot of them say, ‘Okay, I’m here, let’s face the fact that my family needs to eat.’ In Mexico, “The job situation is hard, so a lot of times they have to create their own jobs.”
Others have created jobs in Mexico deliberately.
Angel Calderon manages the River Ranch Farmworker Camp in St. Helena and also manages a factory in his hometown Timbinal in the state of Guanajuato, where he employs about 70 workers in the 600-population town.
In addition to producing robes, towels and baby clothes since 1999, the workers have recently started learning design, sales and marketing during work hours to increase their opportunities for advancement.
“You turned around in my community, and you wouldn’t have seen a place to work,” Calderon said. “They were pretty hopeless.”
Even still, many poor states in Mexico have bleak employment prospects, he said. But the lackluster job situation in the U.S. doesn’t always have the same draw it once did.
“To cross the border illegally right now is very dangerous, very expensive and it’s not worth it,” Calderon said.
http://napavalleyregister.com/news/local/article_40cd43ec-23a3-11e0-98e5-001cc4c002e0.html
Napa Valley Register
January 19, 2011
Marbin Escalante, 26, and Olman Martínez, 32, both of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, sit together for a dinner of beans and tortillas on a recent night at the Calistoga Farmworker Housing Center.
The workers reminisced about their recent holiday spent at home and the family and friends they left behind. They estimate about 20 regulars at the Calistoga center from Mexico don’t plan to return to the Napa Valley this year.
“They spent some time here and they haven’t come back,” Escalante said. “They have their family, or they stayed to get married. Some don’t have papers and returning is very difficult.”
Seasonal workers from Mexico have more reason to stay home this year as the Mexican economy improves. While Napa and the rest of the U.S. struggle to add jobs and jolt the economy back to pre-recession levels, Mexico created 730,348 jobs in 2010, the highest number in 14 years, Mexican officials announced this month.
At the same time, a record number of people were deported from the U.S. in 2010.
Some friends who usually make the trip back to Napa Valley vineyards for pruning season have stayed home, the diners at the Calistoga Farmworker Housing Center said.
Daniel Alvarez-Garcia, 19, of Mexico City, mentioned two friends who will stay in Mexico this year to work as a taxi driver and a florist instead of making the trek to Calistoga.
They’ll stay in Mexico “not so much because the economy is good, but because rent and food is so expensive here,” he said.
Despite the high cost of living in Calistoga, Garcia plans to send $800 a month home to his family in El Centro, the central neighborhood of Mexico City.
The employment outlook in Mexico might not be as rosy as the job-creation number suggests. The manufacturing, service and commerce sectors in Mexico were the top creators of jobs in 2010, but the average salary for those new jobs was only $19.29 (232 pesos) a day.
Many seasonal workers at the Calistoga Farmworker Housing Center plan to keep sending money to families south of the border, they said.
Unemployment in Mexico persists. It fell slightly to 5 percent at the end of 2010 from a peak of 6.4 percent in September 2009, according to the Mexican government.
By comparison, Napa County’s unemployment rate was 10 percent in November, the most recent number released by state officials.
While it’s difficult to understand the full impact of an improved Mexican economy on Napa County, it does have the power to stimulate business locally, said Lisa Batto, CEO of the Napa Chamber of Commerce.
“Because we are 45 percent Latino, that has ramifications for Napa,” Batto said. “Our economy can grow.”
Often, workers who came to Napa yearly for jobs are now staying in Mexico due to the danger of border crossing or because they were deported, local immigration experts said.
The U.S. reported a record number of deportations — 392,862 — in the 2010 fiscal year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Immigration officials attribute this increase to Secure Communities, the program in U.S. jails that enforces the checking of fingerprints against immigration records with every inmate booked. Secure Communities was implemented in Napa County Jail last August.
As a result, the largest increase in U.S. deportations was among convicted criminals. There was a 46.6 percent increase in convicted criminals deported from the U.S. to Mexico from fiscal year 2009 to 2010, according to ICE data.
Out of the San Francisco ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Office, which is also responsible for Napa County, the overall number of deported criminals increased slightly to 9,684 and non-criminal deportations decreased slightly to 6,055 in 2010.
Once deported, the newly repatriated “don’t have any other option than to start their own business,” said Teresa Foster, an immigration consultant in Napa. “A lot of them say, ‘Okay, I’m here, let’s face the fact that my family needs to eat.’ In Mexico, “The job situation is hard, so a lot of times they have to create their own jobs.”
Others have created jobs in Mexico deliberately.
Angel Calderon manages the River Ranch Farmworker Camp in St. Helena and also manages a factory in his hometown Timbinal in the state of Guanajuato, where he employs about 70 workers in the 600-population town.
In addition to producing robes, towels and baby clothes since 1999, the workers have recently started learning design, sales and marketing during work hours to increase their opportunities for advancement.
“You turned around in my community, and you wouldn’t have seen a place to work,” Calderon said. “They were pretty hopeless.”
Even still, many poor states in Mexico have bleak employment prospects, he said. But the lackluster job situation in the U.S. doesn’t always have the same draw it once did.
“To cross the border illegally right now is very dangerous, very expensive and it’s not worth it,” Calderon said.
http://napavalleyregister.com/news/local/article_40cd43ec-23a3-11e0-98e5-001cc4c002e0.html
Friday, June 4, 2010
Immigrant in Run for Mayor, Back Home in Mexico
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
June 1, 2010
It was the picture of a classic New York campaign: The candidate dashed around the city where he had pulled himself up from poverty to business success and now a run for elected office. He met constituents, gave interviews and, at a private celebration in a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, thanked supporters.
But the recent flurry of campaigning was no ordinary political tour. The candidate, Juan Navarro, is a Mexican immigrant with homes in Queens and New Jersey, and his electoral goal is an office 2,200 miles away: the mayoralty of the small city of Serdán, Mexico.
Mr. Navarro, a legal resident of the United States, has made his expatriate identity a major theme in his platform, saying that his experiences as an up-by-his-bootstraps immigrant have taught him hard lessons that would make him a sensitive civic leader in Serdán, his hometown.
“You learn a lot about how to survive,” said Mr. Navarro, 33, who has lived in New York for 18 years but in recent months has spent nearly all of his time campaigning in Mexico, where he plans to live if he wins. “That’s important in a country like Mexico, because we don’t have as many opportunities.”
Mr. Navarro’s cross-border candidacy reflects the intimate relationship between New York’s maturing Mexican diaspora and Mexico — a steady, two-way flow of people, resources, cultural practices and ideas.
But it also attests to the obstacles that Mexicans face in New York, even as they have recently become the city’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Although they are now its fourth-largest immigrant population — after Dominicans, Chinese and Jamaicans — they are still largely absent from politics. Leaders in their communities say they know of no Mexican immigrant who has held elected public office in the city.
Mexicans in New York, they say, lack political organization and experience, as well as a critical mass of candidates or voters, since so many are not American citizens. Even with the considerable inconveniences of an international campaign, the Mexican-American candidate tends to look homeward.
“It’s easier to run in Mexico, even if we’ve been so many years out of our towns and cities,” said Joel Magallan, executive director of Asociacion Tepeyac, an advocacy and education organization for Mexican immigrants.
It is not uncommon for Mexicans living in the United States to run for public office in Mexico, but most have made their bids from the American Southwest, where the majority of Mexican immigrants have settled. Only a few candidates have run from New York, community leaders say, and none have won office.
Mr. Navarro, with the backing of some Mexican-American business leaders and some regional power brokers in the Mexican state of Puebla, where Serdán is situated, appears to have greater momentum than any of his predecessors as he heads toward the July 4 election.
His expatriate experience has worked both for and against him. He says it has given him a finer appreciation of the deprivations that compelled him and so many others to leave Mexico, and allowed him and his brothers the opportunity to make the money that he now wants to invest in Serdán. But he has also been attacked as a carpetbagger.
Among many in New York’s Mexican leadership, his candidacy is a source of pride. “He has gone to help the people,” said Erasmo Ponce, an immigrant from Puebla and owner of one of the largest tortilla-making companies in the New York region. “It was a good and sensible decision. The friends of Juan are united behind him.”
Mr. Navarro’s successes so far have mirrored the meteoric growth of the Mexican population in New York. In 1980, there were about 6,700 Mexicans in the city. They now total more than 170,000, with more than double that number in the region, according to the Census Bureau, though the Mexican Consulate in New York estimates there are about 1.2 million in the region. Most Mexicans in New York have come from the Mixteca region south of Mexico City, particularly Puebla.
Several Mexican immigrants who have become American citizens have run for elected office in the New York region in recent years, including Roberto Lopez, who was a city councilman in New Rochelle, N.Y., from 2003 to 2007.
Mr. Navarro said that although he might someday consider a run for office in the United States, he was a long way from having enough money or familiarity with the American political system. To run in Maspeth, Queens, where he rents an apartment, or in Passaic, N.J., where he owns a house, he would have to become an American citizen. For now, he said, he is more interested in helping his countrymen.
Mr. Navarro’s celebrated return to Mexico was in sharp contrast to his departure. Born into a poor family of street peddlers, he grew up selling candy for pennies. In 1992, at age 14, he slipped across the United States border with the help of smugglers; they brought him to New York, where he joined three older brothers who had arrived earlier and worked in a garment district sweatshop.
Mr. Navarro and his brothers eventually became legal residents and started their own businesses, forming a band that played for Mexican audiences along the Eastern Seaboard. They founded a small record company, opened restaurants — most recently El Tequilazo in Midtown — and promoted Mexican events in New York.
They gained some notoriety in 1999 when a bull escaped from a rodeo they had organized in Queens. The police gave chase, shooting the animal dead in a parking lot. The brothers were issued police summonses for failing to get permits for wild animals.
Although Mr. Navarro, who is single, has many relatives in Serdán, he was largely unknown there last August, when he heralded his arrival by sponsoring a party for the city’s residents. “Nobody knew who he was before that,” said Valentín Rosas Hernández, a correspondent in Serdán for El Sol de Puebla, a daily newspaper.
As Mr. Navarro courted political and business leaders there, he also marshaled support from Mexican leaders in New York. Last month, the state leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, one of Mexico’s main political parties, selected him as their candidate.
Alejandro Armenta Mier, president of the party’s state committee, said in a telephone interview from Mexico that the endorsement resulted from a poll of party leaders in the city. But Mr. Navarro’s campaign aides said he was handpicked in backroom negotiations by a small cadre of state power brokers — a tradition in Mexican politics known as el dedazo, or the big finger.
