Thread: More Mexican Minors and Women Migrate North

http://www.mexidata.info/id751.html

Monday, January 16, 2006

More Mexican Minors and Women Migrate North

Frontera NorteSur

Youth Migration on the Rise

In their report "The Truncated Hope," Mexican researchers Blanca Villaseñor and Jose Moreno Mena provide additional evidence about the increased migration of Mexican youth to the United States. Drawing on data culled from the experiences of undocumented youthful migrants detained or sheltered in the Tijuana and Mexicali regions of Baja California, the authors report big leaps in teenage migration after 1996, citing for example a Mexican National Migration Institute statistic that revealed overall youth migration increased 50 percent from 1999 to 2000.

"A great number of adolescents, males as well as females, are joining the migratory process," write the authors of The Truncated Hope. "This fact is of great importance, because due to their (youth) they become one of the most vulnerable groups, and without the most basic rights."

While the total numbers of youthful migrants are sketchy, Villaseñor and Moreno give details about the gender, educational background, labor experience and motivations of adolescent migrants. More than 90 percent of the group examined – 92 percent to be precise – were between 15 and 17 years of age. Most came from traditional migrant expelling states – Michoacan, Jalisco and Guanajuato, but "more and more states from the country’s south are turning into zones of expulsion," according to Villaseñor and Moreno.

The two authors report that most teenagers who travel to the U.S. have limited formal education, with some differences between males and females. For example, only 24 percent of males and 27 percent of females finished middle school. A striking one percent of each gender group completed high school. Before traveling to the U.S., 65 percent of the migrants worked and 34 percent went to school. Although a 66.1 percent majority said they went to the U.S. to find better working and living conditions, almost 20 percent departed to join relatives and friends already in “El Norte.� Nearly seven percent left their homes to study north of the border, while 5.5 percent gave nebulous reasons, alluding to the Hollywood-created Land of Milk and Honey.

Once inside the U.S., 60 percent of the youth found jobs as agricultural laborers, service workers, gardeners, etc. The report coincides in some respects with a recent study from the Pew Foundation that contended most Mexicans who travel to the U.S. already had jobs and are moving north simply in search of higher wages. However, Villaseñor and Moreno say unemployment is a growing factor. They cite statistics from Mexico's National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics that report more than 1.5 million people over the age of 14 years look for work but cannot find it.

The two researchers note that Mexico needs to create more than 1 million jobs per year, but only about 400,000 jobs a year were created during each year of the Fox administration. An estimated 515,000 jobs were lost in Mexico during the first three months of 2005, a figure "without precedent in Mexico," according to the report.

Villaseñor and Moreno say that for Mexican youth, as well as adults, migration has been one of three "escape valves" in their country. The other two are drug trafficking, and the informal economy, an activity frequently characterized by the street-side sale of pirated recordings or illegally imported goods from the Far East and elsewhere.



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As my "wonderful" congressman Raul Grijalva puts it, it's "Family Unity".

We need to teach them that family unity needs to take place in their home country.

yep one of those minors- now Dead- well his family is sueing amtrack for 1.3 million dollars- in oregon- why? cause he - the 20 year old decided to race a train on his bike and got killeded XXXXXXX