Thread: Reverse migration: Economy forces some Mexican nationals to

Reverse migration: Economy forces some Mexican nationals to return home, with varying emotions

10:58 PM PDT on Saturday, May 23, 2009

By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise, Cotija, Mexico

Mexican immigrant Enrique Andrade quickly began searching for work after the Inland RV factory where he had worked for three years closed in September.

He had never had trouble finding a job in his 13 years in the United States. But after dozens of phone calls and applications, he realized this time was different.

"You see it in the news: There's no work," Andrade said in Spanish. "I knew everything was messed up."

Left with no good options, Andrade moved from Perris to the same simple house in Cotija, Mexico, that he left behind for what he hoped would be a prosperous new life in the United States.

After four decades of massive immigration that increased the Mexican-born population in the United States from less than 800,000 in 1970 to more than 12 million today, job losses are pushing some Mexicans back across the border.

No one knows how many immigrants have returned. But experts expect more to abandon their lives in the United States as the weeks without jobs turn into months and they run out of money and give up hope.

As some immigrants cross the border into Mexico, fewer are coming the other way.

The economic crisis, combined with a more fortified border, has led to what may be the first drop in the U.S. illegal-immigrant population in years.

Many of the Mexican immigrants who remain in the United States are unemployed, work fewer hours or worry about losing their jobs.

Mexican immigrants, no matter what their legal status, are more likely to be jobless than most other workers, studies show. They face longer odds of finding work in the Inland area, where the unemployment rate is nearly 13 percent, among the highest in the nation.

Immigrants are sending less money to family members in Mexico, causing plummeting sales at some Mexican stores that depend on remittance income. Even churches are seeing a drop in contributions, and towns are struggling to continue development programs that immigrant money helps fund.

EXPORTER OF PEOPLE

Cotija, formally known as Cotija de la Paz, sits about a mile above sea level in the central state of Michoacán, Mexico's largest exporter of people. About 4 million Michoacán natives live in the United States.

The town of 12,000 is best known as the birthplace of the crumbly Cotija cheese that is a staple in many Mexican homes. Faded portraits of St. Rafael GuÃ*zar Valencia, who was born in Cotija in 1878 and canonized in 2006, hang on the walls of some stores and homes. Young people promenade most nights in the tree-lined main plaza across from a 19th century tile-roofed stone church.

There's no industry. Very little cheese making is done locally. Many residents earn low wages in nearby sugar cane, avocado and corn fields.

The lack of jobs spurred thousands of Cotija residents to try their luck in the United States. Nearly as many Cotija natives live in the United States as in the town, said Alberto Contreras Mendoza, secretary of the municipality of Cotija, which includes the town and surrounding rural areas.



Immigrant influence is everywhere. It is not unusual to see license plates from California, Texas or New York State, to hear English spoken by residents when they spot an American, or to see street stands selling flour-tortilla burritos, a food unknown here until migrants began returning from the United States with a taste for Tex-Mex food.

A sign in the window of a travel agency advertises flights to Ontario.

At least 2,000 Cotija natives live in the Inland area, mostly in Perris and Moreno Valley, according to Cotija residents and U.S. immigrants. Perris and Cotija are sister cities.

Andrade, 36, left Cotija in 1995, living in Los Angeles County, San Bernardino and Santa Rosa before arriving in Perris more than three years ago.

He found a job painting, installing flooring and performing other tasks at the recreational vehicle factory. High gas prices and the poor economy caused the RV industry to tank. First, the company eliminated his overtime and reduced his hours. Then the factory closed.

After more than two months of searching for a new job, Andrade gave up and reluctantly decided to return to his parents' home in Cotija, where he lives rent-free with them, his sister and her 4-year-old daughter.

"Here I have my family, but there's no money," Andrade said as he stood inside an open-air kitchen that his family had planned to one day enclose using remittances he was sending from Perris. "There, I didn't have my family, but there was work. And now there's no work there, either."

Andrade found a job in Cotija delivering jugs of purified water. But the Mexican economy also is in recession, and he lost his position a few weeks later. More people are boiling water instead of buying it, he said.

He's still adjusting to eating beans and tortillas twice a day. The family can only afford meat every two weeks. They don't know what they'll do when they burn through the last of Andrade's savings.

"This is not a way to live," Andrade said. "To go out and get a soda -- you can't do it."

All Andrade can do now is wait.

"When the economic situation in the United States improves," he said, "I'm going back."

RETURN COUNT UNCLEAR

There is no way to accurately measure how many immigrants have returned to Mexico. The United States does not survey people as they leave the country.

