Thread: Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North

Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North

Economic, demographic and social changes in Mexico are suppressing illegal immigration as much as the poor economy or legal crackdowns in the United States.


By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: July 6, 2011




Antonio Orozco, center, with his sons Andrés, left, and Samuel, in Agua Negra, Mexico. Many Orozcos have crossed the border for work. View the Slide Show »

AGUA NEGRA, Mexico — The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.

A growing body of evidence suggests that a mix of developments — expanding economic and educational opportunities, rising border crime and shrinking families — are suppressing illegal traffic as much as economic slowdowns or immigrant crackdowns in the United States.

Here in the red-earth highlands of Jalisco, one of Mexico’s top three states for emigration over the past century, a new dynamic has emerged. For a typical rural family like the Orozcos, heading to El Norte without papers is no longer an inevitable rite of passage. Instead, their homes are filling up with returning relatives; older brothers who once crossed illegally are awaiting visas; and the youngest Orozcos are staying put.

“I’m not going to go to the States because I’m more concerned with my studies,â€

Illegal Immigration is no longer a problem. Go back to sleep American fools. They are staying home and all is well now ...

Ok, does anyone buy into the propaganda?

Men from small town in Oaxaca struggle to live, work and support families amid anti-Mexican tide
BY Erica Pearson
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, July 5th 2011, 4:00 AM


The small-town life that Mexican migrants left behind offers quite a contrast to busy Port Richmond, Staten Island.

SAN MARCOS NATIVIDAD, Mexico - This tiny town in the southern state of Oaxaca, reachable only by donkey 15 years ago, has nearly emptied of young men.

Most have left for a single neighborhood on Staten Island, working as day laborers and sending money back home.

Many speak only their indigenous Mixtec language and no Spanish, much less English - and they cling to their traditions while toiling in Port Richmond.

Felimon Basurto, 26, made the journey, then returned to San Marcos two years ago, bringing back a snapshot of the Statue of Liberty taken from the ferry.

"I missed my mom too much. When I would talk to her on the phone, she would cry and cry, asking when would we return," Basurto said.

He hopes to return to Staten Island, but for now, he and his wife, Maria Montiel, 24, sell Doritos, notebooks and yarn at the family variety store, where a Justin Bieber poster graces a cinder-block wall and chickens scurry underfoot.

Five of Basurto's siblings and about 100 others from a town with only several hundred residents are still in Port Richmond.

They're part of the most recent wave of Mexican immigrants who come to New York from poor villages in the rural Mixteca region, a triangle of dry highland where the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero meet.

An estimated 25,000 Mixtecos live in New York City, CUNY Graduate Center research found. A growing number of Oaxacans have moved to Port Richmond and East Harlem.

"They are coming from tiny little dots on the map in Mexico," said Gonzalo Mercado, executive director of El Centro del Inmigrante in Port Richmond.

"The people here play a critical role in their families basically surviving."


Streets of San Marcos Natividad are mostly empty, aside from women and stray chickens. The majority of the men have immigrated to Port Richmond for day labor work.

More than a quarter of the immigrants Mercado works with are Mixtecos from Oaxaca. Although many take Spanish literacy classes, those who know only Mixtec struggle to be understood by police or doctors.

The San Marcos families have banded together in Port Richmond, where a core group keeps up traditions like a procession for a patron saint festival.

They've created a group called La Fundacion Mixteca to help their town from afar.

For the past five years, a troupe of musician brothers billed as Los Hermanos Gonzalez have been renting out party halls, belting out ritmo oaxaqueno songs and filling San Marcos' coffers with the ticket money.

They've built a town hall but dream of a park inside the barren, rocky church courtyard, books for the schools and a health clinic.

In the dusty village, where farmers plant corn only in rainy years, residents feel abandoned by all but family in America.

Families used to travel to far-off Sinaloa state to spend months working vegetable fields, but those jobs have dried up.

"Here, you can't make enough to be able to afford a pizza," Basurto said.

His father and older brother, Rogelio, were the first to leave for Staten Island, in 1993.

Rogelio, 33, was just 14 when he left. He returned to the town for several years, even serving as mayor, but has spent the past three years back on Staten Island.

His wife, Maria Luisa Vasquez, 29, works the steep cornfields with her husband's family and cares for their three kids.

"It's hard," Vasquez said. "I have to be both a father and mother. And he doesn't say when he's coming back."

Vasquez and her mother-in-law walked slowly behind a pair of oxen stepping in unison, dropping three seeds at a time from an orange bucket into freshly plowed ground.