Mr. Armenta said Mr. Navarro understood the struggles of ordinary families. “Juan Navarro is the representation of the effort of thousands of Puebla families who have had to leave and go to the United States to seek their livelihood,” he said.
Mr. Navarro’s two opponents, however, have tried to cast him as an uninformed interloper.
“He hasn’t been here, and people don’t identify with him,” said one rival, Jesús Hernández Sánchez, a former city councilman. “We know the needs of the people.”
Mr. Navarro, who is back in Serdán this week, traveling from dawn to dusk throughout the city’s 24 townships, said he did not leave 18 years ago because he wanted to, but because he had to.
“I went out to earn,” he said, “and I’ve returned to share what I gained.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/nyregion/02mexican.html
The New York Times
June 1, 2010
It was the picture of a classic New York campaign: The candidate dashed around the city where he had pulled himself up from poverty to business success and now a run for elected office. He met constituents, gave interviews and, at a private celebration in a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, thanked supporters.
But the recent flurry of campaigning was no ordinary political tour. The candidate, Juan Navarro, is a Mexican immigrant with homes in Queens and New Jersey, and his electoral goal is an office 2,200 miles away: the mayoralty of the small city of Serdán, Mexico.
Mr. Navarro, a legal resident of the United States, has made his expatriate identity a major theme in his platform, saying that his experiences as an up-by-his-bootstraps immigrant have taught him hard lessons that would make him a sensitive civic leader in Serdán, his hometown.
“You learn a lot about how to survive,” said Mr. Navarro, 33, who has lived in New York for 18 years but in recent months has spent nearly all of his time campaigning in Mexico, where he plans to live if he wins. “That’s important in a country like Mexico, because we don’t have as many opportunities.”
Mr. Navarro’s cross-border candidacy reflects the intimate relationship between New York’s maturing Mexican diaspora and Mexico — a steady, two-way flow of people, resources, cultural practices and ideas.
But it also attests to the obstacles that Mexicans face in New York, even as they have recently become the city’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Although they are now its fourth-largest immigrant population — after Dominicans, Chinese and Jamaicans — they are still largely absent from politics. Leaders in their communities say they know of no Mexican immigrant who has held elected public office in the city.
Mexicans in New York, they say, lack political organization and experience, as well as a critical mass of candidates or voters, since so many are not American citizens. Even with the considerable inconveniences of an international campaign, the Mexican-American candidate tends to look homeward.
“It’s easier to run in Mexico, even if we’ve been so many years out of our towns and cities,” said Joel Magallan, executive director of Asociacion Tepeyac, an advocacy and education organization for Mexican immigrants.
It is not uncommon for Mexicans living in the United States to run for public office in Mexico, but most have made their bids from the American Southwest, where the majority of Mexican immigrants have settled. Only a few candidates have run from New York, community leaders say, and none have won office.
Mr. Navarro, with the backing of some Mexican-American business leaders and some regional power brokers in the Mexican state of Puebla, where Serdán is situated, appears to have greater momentum than any of his predecessors as he heads toward the July 4 election.
His expatriate experience has worked both for and against him. He says it has given him a finer appreciation of the deprivations that compelled him and so many others to leave Mexico, and allowed him and his brothers the opportunity to make the money that he now wants to invest in Serdán. But he has also been attacked as a carpetbagger.
Among many in New York’s Mexican leadership, his candidacy is a source of pride. “He has gone to help the people,” said Erasmo Ponce, an immigrant from Puebla and owner of one of the largest tortilla-making companies in the New York region. “It was a good and sensible decision. The friends of Juan are united behind him.”
Mr. Navarro’s successes so far have mirrored the meteoric growth of the Mexican population in New York. In 1980, there were about 6,700 Mexicans in the city. They now total more than 170,000, with more than double that number in the region, according to the Census Bureau, though the Mexican Consulate in New York estimates there are about 1.2 million in the region. Most Mexicans in New York have come from the Mixteca region south of Mexico City, particularly Puebla.
Several Mexican immigrants who have become American citizens have run for elected office in the New York region in recent years, including Roberto Lopez, who was a city councilman in New Rochelle, N.Y., from 2003 to 2007.
Mr. Navarro said that although he might someday consider a run for office in the United States, he was a long way from having enough money or familiarity with the American political system. To run in Maspeth, Queens, where he rents an apartment, or in Passaic, N.J., where he owns a house, he would have to become an American citizen. For now, he said, he is more interested in helping his countrymen.
Mr. Navarro’s celebrated return to Mexico was in sharp contrast to his departure. Born into a poor family of street peddlers, he grew up selling candy for pennies. In 1992, at age 14, he slipped across the United States border with the help of smugglers; they brought him to New York, where he joined three older brothers who had arrived earlier and worked in a garment district sweatshop.
Mr. Navarro and his brothers eventually became legal residents and started their own businesses, forming a band that played for Mexican audiences along the Eastern Seaboard. They founded a small record company, opened restaurants — most recently El Tequilazo in Midtown — and promoted Mexican events in New York.
They gained some notoriety in 1999 when a bull escaped from a rodeo they had organized in Queens. The police gave chase, shooting the animal dead in a parking lot. The brothers were issued police summonses for failing to get permits for wild animals.
Although Mr. Navarro, who is single, has many relatives in Serdán, he was largely unknown there last August, when he heralded his arrival by sponsoring a party for the city’s residents. “Nobody knew who he was before that,” said Valentín Rosas Hernández, a correspondent in Serdán for El Sol de Puebla, a daily newspaper.
As Mr. Navarro courted political and business leaders there, he also marshaled support from Mexican leaders in New York. Last month, the state leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, one of Mexico’s main political parties, selected him as their candidate.
Alejandro Armenta Mier, president of the party’s state committee, said in a telephone interview from Mexico that the endorsement resulted from a poll of party leaders in the city. But Mr. Navarro’s campaign aides said he was handpicked in backroom negotiations by a small cadre of state power brokers — a tradition in Mexican politics known as el dedazo, or the big finger.
Mr. Armenta said Mr. Navarro understood the struggles of ordinary families. “Juan Navarro is the representation of the effort of thousands of Puebla families who have had to leave and go to the United States to seek their livelihood,” he said.
Mr. Navarro’s two opponents, however, have tried to cast him as an uninformed interloper.
“He hasn’t been here, and people don’t identify with him,” said one rival, Jesús Hernández Sánchez, a former city councilman. “We know the needs of the people.”
Mr. Navarro, who is back in Serdán this week, traveling from dawn to dusk throughout the city’s 24 townships, said he did not leave 18 years ago because he wanted to, but because he had to.
“I went out to earn,” he said, “and I’ve returned to share what I gained.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/nyregion/02mexican.html
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Arizona immigration law prompts Mexico to extend repatriation aid program
In response to the controversial Arizona immigration law, Mexico extended a repatriation program to help ease the transition of illegal migrants back home. The governments says the Arizona law could lead to a flood of returnees when it goes into effect, but most Mexicans are skeptical.
By Nacha Cattan, Correspondent, Sara Miller Llana, Staff writer
Mexico City and Cartagena, Colombia
The Christian Science Monitor
June 1, 2010 at 12:15 pm EDT
In response to the controversial new Arizona immigration law, Mexico is extending a program that helps citizens living illegally in the US return home.
Need medical attention? Need something to eat? The website of the Mexican National Migration Institute illustrates how the voluntary repatriation program works.
But few in Mexico are expecting a flood of new returnees. Last year about 500,000 Mexicans were repatriated from the US, an average annual number, according to National Migration Institute (INM).
While the country is spending some money to ease the transition home for Mexicans who want to return, most with steady jobs in the US are unlikely to sign up for the program.
“There will not be a massive return, unlike what is expected,” says Rodolfo Cruz, a professor in the population studies department at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana (COLEF). “In Mexico they do not have employment options, and they are well aware of this…It would be much more expensive for them to return [to Mexico]. Because they’ll return, spend money, not find any [work] or find work that does not meet their economic needs and will go once more to the United States.”
The head of Mexico's INM, Cecilia Romero, said that the repatriation program, is being extended this year because of concerns that more Mexicans will be driven out of Arizona. “It is probable that when the [new immigration] law of Arizona goes into effect, repatriations and deportations of Mexicans will go up,” she said recently.
The program will run from June 1 through Sept. 28, during which federal, state, and local authorities will help Mexican migrants, pointing them towards medical attention should they need it and helping them avoid criminal groups who prey on them on the way home.
The new Arizona immigration law directs police to determine immigration status if they are suspicious of criminal activity. Currently, police officers can inquire about a person’s immigration status only if that person is a suspect in another crime.
Rodolfo Mendez, who parks cars for a Mexico City restaurant, says his brother is an undocumented worker in Arizona and is considering leaving Arizona for another US state but not returning home. He wouldn't be able to earn enough to support his six children working the fields in his hometown of Santa Catarina, Oaxaca. The program could help his brother, “but it is no solution to the Arizona law.”
Hilario Fuentes, a newspaper vendor in Mexico City whose daughter lives illegally in Los Angeles, says he thinks few migrants living in the US would agree to voluntary repatriation. “They wouldn’t accept it, because people go [to the US] out of necessity. They leave their families out of necessity,” he says. His daughter has been deported four times, but keeps returning to Los Angeles to be with her American-born children.
Mr. Cruz says that Mexican action against the law, which has ranged from travel alerts to canceled bilateral meetings in Arizona, is popular in Mexico.
“Any help given to immigrants in the state of Arizona will be welcomed, because the new law is one of the strongest and most racist that has passed [in the US],” he says. But the real support will need to go toward Mexican consulates in Phoenix and Tucson once the law goes into effect, he says. “They will need help in presenting discrimination cases, abuse cases, civil rights violations…More than anything they will need information about what their rights are.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2010/0601/Arizona-immigration-law-prompts-Mexico-to-extend-repatriation-aid-program?sms_ss=email
By Nacha Cattan, Correspondent, Sara Miller Llana, Staff writer
Mexico City and Cartagena, Colombia
The Christian Science Monitor
June 1, 2010 at 12:15 pm EDT
In response to the controversial new Arizona immigration law, Mexico is extending a program that helps citizens living illegally in the US return home.
Need medical attention? Need something to eat? The website of the Mexican National Migration Institute illustrates how the voluntary repatriation program works.
