http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/nation/13103163.htm

Displaced Mexican corn farmers are streaming into Missouri

BY BILL LAMBRECHT

St. Louis Post-Dispatch


KENNETT, Mo. - Alonzo Moran earns more money driving a fork-lift in a cotton gin in Missouri's Bootheel than he could make in almost any job back home in Mexico.

But after 13 months as a migrant farm worker, Moran is eager to return to the 30 acres he owns in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

There, his land lays fallow, not worth planting because of depressed corn prices he blames on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"What is my dream for the future? I want corn prices to be high again so I can go back to Mexico to farm. But I don't know if that will happen," said Moran, 42.

There are many reasons for the recent record migration from Mexico to the United States. But many Mexicans say a prime motivation is the difficulty in making a living on small farms in rural Mexico.

A favorite destination is Missouri, where migrants - legal and illegal - find farm work in fields and slaughterhouses. Many stay. From 2000 to 2004 alone, Missouri's Hispanic population - mainly Mexican _grew by nearly 25 percent, after a 92 percent increase from 1990-2000, according to U.S. Census data.

And those are just the Hispanics who get counted.

Farm-owners and many businesses welcome the immigrants as a means to lower labor costs. By the same token, the migrants add to the burdens of governments and communities to provide education, health care, housing and legal assistance - costs that are rarely mentioned in discussions about farm subsidies and trade agreements.

Joe Tillman, who until recently headed the Missouri Migrant Education Language Learning program, says young men in their 20s arriving told him they saw no future on Mexican farms. Their presence is putting heavy pressure on rural towns in Missouri, Tillman said.

"In many cases, these are small, more rural communities that didn't have many resources to begin with. They're these generally white, older communities that suddenly are browning with the arrival of many kids," he said.

"Agribusiness clamors for cheaper and cheaper labor in order to keep their costs down, but we don't have the programs we need for all these people," he said. "It's an untenable situation that we have found ourselves in."

Southeastern Missouri has become especially appealing for migrants, who can find work nearly year round, pruning peaches in February, harvesting watermelons and canteloupes in summer and laboring in cotton gins until early winter.

Many come from the southern Mexican state of Michoacan, from which the Mexican government estimates more than 40,000 migrated last year alone, many because of plummeting agriculture prices.

Before heading to work in a Senath, Mo., cotton gin recently, Israel Lopez said fewer and fewer people in his part of Michoacan make a living from farming.

"You plant the corn and pay for all the chemicals and expenses, and you end up with no money in your pocket," he said.

Since 1990, Dunklin County, home to Missouri's richest cotton fields, measured a four-fold percent increase in its Hispanic population. The new population's needs were evident earlier last month at the Southeast Missouri Health Network clinic when a van disgorged a dozen Hispanic children seeking coats, hats and mittens. By day's end, 60 children had been outfitted for the first cold weather many had ever seen.

The Kennett clinic distributed food to more than 300 people in September alone. It provided non-emergency health care last year to 2,000 migrants, double the number in 2001 when the Post-Dispatch last profiled its efforts.

"There are so many needs and so few resources, and it becomes nearly impossible here with the influx of Spanish-speaking people. You could work 24 hours a day and not get done," said Sandy Sharp-Self, the network's migrant services director.

At last count, 27 percent of the students in Senath in Dunklin County were Hispanic, creating challenges that the school district is ill-equipped to handle, said superintendent Yancy Poorman.

Poorman said he is especially concerned about a waiting list last month of 35 pre-school children who need English language instruction but can't get it because of a shortage of federal funds.

"They're coming and they stay. They don't go back to Mexico," he said.

George Grayson, an immigration expert at William & Mary College in Virginia, said that any discussion of U.S. farm subsidies should include the cost of the immigration the subsidies spawn.

Those subsidies, he remarked, especially benefit the multinational food companies paying as little as possible for corn on both sides of the border.

"We're shooting ourselves in the foot with a machine gun by granting these enormous subsidies," he said. "These people coming in don't compete with the vice president of Archer Daniels Midland for jobs. They compete with our underclass."