'Felt like a jail sometimes'

For Felimon Basurto, after six years in Staten Island, returning to the town - where dowries are required for marriage and a mentally ill resident is bound hand and foot in a hut - was an adjustment.

"It seemed so small. We got here and there are so few people!" he said.

But Basurto, who was spooked by attacks on Mexicans on Staten Island, feels safer where he grew up.

"It felt like a jail to me sometimes. ... I was afraid of being attacked. They don't like Mexicans," he said.

"Here, you just grab your burro, and you can climb all the way up there, up to the mountain. And there? Where are you even going to get a burro? You step out onto Port Richmond Ave. and where can you go?"

epearson@nydailynews.com

Read more: http://www.tiny9.com/u/2617
Brothers' toil builds home for those they left behind in Mexico
BY Erica Pearson
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, July 5th 2011, 4:00 AM


Rafael Gonzalez, wife Alicia, baby Leslie and mom Elena (r.) at home in Mexico built with funds sent from kin on Staten Island.

A grand house with high ceilings, a sweeping balcony and a columned porch sits nearly finished in San Marcos.

It's been built with money sent to the Mexican town by Arnulfo Gonzalez, 36, a construction worker who lives with four younger brothers in Port Richmond, S.I.

Their youngest brother, Rafael, 21, was left behind to care for their mom and all of the livestock - and wonders if they're ever coming back.

ALSO SEE: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

"I'm sad to be here alone," he said. "I'm the last one, I guess, of the family."

He, his wife, Alicia, and their baby daughter have been using just one of the home's seven rooms.

It's a rare tall building in a town that was once all thatched palm houses and where most families have built simple cement one-story homes with money sent from Staten Island.

The nearly empty house in San Marcos could not be more different from the busy three-story Port Richmond home that Rafael's brothers - members of the band Los Hermanos Gonzalez - share with their families.

They've been on Staten Island between eight and 17 years and say they plan to return to Mexico, even though their kids are growing up New Yorkers who speak English, Spanish and Mixtec.

Arnulfo Gonzalez said he's come a long way from his first U.S. kitchen job, where he struggled to learn Spanish.

"I didn't know what spinach was - or broccoli!" he said. "They told me - 'Go get the spinach,' and I just stood there until they insulted me," he said.

"How was I supposed to know what mashed potato is if I've never seen it? And then we had to relearn the words for everything."

On the wall of their Port Richmond home hangs a poster, designed by one of the brothers, that illustrates the bond between San Marcos and Staten Island.

The collage shows San Marcos with the New York skyline behind it. The Empire State Building looks like it's just over the next hill.

Arnulfo Gonzalez (below) thinks of his family back home.

"I'm sure they are worried and wondering when we're coming back," he said. "Here you can triumph. But you can also lose yourself."



http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2 ... ehind.html

Mexico did have a baby boom in the 60s-70s - I had read about that elsewhere.

Large single family houses are a poor initial investment in a place where there is no economy to support it. The cost of completing and maintaining it requires having the size income that is easier to get here. It is better building chicken coops or a clothing factory.

As U.S. Gets More Like Mexico, More Mexicans Stay in Mexico



By David North, July 6, 2011


The New York Times' lead story this morning made an interesting case for what it sees as a decline in illegal migration from Mexico to the U.S.

But it played down a central element of the picture: the fact that the U.S., with its widespread poverty and huge wages gaps between the rich and the poor, is rapidly getting to be more like Mexico than in the past, so the Mexican poor no longer have as many reasons to want to come here. Being sensible, they stay home.

In addition to that, the article frays a bit when parts of it are examined by a microscope.

The report by Damien Cave was obviously months in the making, and I, for one, am grateful that the Times still engages in expensive investigative reporting. The report of the truly remarkable drop in Mexican birth rates was particularly valuable, as were the reports of expanding educational and economic opportunities in that country.

The whole tone of the long article, however, was that improving conditions in Mexico were the main reasons for the drop in emigration, and that U.S. enforcement activities had relatively little to do with the trend. So, the article seemed to be hinting, the U.S. need not do anything drastic like really enforcing the immigration law. If that is the implication, I disagree with it.

When the Times does a big story, like this one, it always makes sure that there are photographs and charts to illustrate and strengthen it. Today's report was no exception.

Across a full page inside the paper was a chart headed "A Decline in Illegal Immigration from Mexico." It looked like a mountain range in profile, and ran from 1950 until 2009, an impressive time series with a steep and steady decline from 1999 to 2009.

If, like most readers, you just let the image sink it, it appeared persuasive. It may well reflect a bit of reality, but a careful reading of the fine print and the use of a little math make it far less convincing.