But few in Mexico are expecting a flood of new returnees. Last year about 500,000 Mexicans were repatriated from the US, an average annual number, according to National Migration Institute (INM).
While the country is spending some money to ease the transition home for Mexicans who want to return, most with steady jobs in the US are unlikely to sign up for the program.
“There will not be a massive return, unlike what is expected,” says Rodolfo Cruz, a professor in the population studies department at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana (COLEF). “In Mexico they do not have employment options, and they are well aware of this…It would be much more expensive for them to return [to Mexico]. Because they’ll return, spend money, not find any [work] or find work that does not meet their economic needs and will go once more to the United States.”
The head of Mexico's INM, Cecilia Romero, said that the repatriation program, is being extended this year because of concerns that more Mexicans will be driven out of Arizona. “It is probable that when the [new immigration] law of Arizona goes into effect, repatriations and deportations of Mexicans will go up,” she said recently.
The program will run from June 1 through Sept. 28, during which federal, state, and local authorities will help Mexican migrants, pointing them towards medical attention should they need it and helping them avoid criminal groups who prey on them on the way home.
The new Arizona immigration law directs police to determine immigration status if they are suspicious of criminal activity. Currently, police officers can inquire about a person’s immigration status only if that person is a suspect in another crime.
Rodolfo Mendez, who parks cars for a Mexico City restaurant, says his brother is an undocumented worker in Arizona and is considering leaving Arizona for another US state but not returning home. He wouldn't be able to earn enough to support his six children working the fields in his hometown of Santa Catarina, Oaxaca. The program could help his brother, “but it is no solution to the Arizona law.”
Hilario Fuentes, a newspaper vendor in Mexico City whose daughter lives illegally in Los Angeles, says he thinks few migrants living in the US would agree to voluntary repatriation. “They wouldn’t accept it, because people go [to the US] out of necessity. They leave their families out of necessity,” he says. His daughter has been deported four times, but keeps returning to Los Angeles to be with her American-born children.
Mr. Cruz says that Mexican action against the law, which has ranged from travel alerts to canceled bilateral meetings in Arizona, is popular in Mexico.
“Any help given to immigrants in the state of Arizona will be welcomed, because the new law is one of the strongest and most racist that has passed [in the US],” he says. But the real support will need to go toward Mexican consulates in Phoenix and Tucson once the law goes into effect, he says. “They will need help in presenting discrimination cases, abuse cases, civil rights violations…More than anything they will need information about what their rights are.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2010/0601/Arizona-immigration-law-prompts-Mexico-to-extend-repatriation-aid-program?sms_ss=email
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Migrants struggling for work in Texas return to Mexico as a burden
By ALFREDO CORCHADO
The Dallas Morning News
Monday, February 1, 2010
CORRAL DE PIEDRAS, Mexico – The leader of this community has a message for its native sons and daughters who work in Texas and dream of returning home: Don't do it. You'll regret it.
To make her point, she has the perfect example: her husband.
Teresa Cadena Moreno, 34, the mayor's delegate in this farming community of 5,000 people in central Guanajuato state, has noticed a troubling trend over the past few months. With the slowdown in the U.S. economy, she is seeing a rising number of expatriates returning home. They're not coming just for a Christmas visit or town
celebration, but with every intention of staying permanently. And that has the town in a bind.
They come back with more expectations than they left with. They want better public services – roads, schools, sewer systems – and, more important, jobs. Some complain about the lack of drinking water. Their children often speak only English or broken Spanish.
"It's not easy," Cadena said. "We're a poor community that relies on the remittances of our migrants, not on them returning home to stay."
It's not easy for the returnees, either.
Last fall, Cadena's husband, Jaime Hernández, 32, returned home after working in construction in Tyler. He had every intention of staying put for a while, if not permanently.
As a painter in Texas, Hernández made in one day what he makes here in a week, roughly $100, he said. Yes, food is cheaper here and his home is paid for, but after a few weeks "you miss a good steak," he said.
"You have to watch every peso you spend," he said. "Here you fight to maintain whatever you have, not necessarily to get ahead."
In the third quarter of 2009, the Mexican government recorded an unusual trend: 108,078 emigrants returned home to stay, up 30 percent from 2008. The trend was expected to continue through the fourth quarter, though those numbers haven't been released yet.
Meanwhile, money sent home by Mexicans abroad plunged a record 15.7 percent in 2009, a reflection of the sluggish U.S. economy. Remittances are Mexico's No. 2 source of foreign income after oil, totaling $21.2 billion in 2009 compared with $25.1 billion in 2008, according to the central bank.
For a country that says it wants to see its emigrants return home, these trends put Mexico in a quandary.
For more than two decades, the Mexican government has been trying to re-establish bonds with Mexicans living abroad.
The government even has an agency, the Office for Mexicans Abroad, with a campaign that in part aims not just to lure return investment in Mexico, but to encourage emigrants to return home. Just not now.
"There are a lot of pretty, nostalgic words spoken by the Mexican government," said Primitivo Rodríguez, director of the Coalition for the Political Rights for Mexicans Abroad.
"But where is the substance? The question really is, 'How can Mexico reserve a job for you, immigrant, when the government can't even guarantee a job for your cousin or brother back home?' "
Mexico's long, devastating recession and drought have left millions unemployed or underemployed.
Even as President Felipe Calderón declares the recession officially over, it will take time for many municipalities to rise from financial ruin. Last year, the National Association of Mayors reported that more than 70 percent of Mexico's 2,439 municipalities were broke or near bankruptcy.
Corral de Piedras is no exception.
Jesús Ramírez Ramírez, 42, worked in construction throughout the southeastern United States but returned home last year when work became scarce. Now he sells corn on the cob for 10 pesos, about 90 cents, each.
"There's not much work here either. ... I'd like to go back, but it's hard," he said, pointing to one of his seven children.
And the returning emigrants add to the strain on the community, Cadena said.
"We don't have enough room in our schools, much less bilingual teachers, as some students arrive speaking English, and they can't fit in," she said.
"I don't want to sound ungrateful or offensive," she said, "because here almost everyone has a relative living in the United States."
Cadena runs a neighborhood grocery store with help from the money her husband has sent from the U.S. Recently, she said, he has been edgy, staying up late at night, worried about the difficulty of making a living at home. Finally, he told his wife he had decided to leave again.
"Being away from my wife, my kids, my hometown is very painful," Hernández said. "Living apart is no life. But so is living without a good-paying job."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/world/stories/020210dnintreturn.40d7bb7.html
The Dallas Morning News
Monday, February 1, 2010
CORRAL DE PIEDRAS, Mexico – The leader of this community has a message for its native sons and daughters who work in Texas and dream of returning home: Don't do it. You'll regret it.
To make her point, she has the perfect example: her husband.
Teresa Cadena Moreno, 34, the mayor's delegate in this farming community of 5,000 people in central Guanajuato state, has noticed a troubling trend over the past few months. With the slowdown in the U.S. economy, she is seeing a rising number of expatriates returning home. They're not coming just for a Christmas visit or town
celebration, but with every intention of staying permanently. And that has the town in a bind.
They come back with more expectations than they left with. They want better public services – roads, schools, sewer systems – and, more important, jobs. Some complain about the lack of drinking water. Their children often speak only English or broken Spanish.
"It's not easy," Cadena said. "We're a poor community that relies on the remittances of our migrants, not on them returning home to stay."
It's not easy for the returnees, either.
Last fall, Cadena's husband, Jaime Hernández, 32, returned home after working in construction in Tyler. He had every intention of staying put for a while, if not permanently.
As a painter in Texas, Hernández made in one day what he makes here in a week, roughly $100, he said. Yes, food is cheaper here and his home is paid for, but after a few weeks "you miss a good steak," he said.
"You have to watch every peso you spend," he said. "Here you fight to maintain whatever you have, not necessarily to get ahead."
In the third quarter of 2009, the Mexican government recorded an unusual trend: 108,078 emigrants returned home to stay, up 30 percent from 2008. The trend was expected to continue through the fourth quarter, though those numbers haven't been released yet.
Meanwhile, money sent home by Mexicans abroad plunged a record 15.7 percent in 2009, a reflection of the sluggish U.S. economy. Remittances are Mexico's No. 2 source of foreign income after oil, totaling $21.2 billion in 2009 compared with $25.1 billion in 2008, according to the central bank.
For a country that says it wants to see its emigrants return home, these trends put Mexico in a quandary.
For more than two decades, the Mexican government has been trying to re-establish bonds with Mexicans living abroad.
The government even has an agency, the Office for Mexicans Abroad, with a campaign that in part aims not just to lure return investment in Mexico, but to encourage emigrants to return home. Just not now.
"There are a lot of pretty, nostalgic words spoken by the Mexican government," said Primitivo Rodríguez, director of the Coalition for the Political Rights for Mexicans Abroad.
"But where is the substance? The question really is, 'How can Mexico reserve a job for you, immigrant, when the government can't even guarantee a job for your cousin or brother back home?' "
Mexico's long, devastating recession and drought have left millions unemployed or underemployed.
Even as President Felipe Calderón declares the recession officially over, it will take time for many municipalities to rise from financial ruin. Last year, the National Association of Mayors reported that more than 70 percent of Mexico's 2,439 municipalities were broke or near bankruptcy.
Corral de Piedras is no exception.
Jesús Ramírez Ramírez, 42, worked in construction throughout the southeastern United States but returned home last year when work became scarce. Now he sells corn on the cob for 10 pesos, about 90 cents, each.
"There's not much work here either. ... I'd like to go back, but it's hard," he said, pointing to one of his seven children.
And the returning emigrants add to the strain on the community, Cadena said.
"We don't have enough room in our schools, much less bilingual teachers, as some students arrive speaking English, and they can't fit in," she said.
"I don't want to sound ungrateful or offensive," she said, "because here almost everyone has a relative living in the United States."
Cadena runs a neighborhood grocery store with help from the money her husband has sent from the U.S. Recently, she said, he has been edgy, staying up late at night, worried about the difficulty of making a living at home. Finally, he told his wife he had decided to leave again.
"Being away from my wife, my kids, my hometown is very painful," Hernández said. "Living apart is no life. But so is living without a good-paying job."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/world/stories/020210dnintreturn.40d7bb7.html
Monday, January 18, 2010
Nostalgia and reality collide in Mexico
By Hector Becerra
The Los Angeles Times
17 Jan 2010
Bobby Salcedo grew up in El Monte, his immigrant parents staking the family's future in the working-class suburb that felt worlds away from the Mexican farming towns of their roots.
