Thread: Georgia laws have an impact on Mexico towns

Published Sunday, March 16, 2008
Georgia laws have an impact on Mexico towns
By Jeremy Schwartz, Cox News Service


EJIDO MODELO EMILIANO ZAPATA, Mexico | Lanky teenagers hang out in clumps at the volleyball courts, laughing and teasing, enjoying what could be their last days here.

Many will soon embark on the long, grueling journey through the desert they hope will eventually end in metro Atlanta with jobs.

But that illegal migration, once as natural as the changing of the seasons, has become a different prospect lately. A combination of tough Georgia laws, a sharp escalation in deportations, and a slew of measures wending their way through the Georgia legislature has had a profound impact on towns that send their migrants to the Atlanta area.

Jesica Garcia Saenz, the 17-year-old reigning beauty queen of this town of 7,500, said she feels the inevitable pull of that distant city. Her siblings, cousins and uncles are already in Atlanta. But such longing is tinged with foreboding.

"You feel lonely because there's barely any people left here," she said. "But then they say that life over there is hard now. They say they don't want to give us jobs, that they want to kick us out."

Just two years ago, residents here say, such dread of life in Atlanta did not exist.

In two towns, Ejido Modelo Emiliano Zapata in the central agricultural state of Jalisco and San Marcos, on Mexico's sweltering Pacific coast, the reputation of metro Atlanta has undergone a transformation.

For decades, both have been sending the vast majority of their immigrants to Georgia as undocumented workers. Both towns survive largely because of the money sent home by fathers and brothers working in Atlanta.

Both places are watching with great worry the changes in the state's political climate.

"I don't know what happened, a racist element entered somewhere along the way," said Antonio Lorenzo Cortes, a

48-year-old San Marcos native who has been migrating illegally to Atlanta on and off since 1988. "At first we were welcomed, but now they see us as delinquents."

Among the proposed measures making the most waves in Mexico is the proposal to allow police to seize cars driven by illegal immigrants who violate traffic laws. That measure, sitting before a Georgia House subcommittee, has scared migrants in Atlanta, causing many to send their vehicles back home to avoid losing their cars, residents in Mexico say.

And rumors are flying through both towns that the children of undocumented immigrants will not be granted citizenship even if they are born on U.S. soil. A Georgia measure would merely urge the U.S. Congress to pass such a law since states don't have that authority. But, as in a transnational game of telephone, the original news got twisted as it arrived across the border.

In both towns, residents say the amount of money being sent back by their migrants has decreased in recent years, generating fear of economic collapse mirrored in the proliferation of unfinished houses.

And the number of migrants who return to visit has plummeted, residents say, because of increased concern over crossing the border. At the same time, the number of migrants who have returned permanently has gone up because of fear of raids, deportations or disgust with the new laws and policies.

But despite the growing feeling that Georgia has become hostile to immigrants, the tug of Atlanta remains strong in these communities. It is still home to relatives who can receive and orient newer immigrants. And in both towns, despite worries about creeping recession, there is the strong perception that there is work to be had in Atlanta.

In Ejido Modelo, which is made up mostly of elderly parents, wives and children, the laws have translated into a lot of worry. Set against Mexico's largest lake, Lago Chapala, Ejido Modelo provides few jobs for its residents besides hacking a living out of the cornfields or fishing in the polluted lake.

People like Blas Chavarria Avalos, 66, survive on the money sent home by their children. Chavarria has five children in the United States, including one in Atlanta, who he says paid for his open-heart surgery a few years ago.

"There is a lot of worry here because most of us depend on our kids," he said. "If they stopped sending money back, it would be a chaos."

Fears of mass deportations haunt Ejido Modelo. Locals estimate there are about 2,500 residents working in metro Atlanta.

"If they kicked all those people out, what would happen to this town?" asked Alicia Buenrostro, a 26-year-old secretary who married an Atlanta migrant in February. "If they leave Atlanta, they would have to start over from zero. I wonder what the motive for all this is ... It seems just concentrated in Atlanta."

Many residents believe the wave of anti-immigrant fervor was sparked by the mass protests in the summer of 2006 demanding reform to American immigration laws.

"That was a mistake," said Buenrostro. "They weren't in their own country. Maybe that's why."

Migrants in metro Atlanta don't just send money back to their relatives in Ejido Modelo - they have also funded many public works, including helping to pave major streets, renovating the town's Catholic church and buying about 20 computers for the town's elementary school.

At the school, sixth-grade teacher Yolanda Garcia said news of her countrymen's difficult situation is filtering down to students.