Many of the reverse migrants are reluctant to publicize their return. Some are illegal immigrants; others are legal residents whose immigration status is endangered if they leave the United States for more than six months at a time.

The lack of data leads some to doubt that an unusual number of Mexicans are returning home.

There are always immigrants resettling in Mexico, often after working in the United States for several years and then returning with their savings, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan research group. The same phenomenon occurred with European immigrants in the 1800s and 1900s.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people going back to Mexico all the time," he said. "There are indications of people leaving (today), but you never look for that in the good times."

Yet anecdotal evidence indicates the reverse migration is greater today than in past years.

Immigrant-assistance groups TODEC Legal Center in Perris and the San Bernardino Community Service Center said they've never seen so many people going back to Mexico or planning to do so.

School registrars in Riverside County are seeing significantly more Latin American and Asian immigrant parents pulling their kids out of school to return to their homelands, said Kenn Young, county superintendent of schools.

A January survey by the bus company Crucero USA found that 37 percent of its passengers who traveled from the United States to Tijuana and then boarded buses to other parts of Mexico were returning to Mexico for good, said Juan Antonio López, general manager of Crucero, a Greyhound Lines subsidiary that has stops in Riverside and San Bernardino. In past surveys, fewer than 20 percent of such passengers were returning permanently, he said.

Employees at El Corre Caminos, a Fontana-based bus company that travels from the Inland area to the border, said more riders are telling them they're returning to Mexico.

"You can see it when their family comes and they're crying, and by all the luggage they have, that they're not coming back here," said Simón Rosales, a Corre Caminos bus driver.

But many illegal immigrants are nervous about going to Mexico for fear they will not be able to re-enter the United States, said Todd Sorensen, an assistant professor of economics at UC Riverside and an expert on Mexican migration patterns.

More Border Patrol agents, more fencing and more high-tech equipment that can detect migrants has increased the risks in crossing the border. That and the higher prices that coyotes charge to bring people across cause many illegal immigrants to stay in the United States instead of trying to temporarily return to Mexico, Sorensen said.

STAYING PUT

Immigrants who have been in the United States the longest -- regardless of legal status -- are more likely to try to weather the U.S. economic crisis rather than return to Mexico, said Marc Rosenblum, a senior analyst with the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.

They are more likely to have a broader network of family and friends to help them find jobs and support them financially, or to provide a place to stay while they're out of work, he said.

They also are less likely to have close family members and friends in Mexico to help them, said Rosmi Bonilla, secretary of migration for Michoacán. The state had braced itself for a wave of returning immigrants once the U.S. economy began to sour, she said. But a December survey found that fewer than 3 percent of Michoacán natives arriving in the state were planning to stay permanently.

In Cotija, residents and municipal officials estimated that no more than several-dozen people had returned permanently.

The Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography found that fewer people entered Mexico from abroad in 2008 than in 2007. But many of the migrants in those statistics typically are people who each year go back and forth between the United States and Mexico for work, and their numbers are declining because of stricter border enforcement, said Victor Alfredo Bustos, the institute's director of analysis and demographic studies.



Although experts disagree on whether more people are returning to Mexico than before, they have no doubt that fewer Mexicans are leaving for the United States.

The number of people emigrating from Mexico dropped 37 percent between the last three months of 2006 and the final quarter of 2008, according to the Mexican statistics institute.

Less than half as many people were arrested in fiscal year 2008 for illegally trying to cross U.S. borders than in 2000, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Roy Beck, executive director of Virginia-based NumbersUSA, which supports greater limits on immigration, said the drop in illegal immigration "is a great thing for California" because it opens more jobs for citizens and legal residents. It illustrates how tighter border security, increased deportations and difficulty in obtaining jobs can deter illegal immigration, he said.

FRUITLESS SEARCHES

Alberto Maciel had looked in vain for work for several weeks when immigration agents arrived at his rented Riverside house in June 2008. He was later deported.

Maciel, 33, considered trying to illegally cross the border to return to his wife and three children. But with the job market increasingly dire, he decided it wasn't worth the risk, especially because as a deportee he could be jailed and banned from entering the United States for 10 years if he were caught.

A week after his deportation, Maciel's wife, MarÃ*a Guadalupe Salgado, left her job as an assistant manager at a Riverside clothing store and took their three children to Tijuana to meet up with him.

The family now lives in Cotija with Maciel's parents.

A year and a half ago, Maciel said, he was making $20 an hour at a Long Beach oil refinery, earning as much as $2,800 a week when he received overtime.

Maciel now sells coconuts and coconut juice from the back of a pickup in the center of Cotija, the town he left 15 years ago. He makes about $50 a week.

Salgado, 27, scrapes together extra money selling tacos, soft drinks and toilet paper from the front of the house.