But like so many Mexican Americans, some of Salcedo's fondest memories were from the winter and summer vacations when his family would pack into the van and drive 1,300 miles south to the lands of their ancestors in Jalisco.
The pace of life slowed there, with children hanging out in town plazas late into the night and young men handing flowers to pretty girls as they strolled in opposing circles. For many young Mexican Americans, that small-town life seemed a panacea compared to the urban stresses of Los Angeles, and to being cooped up at home, playing video games and watching TV.
The connection to Mexico stayed with Salcedo through the years as he became an assistant principal and El Monte school board member. He continued to visit family in Mexico, and did charity work for South El Monte's sister city, Gomez Palacio in Durango state. He met his future wife there.
The 33-year-old Salcedo and his wife returned to her hometown this Christmas to visit family and friends. A few days later, they were at a bar when masked gunmen, suspected members of a drug cartel, burst in and kidnapped Salcedo and five other men. They were shot to death execution-style and dumped near a canal.
The case made headlines as an example of Mexico's out-of-control drug war and prompted mourning in El Monte, where Salcedo was a popular educator and a rising community leader.
But for many Mexican Americans who are deeply rooted to the land of their parents, the killing also underscored the complex relationship they have with Mexico and provoked feelings of anger, disappointment and betrayal.
"Mexico is going through very fast change, so you kind of have in mind all these different images and ideas," said Francisco Balderrama, a professor of history and Chicano studies at Cal State L.A. "A lot of them have passed on into a type of nostalgia."
Balderrama said his youthful memories of Mexico are different from his son's.
Like his son, the professor studied in Mexico as a young man. But his son also volunteered for the Peace Corps in the state of Queretaro. His son experienced the difficulties of getting things done in Mexico, a frustration Balderrama never had to experience. His son also has a more updated perspective on some of the country's dangers.
When Balderrama proposed that his son take a bus to meet him in another state of Mexico, his son said that could be unsafe.
The Salcedo case is a reminder of the new realities, the latest bang in a steady drumbeat of violence that has steadily chipped away at romantic notions that many Mexican Americans had.
"We see what we want to see down there," said Salcedo's brother Juan, 35. "We're not down there, living the daily life of the average Mexican. We're living an American life in a Third World country. Our dollar goes further. We're able to enjoy things that many people there are not able to enjoy."
Childlike nostalgia
Juan Salcedo said he remembers getting into the gray station wagon, later upgraded to a "big ole" white van, at least once a year. They would bring various things people had requested: paper towels, bags of sugar or flour. Their mother Graciela's town was Tototlan, their father's Atotonilco, both near Guadalajara. They would hop around, visiting family and being fed or taking trips to Lake Chapala or a little water park.
As the Salcedo children got older, the trips became less frequent but they never stopped. Two years ago they went to the wedding of their cousin Eddie Macias, who used to tease Bobby and his siblings about their Spanish.
Bobby was "very proud of his Mexican origins, but very proud of being an American," said Macias, 36. "They got to know many other parts of Mexico, not just from a family point of view, but as part of their culture."
Macias said many Mexicans have negative or stereotypical views of Mexican Americans, saying they just work in the U.S. but don't amount to much.
"On occasion, unconsciously at times, I'd defend them," Macias said of his five Salcedo cousins, all of whom graduated from college. "I'm very proud of my family in the U.S. I would say, 'On the contrary, I have family in California, and they contribute to their community. They are examples of how to live for the rest of us. Here and there.' "
American dream
Bobby Salcedo became a teacher in South El Monte and president of the town's sister-city program, which includes Gomez Palacio. He met Betzy Lazos there and married her two years ago.
He helped raise money for orphanages and firefighters and other causes in Gomez Palacio. The violence in Mexico always seemed distant to the Salcedo family.
"I was a nonbeliever," Juan said.
And yet there he was, walking into the back of a "dingy" room in the Gomez Palacio morgue. He said he felt as if the authorities were hiding his brother's body in fear of the cartels. They wanted to quickly cremate the body, he said.
Juan Salcedo had traveled to the city of 240,000 with his mother, who wanted to see her son. But after seeing his brother, Juan said he would let her come into the room only if Bobby's face was covered.
"That first day, I just let her hold his hand," he said.
Fear of the cartels also made it difficult to find a mortuary willing to take care of his brother's body, he said.
As the casket arrived in the cargo hold of a Mexicana commercial jet, about 5,000 people celebrated Salcedo’s life at Mountain View High School in El Monte, where he had been the student body president.
Juan Salcedo said he no longer has a reason to go back to Mexico. He doesn't think he ever will. He doesn't think his parents will either.
There are 31 states in Mexico, and few have endured the spasms of violence seen in places like Durango. But Carlos Salcedo shares his brother's sentiment: "Until the times change, I'll be sad, but I'm not going to go there."
Still, it's not hard to conjure the memories that made it such a special place for Bobby, and for himself.
"It's a beautiful land," Carlos Salcedo said. "I still love it. I can't deny that. I have family there. I can't renounce my family. It's just an unfortunate situation to the ultimate extent."
A community torn
The ripples of Salcedo's death have touched other Mexican American families as well.
Hector Delgado, a South El Monte councilman whose parents also emigrated from the Mexican state of Jalisco, said he was aware of the tales of carnage in Mexico. But it was only after Salcedo was killed that he felt betrayed. For the first time, his parents' country loomed as truly foreign.
"I always loved the fact that my parents taught us to value our roots. I am an American of Mexican descent, and I'm very proud of that," he said. "But this really left a bitter taste in my mouth. It's completely changed my view of Mexico, to be honest. I'm actually ashamed of Mexico right now."
Jorge Andres Herrera, 28, is one of five Mexican American siblings who graduated from or are studying at UCLA. They formed a norteño music group called the Hermanos Herrera and have won awards in Mexico. Herrera said Salcedo's killing left him feeling sad and disappointed. "He died in Durango, the state of my dad."
Like many Mexican Americans, Herrera began going to Mexico when he was very young. He said fitting in there wasn't easy. Even dressed as a norteño or ranchera singer, the moment he spoke, he would reveal himself as being from north of the border.
"Everything changes when I'm singing. I consider my singing 100% Mexican Spanish," he said. "I don't feel they really see me as different when I'm singing."
But as the violence continued to escalate in Mexico, the band made careful decisions about where they would play and which places they would avoid. They decided that many of the northern states, the ones that gave birth to the genre of music the group specializes in, were simply too dangerous.
"I understand why people say they're not going to ever go back," he said. "But I don't agree with people saying they give up on Mexico. You should care about the place of your parents, and try to better that place. There's not just bad things going on in Mexico. I won't give up on it."
http://m.latimes.com/inf/infomo?view=page7&feed:a=latimes_1min&feed:c=localnews&feed:i=51687809&nopaging=1
The Los Angeles Times
17 Jan 2010
Bobby Salcedo grew up in El Monte, his immigrant parents staking the family's future in the working-class suburb that felt worlds away from the Mexican farming towns of their roots.
But like so many Mexican Americans, some of Salcedo's fondest memories were from the winter and summer vacations when his family would pack into the van and drive 1,300 miles south to the lands of their ancestors in Jalisco.
The pace of life slowed there, with children hanging out in town plazas late into the night and young men handing flowers to pretty girls as they strolled in opposing circles. For many young Mexican Americans, that small-town life seemed a panacea compared to the urban stresses of Los Angeles, and to being cooped up at home, playing video games and watching TV.
The connection to Mexico stayed with Salcedo through the years as he became an assistant principal and El Monte school board member. He continued to visit family in Mexico, and did charity work for South El Monte's sister city, Gomez Palacio in Durango state. He met his future wife there.
The 33-year-old Salcedo and his wife returned to her hometown this Christmas to visit family and friends. A few days later, they were at a bar when masked gunmen, suspected members of a drug cartel, burst in and kidnapped Salcedo and five other men. They were shot to death execution-style and dumped near a canal.
The case made headlines as an example of Mexico's out-of-control drug war and prompted mourning in El Monte, where Salcedo was a popular educator and a rising community leader.
But for many Mexican Americans who are deeply rooted to the land of their parents, the killing also underscored the complex relationship they have with Mexico and provoked feelings of anger, disappointment and betrayal.
"Mexico is going through very fast change, so you kind of have in mind all these different images and ideas," said Francisco Balderrama, a professor of history and Chicano studies at Cal State L.A. "A lot of them have passed on into a type of nostalgia."
Balderrama said his youthful memories of Mexico are different from his son's.
Like his son, the professor studied in Mexico as a young man. But his son also volunteered for the Peace Corps in the state of Queretaro. His son experienced the difficulties of getting things done in Mexico, a frustration Balderrama never had to experience. His son also has a more updated perspective on some of the country's dangers.
When Balderrama proposed that his son take a bus to meet him in another state of Mexico, his son said that could be unsafe.
The Salcedo case is a reminder of the new realities, the latest bang in a steady drumbeat of violence that has steadily chipped away at romantic notions that many Mexican Americans had.
"We see what we want to see down there," said Salcedo's brother Juan, 35. "We're not down there, living the daily life of the average Mexican. We're living an American life in a Third World country. Our dollar goes further. We're able to enjoy things that many people there are not able to enjoy."
Childlike nostalgia
Juan Salcedo said he remembers getting into the gray station wagon, later upgraded to a "big ole" white van, at least once a year. They would bring various things people had requested: paper towels, bags of sugar or flour. Their mother Graciela's town was Tototlan, their father's Atotonilco, both near Guadalajara. They would hop around, visiting family and being fed or taking trips to Lake Chapala or a little water park.
As the Salcedo children got older, the trips became less frequent but they never stopped. Two years ago they went to the wedding of their cousin Eddie Macias, who used to tease Bobby and his siblings about their Spanish.
Bobby was "very proud of his Mexican origins, but very proud of being an American," said Macias, 36. "They got to know many other parts of Mexico, not just from a family point of view, but as part of their culture."
Macias said many Mexicans have negative or stereotypical views of Mexican Americans, saying they just work in the U.S. but don't amount to much.
"On occasion, unconsciously at times, I'd defend them," Macias said of his five Salcedo cousins, all of whom graduated from college. "I'm very proud of my family in the U.S. I would say, 'On the contrary, I have family in California, and they contribute to their community. They are examples of how to live for the rest of us. Here and there.' "
American dream
Bobby Salcedo became a teacher in South El Monte and president of the town's sister-city program, which includes Gomez Palacio. He met Betzy Lazos there and married her two years ago.
