Thread: Looking North With Pride, Fear

http://www.latimes.com

Looking North With Pride, Fear
By Richard Boudreaux
Times Staff Writer

May 1, 2006

TEOCELO, Mexico — Seven years of mopping floors, wiping tables and scrubbing toilets in Arizona restaurants earned Armando Andrade two-thirds of a dream.

His wages were enough to build concrete-block homes for his wife and his mother in their impoverished community here. Three more years of work, he figured, and his wife could open a little convenience store.

The U.S. Border Patrol had a different plan.

Several weeks ago, the 40-year-old illegal immigrant was seized while walking to work and deported. Later, a cousin reported that law enforcement agents in Tucson had taken Andrade's most prized possession: receipts showing he had paid U.S. taxes for years, evidence that might have helped him eventually earn a permit to work legally in the United States.

As immigrants rally across the United States to demand legal status and citizenship, their movement evokes pride and alarm in poor Mexican communities such as Teocelo, where livelihoods and ambitions revolve around the promise of jobs north of the border.

The pride is understandable. The alarm comes from a sense here that what happened to Andrade will become more frequent, that life is going to get a lot tougher for illegal immigrants in the United States before it gets better.

"I see the marches on TV, and they scare me," said Leonardo Lerio, a 63-year-old community leader who has advised his four sons working illegally in Mississippi not to take part. "I worry about two things: First, the authorities will identify all those demonstrators and send them home. Then, if they legalize some immigrants and not others, my boys might not qualify, and they too will be sent home."

The stakes are high enough here that most people have a basic grasp of the arguments in America's monumental debate over immigration and the various proposals before Congress.

One passed by the House in December would speed up deportations and criminalize illegal immigrants, a crackdown sought by critics who say those workers depress wages and take jobs from Americans. A bill to give most undocumented workers a chance to stay legally and oblige others to leave collapsed in the Senate last month but has been revived.

Mexican President Vicente Fox has applauded the Senate bill as a step toward the kind of U.S. immigration reform for which he has lobbied since he was elected in 2000.

But because all proposals before Congress call for tighter enforcement of immigration law, Mexican officials have quietly begun to ponder the consequences of a less penetrable border or stepped-up deportations of their citizens.

"It would be a tremendous burden if all our people were sent home," said Rogelio Martinez, Teocelo's mayor. "The pie isn't big enough."

Teocelo does not look like a place that could sustain many inhabitants without the earnings migrants send home to its farming hamlets, which dot the Sierra Madre Oriental foothills south of Jalapa in Veracruz state.

Power blackouts are frequent, and bicycles outnumber cars on rutted dirt streets. Phones are so scarce that migrants in the United States communicate with relatives here mainly by calling Radio Teocelo, 1490 AM on the dial, and passing personal greetings over the air.

Prices for coffee and mangoes, traditional cash crops here, plunged in the 1980s and never recovered. Later, hundreds of people lost their jobs when the Mexican government sold off heavily subsidized sugar refineries. Other enterprises collapsed along with the Mexican peso in 1994.

Men looking for work slipped away, quietly swelling the ranks of undocumented immigrants who now number as many as 12 million in the United States. From Teocelo they hop on buses and head toward the Texas border, usually leaving wives and children behind.

They pay guides $1,200 or more to lead them out of Mexico on foot along desert trails and across the Rio Grande.

From Texas, some turn left and head for Southern California, Arizona and Utah. Most turn right and find work in small towns from Louisiana to North Carolina.

The exodus from Veracruz has remained steady in recent months, apparently unaffected by any expectations of changes in U.S. policy, said Manuel Rosete Pozos, the state official who keeps track of migrants abroad. U.S. immigration officials report a slight increase this year in attempted illegal border crossings.

"Migration from here is driven by economic need on both sides of the border," Rosete said. "At least once a week, a bus full of migrants, 30 to 40 at a time, leaves our state," headed for jobs in the United States.

The outflow reduced Teocelo's population from 17,500 in 1994 to about 15,000 in the 2000 census.

The hamlet that Andrade returned to from Arizona is typical in many ways of hundreds of migrant-exporting communities across Mexico. One hundred and eighty of its people have gone to work in the United States, leaving 1,244 behind, said Rosalba Cortes Viveros, a University of Tlaxcala researcher studying the settlement; of 365 households, one in three has a member working in the United States.

In conversations on dirt porches and in cramped kitchens, people here say they would welcome any new U.S. law that raises their relatives from the shadows of illegality. More than that, they want their own leaders to create more and better jobs to keep people from migrating in the first place.

Laborers earn little more than $50 to $80 a week here picking and selling crops, clearing fields, peddling shrimp from the Juntas River or building concrete-block houses that migrants in the U.S. order up to replace the cardboard and bamboo shacks that once prevailed.

Standing bare-chested in the doorway of his modest new home, Andrade acknowledged that the construction boomlet had made jobs here more abundant than when he first left in 1999. But he said they don't pay enough to save for the convenience store he wants to build, so he's thinking of sneaking back into Arizona, where he was earning more in a day than he can get here in a week.

"I think I could get my old job back," he said.

Victor Peña, 35, returned home recently for only the third time since 1999 to visit his wife and three children during a voluntary break from waiting on tables at a U.S.-owned Mexican restaurant in Sumter, S.C.

He said he would welcome a guest-worker program like the one proposed in the Senate bill, because being able to cross the border legally would enable him to visit home more often.

Perched on a stool outside his house, he said he wanted to send his kids to Mexican universities and had no desire to settle permanently in the United States.

"I don't want to keep violating the laws of your country," he told an American visitor. "But I have worked at the same restaurant there for seven years. I want my job to be recognized.

"A lot of us are waiting to see what comes out of your Congress and what will be achieved by this movement" for immigrant rights, Peña said. "If something good comes of all this, I will go back to my job in South Carolina. But if my compañeros there start getting into trouble with the law, I don't know what I'll do."

TEOCELO, Mexico — Seven years of mopping floors, wiping tables and scrubbing toilets in Arizona restaurants earned Armando Andrade two-thirds of a dream.

His wages were enough to build concrete-block homes for his wife and his mother in their impoverished community here. Three more years of work, he figured, and his wife could open a little convenience store.

The U.S. Border Patrol had a different plan.

Well, BOO-HOO, too bad, shouldn't have entered here illegally.

a cousin reported that law enforcement agents in Tucson had taken Andrade's most prized possession: receipts showing he had paid U.S. taxes for years, evidence that might have helped him eventually earn a permit to work legally in the United States.

How unfortunate for him. Since he was arrested on his way to work, he must have been carrying all those documents with him, or maybe those evil ICE agents broke into his house and stole his documents.