First, let's see what we are measuring. What the graph estimates is number of Mexicans entering U.S. illegally for the first time and not the accumulated Mexican illegal alien population in the U.S. (It's like big business talking about the H-1B program in terms of 65,000 first-time admissions a year, not the probable H-1B population of 650,000 I estimated earlier this year.)

This then is a flow estimate, and flows of people are always more volatile than total population figures; if you chart flows, you are sure to get more mountains and valleys than if you study total populations. And total populations are much more important than yearly fluctuations in flows. So the whole chart must be taken with a grain of salt, which is not included in the Times recipe.

Next you need to read the fine print in the text. The chart is not based on anything as massive as the annual arrests of illegals at the Mexican border, which are also down in the recent years. It is based on a series of annual interviews, over the years, with 800 to1,000 households, I think in a single Mexican state, where emigration has been a major factor over the years.

Then you have to read the fine print in the chart itself. The range, along the left side of the chart is from (implied) 0.0 percent to 1.0 percent (which is stated); when you have one percent of 1,000, what do you have? Well you have 10 individuals. The chart, in short, shows the first time illegal emigration from these 1,000 households as ranging from zero to 12.

Supposing both the mythical Carlos and Pedro, young cousins from two of the surveyed households, both come down with terrible colds at the start of the migration season and do not make their first migration that year, well, the percentage would drop from say 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent and the chart would show a very sharp drop.

One should not project migration or population trends using such a tiny base, or better, one should use several statistical methods, with this as simply one of them.

Another frayed piece of the picture is in Cave's rather heightened emphasis on a (really tiny) reason for the decline in illegal migration: the expansion of the H-2A nonimmigrant program for workers from Mexico. The text adjacent to one of the lesser graphs in the article, says: "nearly 250,000 Mexicans received H-2A (visas for agricultural guest workers) in the years between 2006 and 2010 – a 75 percent increase over the previous five-year period."

Interesting, but 50,000 a year in annual admissions is not terribly important when you realize that the total estimated illegal Mexican population in 2009, according to the Office of Immigration Statistics was 6,650,000, or 133 times the number of H-2A annual admissions from Mexico.

Further, my experience with the post-WWII Bracero program would suggest that the 50,000 coming in one year consisted of about 40,000 repeaters at most, and 10,000 or so new people. (I was Assistant to the Secretary of Labor for Farm Labor in the mid-1960s.)

Incidentally, Cave said that the H-2A program was "one of the few visa categories without a cap."

Hardly. There are, as we have noted, oodles of programs allowing nonimmigrants to work in the U.S. with a variety of letter and number combinations (F-1, H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, J-1, L-1, O-1, R-1 etc.), most with little or no protections in place either for the alien workers or for the resident workers they often displace. Some parts of the H-1B program for high tech workers, and all of the H-2B (non-skilled, non-ag workers) program, do have ceilings, the rest do not. It is the programs for immigrants, a totally different category, where numerical ceilings are more likely.

In summary, an interesting piece of work but its effect – if not its purpose – is to say, "Don't worry America, things are taking care of themselves."

Link for story above As U.S. Gets More Like Mexico, More Mexicans Stay in Mexico

http://www.cis.org/north/as-U.S.-gets-more-like-mexico

Does anyone with any sense at all still believe what BS the media puts out there? It should be obvious by now that they are on the payroll of one party or the other, take your pick. They have been bought and paid for. After watching CNN and FOX for some time it has become increasingly clear that they all are lawyers. That alone should tell you something. Did any one of you ever know of a lawyer that cannot be bought?

State Dept. Policy: No Mexican Left Behind
By Jessica Vaughan, July 7, 2011

The recent New York Times article celebrating the supposed end of illegal Mexican migration to the United States offers little to inform a discussion of the illegal immigration problem, but does usefully illustrate the extent to which legal and illegal immigration feed off of one another. (See here for my colleague David North's take on the article.) And, the article also recounts yet another example of the Obama administration's policy of amnesty by abuse of executive authority, this time by the State Department.

Despite the improvements in Mexican living conditions described in the article (which some experts have questioned), legal immigration from that country continues to climb steadily. This suggests that the level of legal immigration has as much, if not more, to do with our open-ended green card admissions policies as it does with marginal changes in conditions in sending countries. Nearly half of all immigrants are admitted in categories that have no numerical limits, and these admissions have grown rapidly in the last decade. Overall, green cards issued in the unlimited categories – new spouses, the spouse's children, and parents of (often new) citizens – jumped 76 percent since 2000, as I reported in a paper earlier this year. The growth was boosted considerably by previous amnesties for illegal aliens, as the legalized residents sponsored family members, who in turn sponsored other family members, etc. These unlimited categories fuel chain migration and also contribute to serious labor market distortions and fiscal costs.