He helped raise money for orphanages and firefighters and other causes in Gomez Palacio. The violence in Mexico always seemed distant to the Salcedo family.
"I was a nonbeliever," Juan said.
And yet there he was, walking into the back of a "dingy" room in the Gomez Palacio morgue. He said he felt as if the authorities were hiding his brother's body in fear of the cartels. They wanted to quickly cremate the body, he said.
Juan Salcedo had traveled to the city of 240,000 with his mother, who wanted to see her son. But after seeing his brother, Juan said he would let her come into the room only if Bobby's face was covered.
"That first day, I just let her hold his hand," he said.
Fear of the cartels also made it difficult to find a mortuary willing to take care of his brother's body, he said.
As the casket arrived in the cargo hold of a Mexicana commercial jet, about 5,000 people celebrated Salcedo’s life at Mountain View High School in El Monte, where he had been the student body president.
Juan Salcedo said he no longer has a reason to go back to Mexico. He doesn't think he ever will. He doesn't think his parents will either.
There are 31 states in Mexico, and few have endured the spasms of violence seen in places like Durango. But Carlos Salcedo shares his brother's sentiment: "Until the times change, I'll be sad, but I'm not going to go there."
Still, it's not hard to conjure the memories that made it such a special place for Bobby, and for himself.
"It's a beautiful land," Carlos Salcedo said. "I still love it. I can't deny that. I have family there. I can't renounce my family. It's just an unfortunate situation to the ultimate extent."
A community torn
The ripples of Salcedo's death have touched other Mexican American families as well.
Hector Delgado, a South El Monte councilman whose parents also emigrated from the Mexican state of Jalisco, said he was aware of the tales of carnage in Mexico. But it was only after Salcedo was killed that he felt betrayed. For the first time, his parents' country loomed as truly foreign.
"I always loved the fact that my parents taught us to value our roots. I am an American of Mexican descent, and I'm very proud of that," he said. "But this really left a bitter taste in my mouth. It's completely changed my view of Mexico, to be honest. I'm actually ashamed of Mexico right now."
Jorge Andres Herrera, 28, is one of five Mexican American siblings who graduated from or are studying at UCLA. They formed a norteño music group called the Hermanos Herrera and have won awards in Mexico. Herrera said Salcedo's killing left him feeling sad and disappointed. "He died in Durango, the state of my dad."
Like many Mexican Americans, Herrera began going to Mexico when he was very young. He said fitting in there wasn't easy. Even dressed as a norteño or ranchera singer, the moment he spoke, he would reveal himself as being from north of the border.
"Everything changes when I'm singing. I consider my singing 100% Mexican Spanish," he said. "I don't feel they really see me as different when I'm singing."
But as the violence continued to escalate in Mexico, the band made careful decisions about where they would play and which places they would avoid. They decided that many of the northern states, the ones that gave birth to the genre of music the group specializes in, were simply too dangerous.
"I understand why people say they're not going to ever go back," he said. "But I don't agree with people saying they give up on Mexico. You should care about the place of your parents, and try to better that place. There's not just bad things going on in Mexico. I won't give up on it."
http://m.latimes.com/inf/infomo?view=page7&feed:a=latimes_1min&feed:c=localnews&feed:i=51687809&nopaging=1
Sunday, January 3, 2010
For Sick Illegal Immigrants, No Relief Back Home
By KEVIN SACK
The New York Times
January 1, 2010
EJIDO MODELO, Mexico — On the two-hour bus rides from her village on Lake Chapala to a dialysis clinic in Guadalajara, Monica Chavarria’s thoughts would inevitably turn to the husband and son she left behind in Georgia.
A decade after crossing illegally into the United States, Ms. Chavarria returned home in September after learning that Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta was closing the clinic that had provided her with dialysis, at taxpayer expense, for more than a year.
Grady, a struggling charity hospital, had been absorbing multimillion-dollar losses for years because the dialysis clinic primarily served illegal immigrants who were not eligible for government insurance programs.
Hospital officials decided the losses were threatening Grady’s broader mission of serving the region’s indigent population. But before closing the clinic on Oct. 4, they offered to pay to relocate patients to their home countries or other states, and to provide dialysis for three transitional months.
Ms. Chavarria, 34, left quickly with her 8-year-old son, Jose Andres, an American citizen who had never been to Mexico. But she has not found a solution there. Her free treatments have run out, and she can now afford dialysis only by poaching the savings her family has set aside for a transplant.
Her husband, Roberto Barajas, 37, and their 14-year-old son, Eduardo, remained in Georgia so Mr. Barajas could keep working and wire money home for her care.
In separate interviews, one in the farming village of Ejido Modelo, the other in the Atlanta suburb of East Point, Ms. Chavarria and Mr. Barajas each wept while describing their separation after 15 years of marriage.
“I think about them all the time,” said Ms. Chavarria, whose raven hair falls past her waist. “It was the hardest thing to leave without them.”
Mr. Barajas, a stocky road paver, shielded his eyes with his hand. “You don’t know if you’ll be able to see each other again,” he said. “We had always been together, the four of us, and then suddenly they had to go.”
Like other patients repatriated by Grady this fall, Ms. Chavarria gambled that her chances would be better at home. The costs of dialysis and a possible kidney transplant would be considerably lower in Mexico, and she had three siblings there willing to donate an organ.
But it has not worked out that way.
On Dec. 22, she exhausted the 30 free dialysis sessions that Grady had provided at a gleaming private clinic in Guadalajara. On her doctor’s advice, she had been stretching out the treatments, which filter toxins from the blood, by going two times a week instead of the recommended three. Going without dialysis can prove fatal in as little as two weeks, and the twice-a-week regimen has at times left her weak.
Now Ms. Chavarria is dipping into money that Mr. Barajas and other relatives have raised in East Point, which has long been a destination for migrants from Ejido Modelo. They have held raffles and charity soccer tournaments, and placed gold-wrapped donation boxes at taquerias and stores.
The fund-raising proceeds — about $11,000, according to Mr. Barajas — had been earmarked to defray the $20,000 cost of a transplant. So it is a setback each time Ms. Chavarria has to withdraw $100 for a dialysis treatment.
Everywhere, it seems, there are roadblocks to affordable care. The dialysis unit at Guadalajara’s public hospital, which offers heavily discounted prices to the uninsured, has a waiting list that extends for months. Ms. Chavarria is not eligible for the insurance plan known here as Social Security, which is limited to salaried workers. The country’s five-year-old health program for the uninsured, Seguro Popular, does not cover end-stage renal disease.
On top of the cost, the preparations for a kidney transplant can take months. Ms. Chavarria’s brother, Roberto, her first volunteer, recently learned that his own kidneys might not be functioning properly, possibly ruling him out.
When Grady officials decided last summer to close the dialysis clinic for budgetary reasons, the board chairman, A. D. Correll, declared that “people are not going to die on the street because of these actions.” But that pledge may ignore the conditions that await patients who return to Latin America.
Two Grady dialysis patients have died in Mexico since the clinic’s closing, along with one exceedingly ill patient in Atlanta, according to the hospital. A Grady spokesman said the deaths resulted from severe kidney disease and not from insufficient dialysis.
But one of the Grady patients who died in Mexico, Adriana Ríos Fernández, was receiving dialysis only twice a week because her family could not afford a third treatment that might have helped clear her lungs of fluid, her father said. And recent research has found that dialysis patients in Ms. Chavarria’s state of Jalisco, where half of the residents are uninsured, are three times more likely to die than Hispanic dialysis patients in the United States.
“To have end-stage renal disease in Mexico is a tragedy,” said Dr. Guillermo Garcia-Garcia, the lead author of the study. “If you don’t have Social Security, if you don’t have private insurance, you are condemned to die.”
The health care dichotomy in Mexico is stark. At Guadalajara’s Hospital Civil, the teeming public hospital where Dr. Garcia is chief of nephrology, the dialysis unit runs eight stations around the clock, and meets barely half the demand. Doctors there said they see uninsured patients die every week for lack of dialysis. By contrast, the private clinic for the insured where Ms. Chavarria received her Grady-sponsored treatments is operating at one-fourth of its capacity.
During her journeys for dialysis, and her three-and-a-half hours in the chair, Ms. Chavarria daydreams that her family might some day reunite. “I hope it’s soon, while things are all right,” she said, as the bus rolled past fields of cactus and maize.
But it is difficult to block out the grim realities. She knows that she may never be strong enough to cross the border again and that her continued treatment may depend on her husband’s ability to earn $11 an hour in Georgia, rather than $12 a day here as a farmhand.
There are an estimated seven million illegal immigrants in the United States who have no medical coverage. New research shows there may be 5,500 with end-stage renal disease alone. The health care bills in Congress do not address the problem, leaving public hospitals like Grady to treat the immigrants with an ever-fraying safety net.
Most of the 66 immigrants who were dislodged by the Grady clinic’s closing have stayed in Atlanta to take advantage of the hospital’s offer of three months of treatment. They have signed documents stating that they understand that Grady’s financial assistance will end on Sunday, although the hospital’s contract with a commercial dialysis provider lasts until September.
Ten to 13 of the patients appear to have returned to Mexico, with varying success. Pastor Chavez, 37, said his aunt had managed to buy insurance for him. Patricia Pichardo, 36, a mother of three, said she was borrowing from friends to afford her twice-weekly dialysis.
Antonio Camron, 20, said he did not know what he would do after his Grady-sponsored treatments ended in late December. “I have very little time left,” he said.
The repatriation of most of the patients was carried out by MexCare, a California company hired by Grady. As an additional inducement, MexCare offered many patients a year of health insurance to follow their three months of paid dialysis.
But six patients interviewed in Mexico this month said they knew of no steps being taken to obtain meaningful health insurance. One of MexCare’s principals, George Ochoa, said in a brief interview that the company’s offer was to pay for a year of Seguro Popular. That program does not cover dialysis or kidney transplants, according to its national commissioner, Salomón Chertorivski Woldenberg.
Matt Gove, a senior vice president at Grady, said the hospital had not been aware that MexCare was promising patients insurance coverage.
Residents of this farming village on the south shore of Mexico’s largest lake began seeking work in the suburbs near Atlanta’s airport in the mid-1970s. Relatives then summoned relatives until the apartment complexes filled with immigrants. On their days off from construction and landscaping, they reconstituted their social circles and soccer teams as if they had never left home.