A brother of Maciel who works at the Long Beach refinery sends the family about $100 every three months. They pick up municipal government rations of rice and beans.

Maciel hopes to one day go back to California.

"If after a year there's work, maybe I'll go," Maciel said as he lowered a machete toward the top of a coconut. "Right now, no. Here, I go to the plaza and sell coconuts and make enough money to live."

Maciel and Salgado said the main reason they want to return to the United States is for their three U.S.-born boys, aged 4, 8 and 11.

The older boys speak Spanish but only know how to read and write well in English, Salgado said. Their home is the United States not Mexico, she said.

"They cry," Salgado said. "They want to go back, but there's no way to do it."

RECESSION'S REACH

Cotija and many other Mexican towns have long depended on money that immigrants send home. The remittances, the second-biggest source of income in Mexico after oil, feed immigrants' families, build homes and fund street paving and other projects in the towns.

After years of rapid growth, the remittances are falling.

Between 2000 and 2006, remittances to Mexico nearly quadrupled, from $6.6 billion to $25.6 billion, according to the Central Bank of Mexico. They rose only slightly in 2007, then fell almost 4 percent -- nearly $1 billion -- in 2008, the first drop in years.

In Cotija and some of the other towns that have lost an especially large number of residents to the United States, the decline appears to be much larger. At the Cotija currency exchange Compra/Venta Dolares Chavo, the amount of dollars exchanged for pesos has plummeted at least 50 percent in the past year, said owner Salvador Gallardo. "It's going down, down, down," Gallardo said. "And if there's no money for me, there's no money for the town."

Some storeowners in Cotija said they haven't seen a drop in business. Others are struggling, and they blame the fall in remittances.

Antonio Barajas Valencia, a former Cotija municipal president, said sales at his construction and home-improvement business dropped 40 percent in 2008, and he had to lay off three of 12 employees. He estimated that 80 percent of his business comes from remittance income.

"If it doesn't improve, we could have to close," he said.

People are even forgoing or rationing medicine, said Rafael Valencia, owner of the pharmacy Farmacia del Centro.

"They say, 'I just want two pills,' " Valencia said. "In the past, they'd buy a whole box. I tell them they won't do anything if you just take them for two days, that they might just work for two to four hours, but they say, 'I don't care. I don't have the money to pay.' "

At Our Lady of Popolo Catholic Church, contributions have fallen more than 10 percent, said the Rev. José Cruz Moreno Cárdenas. Moreno's parish, which includes 31 churches and chapels in Cotija and surrounding villages, has had to reduce food and medical assistance and postpone church remodeling projects.

José Mendoza Morfin, the municipal president of Cotija, said he fears that the fall in remittances will halt some of the town's infrastructure projects. Cotija participates in a program in which the town and the federal and state governments each match money that immigrants donate for local development initiatives. Inland residents gave $45,000 to the program last year to provide electricity to rural areas and for other projects, he said.

In the state of Zacatecas, contributions to the program increased in 2008 but are expected to be flat in 2009, said Fernando MartÃ*nez Robledo, director of the Zacatecan migration institute.

"Those remittances help us pave streets and provide potable water," said BenjamÃ*n Reyes, director of the migration office of Nochistlán, a town in Zacatecas and former home of many Inland Mexican immigrants. "But people's first priority will be to provide food and clothing for their families."

Reach David Olson at 951-368-9462 or dolson@PE.com

http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stor ... 9dd06.html

Going Home Special Report

http://www.pe.com/reports/2009/return/

I am sputtering mad at the whole situation. Can't find a job in the old home country? Use brain, think and be entrepreneurial. That is what this country was built on. Instead of wasting $3,000 to $12,000 to get smuggled here, take the money and do something useful.
I can't stand the sob stories about poor Mexicans returning, destroying the remittance chain and sitting around and crying about no jobs, while so many of our factories have gone there for cheap labor.

A brother of Maciel who works at the Long Beach refinery sends the family about $100 every three months. They pick up municipal government rations of rice and beans.

So they sit on their tushes waiting for remittances and their government ration because no one hires them.
Horse puckey, or rather #@$*&^*&@!

week after his deportation, Maciel's wife, MarÃ*a Guadalupe Salgado, left her job as an assistant manager at a Riverside clothing store and took their three children to Tijuana to meet up with him.

The family now lives in Cotija with Maciel's parents.

Perfect...the family is united....OVER THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

good post.... but I want them packing bags by the Millions

See that? If they can't get a job, they'll leave on their own. This is exactly what employer enforcement would do if our government officials weren't such gluttons for illegal cheap labor that they can eventually turn into voters.