Thread: C. America migrants traveling in Mexico

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0508immig08.html

C. America migrants traveling in Mexico

Chris Kraul
Los Angeles Times
May. 8, 2005 12:00 AM

CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico - The flow of Central American immigrants bound for the United States has surged 25 percent or more this year, say government and aid agency officials, who point to the sharp climb in deportations, injury reports and assistance needs as the basis for their estimates.

Confronted with increasingly bleak economies in their home countries and rising gang violence, the immigrants, many of them young, are heading north through Mexico at a rate that Mexican and Honduran authorities agree has gone through the roof.

Alex Pacheco, the Honduran consul in the Mexican border city of Tapachula, about 20 miles north of here, says the number of stranded, broke and injured Hondurans he has helped is up 30 percent from when he arrived in late 2003. advertisement

"There is no reason to hide it. It's grown at an exaggerated pace," said Pachecho, who thinks the workload and the tales of woe have aged him prematurely. "The reason is simple: The majority of the countries they come from are in big trouble."

One such immigrant is Marlon David, an 18-year-old Honduran interviewed as he waited to hop the northbound Chiapas-Mayab railroad line with about 200 other youths. Neither police nor railroad officials made any apparent effort to stop them from hitching rides atop empty boxcars and fuel tankers.

His goal: earning money in Florida and sending it back to his mother.

"Necessity forces me to go," David said, adding there is no work in his hometown, Tegucigalpa. He had crossed over into Mexico earlier that morning from Guatemala.

According to immigration experts' estimates, Central and South Americans still make up less than 2 percent of all undocumented immigrants that enter the United States' southern border. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants - nearly half a million per year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center - are Mexicans.

Even with the increase, the number of Central American migrants crossing into Mexico in hopes of making it to the United States is still a "drop in the bucket" compared with Mexican undocumented immigrants, said migrant advocate Claudia Smith of Oceanside, Calif.

But their percentage of the overall number of undocumented workers is slowly rising, if deportations are an indicator, said Andy Adame, spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in Tucson. The number of Central and South Americans caught and returned home in his region rose to 1.7 percent of all those apprehended from 1.5 percent the year before. Adame said the majority were from Central, not South, America.

In addition to factors at home driving Central Americans northward, the United States has become a more realistic goal for many of the migrants. Enough family members and friends now have made it to the United States that a financial and psychological safety net is waiting for them.

and Folks..................CAFTA & FTAA WOULD MAKE THIS LEGAL! This is why the heavy influx of C. Americans now.......they're doing exactly what the Mexicans have done in order to lay their stakes ahead of the future rush of their brethren

This is serious stuff!!