During the holidays, when the population of Ejido Modelo swells with homecoming immigrants, the rutted, unpaved streets are dotted with cars bearing Fulton County, Ga., license plates.
Mr. Barajas’s family came in waves. He said he made the first of his three illegal crossings at age 17 in 1989, shortly after meeting Ms. Chavarria at the soccer field in Ejido Modelo. They courted by telephone and mail, and he returned to marry her in the whitewashed village church. After Eduardo was born, she followed him back to East Point.
Their American dream was to save enough to build a three-bedroom house in Ejido Modelo, and then return home. But in February 2008, while working at an auto parts plant near Atlanta, Ms. Chavarria began having trouble breathing. Doctors at Grady diagnosed her kidney failure and placed her on dialysis. She and her husband were astonished there was no charge.
When it came time to leave, the family made the heartbreaking decision that Eduardo would remain in Georgia because he wanted to stay in American schools. Jose Andres, they decided, was too young to leave his mother (and unlike his brother had the advantage of American citizenship). He is struggling in school in Mexico, according to his parents, because he had never learned to write in Spanish.
Mr. Barajas and Ms. Chavarria said their tearful farewells at a McDonald’s restaurant at Grady, where her MexCare escort had suggested they meet. Mr. Barajas’s sister has moved in to their apartment to help care for Eduardo, but the emptiness remains.
“It’s hard to get home from work or some other place and not see her here,” Mr. Barajas said.
Ms. Chavarria is living with her 64-year-old mother, who welcomes each morning by baking tortillas over a wood fire. Other family members live in a compound of small brick houses surrounding a communal courtyard that is planted with citrus and poinsettias. Ms. Chavarria said she was happy to be with her extended family, but was “missing my own.”
She seems fatalistic about the chances for a reunion, in the house they have all but finished.
“I would want good things to happen,” Ms. Chavarria said, “but destiny is not in our hands.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/health/policy/01grady.html?hp
The New York Times
January 1, 2010
EJIDO MODELO, Mexico — On the two-hour bus rides from her village on Lake Chapala to a dialysis clinic in Guadalajara, Monica Chavarria’s thoughts would inevitably turn to the husband and son she left behind in Georgia.
A decade after crossing illegally into the United States, Ms. Chavarria returned home in September after learning that Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta was closing the clinic that had provided her with dialysis, at taxpayer expense, for more than a year.
Grady, a struggling charity hospital, had been absorbing multimillion-dollar losses for years because the dialysis clinic primarily served illegal immigrants who were not eligible for government insurance programs.
Hospital officials decided the losses were threatening Grady’s broader mission of serving the region’s indigent population. But before closing the clinic on Oct. 4, they offered to pay to relocate patients to their home countries or other states, and to provide dialysis for three transitional months.
Ms. Chavarria, 34, left quickly with her 8-year-old son, Jose Andres, an American citizen who had never been to Mexico. But she has not found a solution there. Her free treatments have run out, and she can now afford dialysis only by poaching the savings her family has set aside for a transplant.
Her husband, Roberto Barajas, 37, and their 14-year-old son, Eduardo, remained in Georgia so Mr. Barajas could keep working and wire money home for her care.
In separate interviews, one in the farming village of Ejido Modelo, the other in the Atlanta suburb of East Point, Ms. Chavarria and Mr. Barajas each wept while describing their separation after 15 years of marriage.
“I think about them all the time,” said Ms. Chavarria, whose raven hair falls past her waist. “It was the hardest thing to leave without them.”
Mr. Barajas, a stocky road paver, shielded his eyes with his hand. “You don’t know if you’ll be able to see each other again,” he said. “We had always been together, the four of us, and then suddenly they had to go.”
Like other patients repatriated by Grady this fall, Ms. Chavarria gambled that her chances would be better at home. The costs of dialysis and a possible kidney transplant would be considerably lower in Mexico, and she had three siblings there willing to donate an organ.
But it has not worked out that way.
On Dec. 22, she exhausted the 30 free dialysis sessions that Grady had provided at a gleaming private clinic in Guadalajara. On her doctor’s advice, she had been stretching out the treatments, which filter toxins from the blood, by going two times a week instead of the recommended three. Going without dialysis can prove fatal in as little as two weeks, and the twice-a-week regimen has at times left her weak.
Now Ms. Chavarria is dipping into money that Mr. Barajas and other relatives have raised in East Point, which has long been a destination for migrants from Ejido Modelo. They have held raffles and charity soccer tournaments, and placed gold-wrapped donation boxes at taquerias and stores.
The fund-raising proceeds — about $11,000, according to Mr. Barajas — had been earmarked to defray the $20,000 cost of a transplant. So it is a setback each time Ms. Chavarria has to withdraw $100 for a dialysis treatment.
Everywhere, it seems, there are roadblocks to affordable care. The dialysis unit at Guadalajara’s public hospital, which offers heavily discounted prices to the uninsured, has a waiting list that extends for months. Ms. Chavarria is not eligible for the insurance plan known here as Social Security, which is limited to salaried workers. The country’s five-year-old health program for the uninsured, Seguro Popular, does not cover end-stage renal disease.
On top of the cost, the preparations for a kidney transplant can take months. Ms. Chavarria’s brother, Roberto, her first volunteer, recently learned that his own kidneys might not be functioning properly, possibly ruling him out.
When Grady officials decided last summer to close the dialysis clinic for budgetary reasons, the board chairman, A. D. Correll, declared that “people are not going to die on the street because of these actions.” But that pledge may ignore the conditions that await patients who return to Latin America.
Two Grady dialysis patients have died in Mexico since the clinic’s closing, along with one exceedingly ill patient in Atlanta, according to the hospital. A Grady spokesman said the deaths resulted from severe kidney disease and not from insufficient dialysis.
But one of the Grady patients who died in Mexico, Adriana Ríos Fernández, was receiving dialysis only twice a week because her family could not afford a third treatment that might have helped clear her lungs of fluid, her father said. And recent research has found that dialysis patients in Ms. Chavarria’s state of Jalisco, where half of the residents are uninsured, are three times more likely to die than Hispanic dialysis patients in the United States.
“To have end-stage renal disease in Mexico is a tragedy,” said Dr. Guillermo Garcia-Garcia, the lead author of the study. “If you don’t have Social Security, if you don’t have private insurance, you are condemned to die.”
The health care dichotomy in Mexico is stark. At Guadalajara’s Hospital Civil, the teeming public hospital where Dr. Garcia is chief of nephrology, the dialysis unit runs eight stations around the clock, and meets barely half the demand. Doctors there said they see uninsured patients die every week for lack of dialysis. By contrast, the private clinic for the insured where Ms. Chavarria received her Grady-sponsored treatments is operating at one-fourth of its capacity.
During her journeys for dialysis, and her three-and-a-half hours in the chair, Ms. Chavarria daydreams that her family might some day reunite. “I hope it’s soon, while things are all right,” she said, as the bus rolled past fields of cactus and maize.
But it is difficult to block out the grim realities. She knows that she may never be strong enough to cross the border again and that her continued treatment may depend on her husband’s ability to earn $11 an hour in Georgia, rather than $12 a day here as a farmhand.
There are an estimated seven million illegal immigrants in the United States who have no medical coverage. New research shows there may be 5,500 with end-stage renal disease alone. The health care bills in Congress do not address the problem, leaving public hospitals like Grady to treat the immigrants with an ever-fraying safety net.
Most of the 66 immigrants who were dislodged by the Grady clinic’s closing have stayed in Atlanta to take advantage of the hospital’s offer of three months of treatment. They have signed documents stating that they understand that Grady’s financial assistance will end on Sunday, although the hospital’s contract with a commercial dialysis provider lasts until September.
Ten to 13 of the patients appear to have returned to Mexico, with varying success. Pastor Chavez, 37, said his aunt had managed to buy insurance for him. Patricia Pichardo, 36, a mother of three, said she was borrowing from friends to afford her twice-weekly dialysis.
Antonio Camron, 20, said he did not know what he would do after his Grady-sponsored treatments ended in late December. “I have very little time left,” he said.
The repatriation of most of the patients was carried out by MexCare, a California company hired by Grady. As an additional inducement, MexCare offered many patients a year of health insurance to follow their three months of paid dialysis.
But six patients interviewed in Mexico this month said they knew of no steps being taken to obtain meaningful health insurance. One of MexCare’s principals, George Ochoa, said in a brief interview that the company’s offer was to pay for a year of Seguro Popular. That program does not cover dialysis or kidney transplants, according to its national commissioner, Salomón Chertorivski Woldenberg.
Matt Gove, a senior vice president at Grady, said the hospital had not been aware that MexCare was promising patients insurance coverage.
Residents of this farming village on the south shore of Mexico’s largest lake began seeking work in the suburbs near Atlanta’s airport in the mid-1970s. Relatives then summoned relatives until the apartment complexes filled with immigrants. On their days off from construction and landscaping, they reconstituted their social circles and soccer teams as if they had never left home.
During the holidays, when the population of Ejido Modelo swells with homecoming immigrants, the rutted, unpaved streets are dotted with cars bearing Fulton County, Ga., license plates.
Mr. Barajas’s family came in waves. He said he made the first of his three illegal crossings at age 17 in 1989, shortly after meeting Ms. Chavarria at the soccer field in Ejido Modelo. They courted by telephone and mail, and he returned to marry her in the whitewashed village church. After Eduardo was born, she followed him back to East Point.
Their American dream was to save enough to build a three-bedroom house in Ejido Modelo, and then return home. But in February 2008, while working at an auto parts plant near Atlanta, Ms. Chavarria began having trouble breathing. Doctors at Grady diagnosed her kidney failure and placed her on dialysis. She and her husband were astonished there was no charge.
When it came time to leave, the family made the heartbreaking decision that Eduardo would remain in Georgia because he wanted to stay in American schools. Jose Andres, they decided, was too young to leave his mother (and unlike his brother had the advantage of American citizenship). He is struggling in school in Mexico, according to his parents, because he had never learned to write in Spanish.
Mr. Barajas and Ms. Chavarria said their tearful farewells at a McDonald’s restaurant at Grady, where her MexCare escort had suggested they meet. Mr. Barajas’s sister has moved in to their apartment to help care for Eduardo, but the emptiness remains.
“It’s hard to get home from work or some other place and not see her here,” Mr. Barajas said.