"Now many kids say they don't want to go to the U.S., at least without papers," she said. "I'd say it's about 20 percent that want to go. Before more than

50 percent wanted to cross to the north. That's because their family there tells them it's getting very hard."

Such tales have influenced sixth grader Francisco Javier Reynosa, who screws his face up in distaste when asked if he'd like to go to Atlanta.

"They say you can't even walk out into the street or they will grab you up," he said. "Here we can go where we want."

Garcia also said the effects of the economic slowdown in the United States are beginning to manifest in Ejido Modelo. "People are losing their jobs and sending less money back," she said. "The families here have to be more restrained in what they can buy."

Remittances, the money sent home by immigrants, fell 5.9 percent in January in Mexico, the sharpest drop in 13 years. The decline in remittances to Mexico, which constitute the nation's third largest income stream after oil and tourism, comes after more than a decade of explosive growth, and has been attributed both to a recession in the United States and tougher, locally enacted, immigration laws in places like Georgia.

Unemployment among migrants in the U.S. also grew in 2007, according to the U.S. Labor Department. And in February, jobs in the construction industry, home to many Mexican migrants, fell 3.14 percent.

In San Marcos, residents and former migrants say the grim economic outlook and the rash of tough measures in Georgia isn't slowing the exodus from the town - population about 45,000 - but has begun to spark interest in other states. Locals estimate there are several thousand residents of San Marcos in metro Atlanta.

"The people will keep leaving here, they don't know any other way," said Carlos Villanueva, the former head of a club of San Marcos migrants in Atlanta. "But people may be going to other states besides Georgia. Many people still consider Atlanta a developing city, but things are getting bad."

Jesus Lorenzo Cortes, 41, a former line cook at an upscale Atlanta restaurant, said he left two years ago after the Georgia Legislature passed Senate Bill 529.

Cortes said the bill, which requires verification of legal status for certain taxpayer services and prevents employers from claiming the wages of illegal workers as a state tax deduction, made working without proper documents more difficult.

"Many of us left after these laws came in," he said. "They are like taxes on illegality."

Since then, Cortes has returned to San Marcos, where he and his older brother, also a regular Atlanta migrant, plot their next move. For the brothers, Atlanta has been a way to pull their family out of poverty, and they hope, to give their children a different destiny.

With money earned from nearly two decades of working in Atlanta, the brothers have started construction on a six-bedroom home, opened a small business selling wood in San Marcos, and most importantly, sent their children to high school and college.

"We are very thankful to the U.S.," said Antonio Cortes. "If the U.S. was in a war and needed soldiers, I'd go, it's given me so much."

Both say that if they had never migrated they wouldn't have been able to afford their children's education and, they hope, break the cycle of illegal immigration.

"That's why we want them to study, so they don't go. And if they go, it's as a tourist," said Antonio Cortes. "My son who is studying has a different mentality. Our parents didn't have money for our schooling. If they had, we wouldn't have gone."

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/2 ... /-1/NEWS03

They are still calling the host Nation Racists . I don't think if we all went to Mexico to work the NAFTA jobs send there by our government . I don't think they'ld like it . Plus the fact we take all remaining jobs would surly make us big hits in Mexico . Course in Mexico they worry not bout law or courts . They just Wack you and end of problem .
Illegals go home . You have Bankrupted our Country

"If they kicked all those people out, what would happen to this town?" asked Alicia Buenrostro, a 26-year-old secretary who married an Atlanta migrant in February. "If they leave Atlanta, they would have to start over from zero. I wonder what the motive for all this is ... It seems just concentrated in Atlanta."

What was this town doing before they came here?? Where are the black day laborers I used to see when I first moved here in 1996? Why are all the dayworker pickup sites populated by (Oh my God, I risk being called a racist), illegals.
If you listen to some people. local Americans are lazy and don't want to work. I have never believed that. Logically, if there were many locals before and now they have been replaced, the problem is the employers. They come seeking to pay the lowest wages. This is not an ignoble thing. It is fair to try to maximize one's profit, fairly and equitably.

I suggest that the locals do not come anymore because they have been undercut so severely in wages that they question the value of the work ethic. Why go out in all kinds of weather for $6-8 an hour for what was once $8-12(sometimes more)/hour. Four days work for $192??? How many of you could afford to live on that??

Add to that the fact that local politicians (Lewis, Sanford, etc) all vote FOR immigration issues that hurt the citizens of Georgia--well --guess what--it's tough luck for locals.

Then these locals go out and vote for these pols who cheat them. So the locals must take some of the responsibility on themselves. But in the daily run it is these unthinking employers who in their quest for ever greater profits, esell out the American worker.