As if there is not yet enough migration from Mexico, under the Obama administration, senior State Department officials in Mexico apparently are stretching their consular authority in order to help large numbers of unqualified and/or ineligible applicants obtain visas. The State Department's admissionist bias is well known, but it is still startling to see such clueless arrogance appear in print. The Times article describes how Edward McKeon, the top consular official in Mexico, has proudly dismantled several safeguards that exist in visa law to prevent various types of immigration scofflaws from getting into the United States. First, he decided that consular officers should "de-emphasize" an applicant's economic situation when adjudicating visitor visas, since it costs only three pesos to cross into the United States (with a visa). Back to ConGen for you, Mr. McKeon – like it or not, the law says that visa officers are obliged to evaluate an applicant's likelihood of return to Mexico, not whether they can afford the trip. But by his standards, nearly everyone in Mexico would qualify, never mind the long tradition of illegal migration.

So as a result of this dubious re-interpretation of the law, now nearly every applicant in Mexico does qualify for a U.S. visa. The refusal rate for short-term visitor visas in Mexico has dropped from the already-generous 32 percent down to 11 percent. This puts Mexico's refusal rate on par with Belgium, Swaziland, and Saudi Arabia (well, that could be another problem!). This is not a small matter; visa overstayers represent 30 to 40 percent of all illegal immigrants, and the single largest source of overstayers is Mexico. Consular officers issue more than 1 million temporary visas to Mexicans each year, mostly in the form of Border Crossing Cards. Border inspectors do not authenticate the identity of BCC holders, unlike visitors from most of the rest of the world, so the cards are frequently abused by imposters; anyone can rent or borrow one from a storefront smuggling outfit or a relative. Since we have no functioning exit recording system, DHS has no way of knowing how many or who overstays or uses them as a de facto work permit or green card. The implications for homeland security and cross-border criminal activity are huge, but the State Department continues to operate as if the BCCs are some kind of entitlement program. For more on this problem, see an earlier blog of mine.

That's not all – to make a guestworker program "more attractive" for migrants and their employers to bypass U.S. workers, Mr. McKeon reportedly did away with a $100 visa fee for agricultural workers, apparently believing that this program should be subsidized by taxpayers. He intriguingly claims a "bias toward people who sweat at work" – but I guess not toward those millions of Americans who are sweating while looking for work.

Not only that, in his zeal to turn the consular section into an international social services agency, Mr. McKeon apparently has directed his staff to assist those who had been in the U.S. illegally to avoid the penalties that would otherwise ensue and thus return to the States on new temporary visas that they should not be eligible for; in other words, a kind of amnesty. According to the article, consular staff in Mexico now are filing ineligibility waiver applications on behalf of former illegal workers so they can return. These workers need a waiver because in 1996 Congress passed a law saying that those who live in the United States illegally and then depart are barred from receiving a new visa for either three or ten years, depending on how long they were here illegally. For more details, see my 2003 Backgrounder on the subject. (By the way, this bar is one of the reasons the waiting list for certain family green card visas has declined in recent years – a significant share of the applicants are illegal aliens.)

This waiver supposedly is available only to illegal aliens with a legal-resident spouse or parent who would suffer "extreme hardship" if separated. It is highly unlikely that large numbers of illegal Mexican farmworkers would be in that situation even though, according to the article, most of the 52,000 Mexican agricultural workers were able to qualify for re-entry on this basis. Perhaps someone in Congress should ask for an audit of these cases to make sure the law was properly applied, and focus on how the operating definition of "extreme hardship" has evolved in recent years. (It does fluctuate from officer to officer. For many years the waivers were adjudicated by a long-time USCIS civil servant who had an approval rate of 90 percent. When I visited our consulate in Ciudad Juarez two years ago, I learned that he had been replaced, the standards had been revisited, and the new guy was approving "only" 75 percent, much to the chagrin of the local immigration bar. Now the approval rate is reportedly back up to 85 percent; it would be interesting to know what has changed since then.)

No doubt the Times his article will be widely cited by open borders proponents as "evidence" that we no longer need immigration law enforcement or border security. Hopefully it also will spur a long overdue examination of the rationale, effects, and management of our immigrant and non-immigrant visa programs.

http://cis.org/vaughan/no-mexican-left-behind