Ms. Chavarria is living with her 64-year-old mother, who welcomes each morning by baking tortillas over a wood fire. Other family members live in a compound of small brick houses surrounding a communal courtyard that is planted with citrus and poinsettias. Ms. Chavarria said she was happy to be with her extended family, but was “missing my own.”
She seems fatalistic about the chances for a reunion, in the house they have all but finished.
“I would want good things to happen,” Ms. Chavarria said, “but destiny is not in our hands.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/health/policy/01grady.html?hp
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Students Sent to Mexico Return to U.S.
Border Patrol: Teens "not deported but given an option to voluntarily go back to Mexico"
By GREG BLEDSOE
Jun 17, 2009
NBC San Diego
The students' temporary visas will expire after a judge decides whether to send them back to Mexico or allow them to stay with documentation.
Three local high school students are back home after being separated from their families for nearly a month.
Students Sent to Mexico Return to U.S.
Border Patrol: Teens 'not deported but given an option to voluntarily go back to Mexico'
It's where they call home that will keep their ordeal going. It all started last month during what the Border Patrol called a routine check of the trolley in Old Town. It ended with 21 people sent back to Mexico, three of them teenagers on their way to school.
The Border Patrol said the students were not deported but given an option to voluntarily go back to Mexico when no legal guardian could come forward. At least some of their family members are in the United States illegally.
Wednesday was an emotional day for three teenagers, including Stephanie Jiminez, who said she was glad to be back with her parents.
"No matter where you stand on the issue of immigration, I think we all have to agree that kids should be with their parents, and it should be a judge that should determine what happens to their case," said immigration activist Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee.
At the trolley stop last month, border agents questioned and detained 21 passengers, including the three teenagers, who, officials said, admitted they were in the country illegally. That was a question they never needed to answer, according to former U.S. Attorney Pete Nunez.
"They don't have to answer the questions, but if you do, you're stuck with what you gave them," Nunez said.
The students are now back in the U.S. on temporary visas.
Mauricio Villanueva was also on his way to school the day he was detained.
"I could see by the acts they were trying to be racist," Villanueva said.
Despite accusations that agents are using racial profiling, agents have every right to be on the trains, Nunez said, and are likely choosing those areas for a reason.
"I'm sure the ICE, Border Patrol, transportation authorities can demonstrate that over the course of history, many people use the trolley that have just entered illegally," Nunez said.
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Students-Sent-to-Mexico-Return-to-US.html
By GREG BLEDSOE
Jun 17, 2009
NBC San Diego
The students' temporary visas will expire after a judge decides whether to send them back to Mexico or allow them to stay with documentation.
Three local high school students are back home after being separated from their families for nearly a month.
Students Sent to Mexico Return to U.S.
Border Patrol: Teens 'not deported but given an option to voluntarily go back to Mexico'
It's where they call home that will keep their ordeal going. It all started last month during what the Border Patrol called a routine check of the trolley in Old Town. It ended with 21 people sent back to Mexico, three of them teenagers on their way to school.
The Border Patrol said the students were not deported but given an option to voluntarily go back to Mexico when no legal guardian could come forward. At least some of their family members are in the United States illegally.
Wednesday was an emotional day for three teenagers, including Stephanie Jiminez, who said she was glad to be back with her parents.
"No matter where you stand on the issue of immigration, I think we all have to agree that kids should be with their parents, and it should be a judge that should determine what happens to their case," said immigration activist Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee.
At the trolley stop last month, border agents questioned and detained 21 passengers, including the three teenagers, who, officials said, admitted they were in the country illegally. That was a question they never needed to answer, according to former U.S. Attorney Pete Nunez.
"They don't have to answer the questions, but if you do, you're stuck with what you gave them," Nunez said.
The students are now back in the U.S. on temporary visas.
Mauricio Villanueva was also on his way to school the day he was detained.
"I could see by the acts they were trying to be racist," Villanueva said.
Despite accusations that agents are using racial profiling, agents have every right to be on the trains, Nunez said, and are likely choosing those areas for a reason.
"I'm sure the ICE, Border Patrol, transportation authorities can demonstrate that over the course of history, many people use the trolley that have just entered illegally," Nunez said.
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Students-Sent-to-Mexico-Return-to-US.html
Thursday, January 15, 2009
No Hard Sign of Reverse Migration
No Hard Sign of Reverse Migration
By NINA BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
January 15, 2009
Despite the worst United States economy in decades and a slowdown in the growth of the nation’s foreign-born population, there is no hard evidence of a return migration tied to the recession, researchers at the Migration Policy Institute said in a report released Wednesday.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that in the last two years more immigrants than usual — legal and illegal — have left the United States for their countries of origin, the report said. But no data exists to verify such a trend, according to the institute, a nonpartisan research organization.
“Substantial return migration of unauthorized immigrants is unlikely unless there’s a protracted and severe worsening of the U.S. economy,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of the institute and a co-author of the report, which draws on historical patterns, demographic studies and “educated speculation.”
Instead of leaving the country, unauthorized immigrants seem to be more likely than natives or legal immigrants to move from state to state in search of work, Mr. Papademetriou said. He said, for example, that complaints about a shortage of agricultural hands had died down, in part because some immigrants previously absorbed by the construction boom had headed back to farm work.
Numbers on annual emigration are skimpy at best; the government abandoned the effort to track departing immigrants in 1957. But even for unauthorized immigrants, whose flows to the United States are far more responsive to the economy than those of legal immigrants or asylum-seekers, the report said, a decision to return home is likely to be a last resort.
The downturn in the United States is also hurting the economies of home countries, and recent currency fluctuations have made remittances in dollars more valuable, especially in Mexico and Central America. And unlike Eastern European workers in Britain and Ireland, who have been returning home in the knowledge that they can easily go back if things change, Latin American immigrants in the United States face growing barriers to re-entry.
Some effects of the economic crisis can be hard to disentangle from those of stricter enforcement, the researchers added, citing stepped up raids and record levels of deportation — about 361,000 in the year ending last Sept. 30, roughly double the number from 2005.
But though anecdotal evidence suggests that some noncitizens are leaving states that have enacted particularly tough laws intended to curb illegal immigration, the report said, initially, at least, their destinations are probably within the United States.
Still, Mr. Papademetriou added in an interview: “Everything hinges on how deep and how long the recession will be. People can try to adjust their expectations, take a job for less pay. But there comes a decision point where you say, If this is going to be as nasty as it appears to be, can I survive? Or can I survive better back home?”
The report cited a growing body of evidence that the historic growth of the foreign-born in the United States had slowed, largely because there has been no growth in the unauthorized immigrant population since 2006 — as was reported last fall by Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center.
In an interview, Mr. Passel agreed that though departures were probably up somewhat, “the cessation of growth in the unauthorized population is due to the decline in arrivals.”
Over time, 20 percent to 40 percent of immigrants to the United States have eventually returned to their country of origin, he said. But even in the Great Depression, he added, when more people left than arrived, that historic shift was driven by the steep drop in immigration, not by any increase in departures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/us/15return.html?hp
By NINA BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
January 15, 2009
Despite the worst United States economy in decades and a slowdown in the growth of the nation’s foreign-born population, there is no hard evidence of a return migration tied to the recession, researchers at the Migration Policy Institute said in a report released Wednesday.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that in the last two years more immigrants than usual — legal and illegal — have left the United States for their countries of origin, the report said. But no data exists to verify such a trend, according to the institute, a nonpartisan research organization.
“Substantial return migration of unauthorized immigrants is unlikely unless there’s a protracted and severe worsening of the U.S. economy,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of the institute and a co-author of the report, which draws on historical patterns, demographic studies and “educated speculation.”
Instead of leaving the country, unauthorized immigrants seem to be more likely than natives or legal immigrants to move from state to state in search of work, Mr. Papademetriou said. He said, for example, that complaints about a shortage of agricultural hands had died down, in part because some immigrants previously absorbed by the construction boom had headed back to farm work.
Numbers on annual emigration are skimpy at best; the government abandoned the effort to track departing immigrants in 1957. But even for unauthorized immigrants, whose flows to the United States are far more responsive to the economy than those of legal immigrants or asylum-seekers, the report said, a decision to return home is likely to be a last resort.
The downturn in the United States is also hurting the economies of home countries, and recent currency fluctuations have made remittances in dollars more valuable, especially in Mexico and Central America. And unlike Eastern European workers in Britain and Ireland, who have been returning home in the knowledge that they can easily go back if things change, Latin American immigrants in the United States face growing barriers to re-entry.
Some effects of the economic crisis can be hard to disentangle from those of stricter enforcement, the researchers added, citing stepped up raids and record levels of deportation — about 361,000 in the year ending last Sept. 30, roughly double the number from 2005.
But though anecdotal evidence suggests that some noncitizens are leaving states that have enacted particularly tough laws intended to curb illegal immigration, the report said, initially, at least, their destinations are probably within the United States.
Still, Mr. Papademetriou added in an interview: “Everything hinges on how deep and how long the recession will be. People can try to adjust their expectations, take a job for less pay. But there comes a decision point where you say, If this is going to be as nasty as it appears to be, can I survive? Or can I survive better back home?”
The report cited a growing body of evidence that the historic growth of the foreign-born in the United States had slowed, largely because there has been no growth in the unauthorized immigrant population since 2006 — as was reported last fall by Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center.
In an interview, Mr. Passel agreed that though departures were probably up somewhat, “the cessation of growth in the unauthorized population is due to the decline in arrivals.”
Over time, 20 percent to 40 percent of immigrants to the United States have eventually returned to their country of origin, he said. But even in the Great Depression, he added, when more people left than arrived, that historic shift was driven by the steep drop in immigration, not by any increase in departures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/us/15return.html?hp
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Tough Economy Making Illegal Immigrants Return to Homelands
Tough Economy Making Illegal Immigrants Return to Homelands
Created: Tuesday, 06 Jan 2009, 7:32 PM CST
Associated Press/FOX 26 News in Houston
HOUSTON -- From home mortgages to car dealerships, financial slumps have taken hit major areas of the U.S economy. Now it appears one controversial sector is also taking a hit: illegal labor.
Texans may be used to seeing undocumented workers arrested at workplace raids and sent back to their home countries. But now some immigration and customs agents say they're getting some unexpected help.
One agent tells Fox News, "I didn't expect to see this day when undocumented people were returning home to Mexico voluntarily?"
Experts and workers say blame it on the economy.
"Recortaron horas, horas de trabajo," one undocumented worker complained of his employer cutting his hours.
Undocumented workers in the stalled construction business were hit especially hard.
While it's impossible to know how many workers are returning home voluntarily, researchers at the Pew Hispanic Center say the number of illegal immigrants has declined since last year. It's a trend that has immigration attorney, Nahid Wilf, concerned.
"The economy runs with these people," he said. "If you don't have these people to work as hard as they do, what are we going to do?"
http://www.myfoxhouston.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=8204485&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1
Created: Tuesday, 06 Jan 2009, 7:32 PM CST
Associated Press/FOX 26 News in Houston
HOUSTON -- From home mortgages to car dealerships, financial slumps have taken hit major areas of the U.S economy. Now it appears one controversial sector is also taking a hit: illegal labor.
Texans may be used to seeing undocumented workers arrested at workplace raids and sent back to their home countries. But now some immigration and customs agents say they're getting some unexpected help.
One agent tells Fox News, "I didn't expect to see this day when undocumented people were returning home to Mexico voluntarily?"
Experts and workers say blame it on the economy.
"Recortaron horas, horas de trabajo," one undocumented worker complained of his employer cutting his hours.
Undocumented workers in the stalled construction business were hit especially hard.
While it's impossible to know how many workers are returning home voluntarily, researchers at the Pew Hispanic Center say the number of illegal immigrants has declined since last year. It's a trend that has immigration attorney, Nahid Wilf, concerned.
"The economy runs with these people," he said. "If you don't have these people to work as hard as they do, what are we going to do?"
http://www.myfoxhouston.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=8204485&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1
Saturday, July 5, 2008
More Mexicans leaving U.S. under duress
By OCTAVIO RIVERA LÓPEZ
Al Día
July 5, 2008
Two hours were enough for José Luis Sánchez and his family to pack their most valuable belongings in two vans – items accumulated in 10 years of living in the Dallas area.
With his wife, children and their suitcases in place, Mr. Sánchez closed the door of his Mesquite apartment for the last time, sat at the wheel of one of the vehicles – his brother drove the other – and hit the road back to his homeland.
So ended his decade-long adventure as an illegal Mexican immigrant in the United States.
According to Mexican consulate officials in Dallas, some 400 immigrant families have told them so far this year that they're going back to Mexico and asked for transfer documents to enroll their children in Mexican schools.
Enrique Hubbard Urrea, Mexican consul general in Dallas, said it is impossible to track every Mexican who leaves the area. But he said the number asking for transfer documents at the consulate is on the rise.
In 2005, the consulate issued 162 such documents; in 2006 it was 199; and last year it was 270. At the current rate, more than twice as many people will leave this year as last, he said.
"There is no doubt the trend indicates that the number is growing," Mr. Hubbard said.
And it isn't happening only in Dallas. At the Mexican consulates in Chicago and Phoenix, too, the number of Mexican families applying for transfer documents for their children has increased.
So far in 2008, more people (752) have visited the Mexican consulate in Phoenix to apply for transfer documents than the total for 2006 (248) and 2007 (330) combined, according to officials there.
According to informal surveys by the Mexican consulate in Dallas, most of those wanting to return to Mexico cite the sudden scarcity of jobs, fear of deportation and uncertainty about obtaining legal resident status any time soon.
In the last few years, and particularly the last few months, Mr. Sánchez struggled to find work. His earnings dwindled as his children grew up and their needs multiplied.
"People like me, if you don't work one day, you worry about how to feed your family the next day," he said. "We as immigrant workers never have stability, even if the economy is doing well. Imagine how things are now."
Also, he said, there is growing anti-immigrant sentiment that he would rather not experience anymore.
"Those of us who live here live depressed all the time, in hiding," he said. "They don't like us here, and those who love us and whom we love are far away. I prefer to go back, even if it means living in poorer conditions."
Mr. Hubbard said tougher enforcement of immigration laws in the last few years hasn't gone unnoticed.
"Some say companies fear hiring people without proper documents," he said.
He said others are seeing authorities detain more people in Irving, Farmers Branch and, to a lesser degree, Carrollton.
Carl Rusnok, spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas, said deportation of Mexican immigrants nationally has grown from 108,900 in 2005 to 136,370 last year.
Mark López, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said he has no reliable data about the number of immigrants returning to Mexico but is not surprised many are going.
"Lower-income people – obviously including immigrants – have been disproportionately affected by the economic downturn," he said.
Two weeks ago, the Pew center said the unemployment rate among Hispanic immigrants reached 7.5 percent in the first quarter of 2008, compared with 5.5 percent during the same quarter of last year.
Mr. Hubbard and Mr. López say the departures could cause problems for cities, especially those that have pushed ordinances hostile to immigrants, because in scaring immigrants away, they are driving away part of their workforce along with its purchasing power.
"If they don't like them as neighbors, they won't like them as consumers, either," said Mr. Hubbard.
But others think that immigrants returning to their countries won't hurt the U.S. economy.
"The country's economy adjusted to the immigrants' presence. No doubt it will adjust to their absence," said Ira Mehlman, national spokesman for FAIR, an organization opposed to illegal immigration.
"That these people are leaving proves what we have been saying for years," he said. "If you begin enforcing the law to prevent them getting what they come here to get, they will go."
Mr. Mehlman said FAIR would like to see more immigrants leave, not because of hard economic times but because of law enforcement.
He said the return of Mexican immigrants to their home country would force the government there to make reforms to jump-start its economy.
"Exporting its unemployed, underemployed citizens or those who are unhappy there allowed the Mexican government to get rid of the pressure to introduce changes for the benefit of their people," Mr. Mehlman said. "Now that their people are going back, perhaps they won't be able to shun their responsibility any longer."
As the moment to leave came, José Luis Sánchez and his family didn't have an idea of the Mexico awaiting them. From their family, they expect everything. From their home country, not much.
"We're going to continue living by the day, for sure," he said. "But psychologically we're going to be better. With our family, without fears, without pressures. It's worth the difficulties."
And, he added, "The American Dream is just that – a dream."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/070508dnmetimmigrants.24395628.html
Al Día
July 5, 2008
Two hours were enough for José Luis Sánchez and his family to pack their most valuable belongings in two vans – items accumulated in 10 years of living in the Dallas area.
With his wife, children and their suitcases in place, Mr. Sánchez closed the door of his Mesquite apartment for the last time, sat at the wheel of one of the vehicles – his brother drove the other – and hit the road back to his homeland.
So ended his decade-long adventure as an illegal Mexican immigrant in the United States.
According to Mexican consulate officials in Dallas, some 400 immigrant families have told them so far this year that they're going back to Mexico and asked for transfer documents to enroll their children in Mexican schools.
Enrique Hubbard Urrea, Mexican consul general in Dallas, said it is impossible to track every Mexican who leaves the area. But he said the number asking for transfer documents at the consulate is on the rise.
In 2005, the consulate issued 162 such documents; in 2006 it was 199; and last year it was 270. At the current rate, more than twice as many people will leave this year as last, he said.
"There is no doubt the trend indicates that the number is growing," Mr. Hubbard said.
And it isn't happening only in Dallas. At the Mexican consulates in Chicago and Phoenix, too, the number of Mexican families applying for transfer documents for their children has increased.
So far in 2008, more people (752) have visited the Mexican consulate in Phoenix to apply for transfer documents than the total for 2006 (248) and 2007 (330) combined, according to officials there.
According to informal surveys by the Mexican consulate in Dallas, most of those wanting to return to Mexico cite the sudden scarcity of jobs, fear of deportation and uncertainty about obtaining legal resident status any time soon.
In the last few years, and particularly the last few months, Mr. Sánchez struggled to find work. His earnings dwindled as his children grew up and their needs multiplied.
"People like me, if you don't work one day, you worry about how to feed your family the next day," he said. "We as immigrant workers never have stability, even if the economy is doing well. Imagine how things are now."
Also, he said, there is growing anti-immigrant sentiment that he would rather not experience anymore.
"Those of us who live here live depressed all the time, in hiding," he said. "They don't like us here, and those who love us and whom we love are far away. I prefer to go back, even if it means living in poorer conditions."
Mr. Hubbard said tougher enforcement of immigration laws in the last few years hasn't gone unnoticed.
"Some say companies fear hiring people without proper documents," he said.
He said others are seeing authorities detain more people in Irving, Farmers Branch and, to a lesser degree, Carrollton.
Carl Rusnok, spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas, said deportation of Mexican immigrants nationally has grown from 108,900 in 2005 to 136,370 last year.
Mark López, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said he has no reliable data about the number of immigrants returning to Mexico but is not surprised many are going.
"Lower-income people – obviously including immigrants – have been disproportionately affected by the economic downturn," he said.
Two weeks ago, the Pew center said the unemployment rate among Hispanic immigrants reached 7.5 percent in the first quarter of 2008, compared with 5.5 percent during the same quarter of last year.
Mr. Hubbard and Mr. López say the departures could cause problems for cities, especially those that have pushed ordinances hostile to immigrants, because in scaring immigrants away, they are driving away part of their workforce along with its purchasing power.
"If they don't like them as neighbors, they won't like them as consumers, either," said Mr. Hubbard.
But others think that immigrants returning to their countries won't hurt the U.S. economy.
"The country's economy adjusted to the immigrants' presence. No doubt it will adjust to their absence," said Ira Mehlman, national spokesman for FAIR, an organization opposed to illegal immigration.
"That these people are leaving proves what we have been saying for years," he said. "If you begin enforcing the law to prevent them getting what they come here to get, they will go."
Mr. Mehlman said FAIR would like to see more immigrants leave, not because of hard economic times but because of law enforcement.
He said the return of Mexican immigrants to their home country would force the government there to make reforms to jump-start its economy.
"Exporting its unemployed, underemployed citizens or those who are unhappy there allowed the Mexican government to get rid of the pressure to introduce changes for the benefit of their people," Mr. Mehlman said. "Now that their people are going back, perhaps they won't be able to shun their responsibility any longer."
As the moment to leave came, José Luis Sánchez and his family didn't have an idea of the Mexico awaiting them. From their family, they expect everything. From their home country, not much.
"We're going to continue living by the day, for sure," he said. "But psychologically we're going to be better. With our family, without fears, without pressures. It's worth the difficulties."
And, he added, "The American Dream is just that – a dream."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/070508dnmetimmigrants.24395628.html
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