Posted on 12/23/2003 10:16:06 AM PST by NormsRevenge
Migrant workers who once crossed the border each spring from Mexico and returned south for the holidays at home are more likely than ever to spend Christmas in the United States.
It is a sea change in a once predictable migratory flow - and an unintended consequence of U.S. immigration policy that aims to keep people out by investing billions of dollars in beefier border security.
The new reality is clear in Northern California's Napa Valley, where farmhands once packed for Mexico after harvesting prized wine grapes. The vines are now bare, but many workers are still kicking around for odd jobs and finding refuge at the Rev. John Brenkle's St. Helena Roman Catholic Church.
"It's supposed to keep people out," Brenkle said of more muscular border security, "but it's locking people in, no question about it."
It was once hard to find Mexican workers in December. Now sign-up lists for an odd-jobs program are twice as long as usual. This year, for the first time, the church has set up eight men in a donated trailer.
From Nebraska to Alabama and across the West - in states where Mexicans have come as cheap labor - word is the same: This year, Christmas will be spent in the United States.
Population researchers in both countries say the phenomenon was building before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks prompted a further crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border, making the crossing more dangerous and expensive. Getting back to Mexico is easy, but the harder road north has caused migrants to delay trips home out of fear they won't be able to return to the United States.
In the year leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, the average undocumented migrant worker stayed just under a year, according to a large survey by one Mexican think tank. The most recent figures, from 2002, show the average stay surpassed 70 weeks - the longest since the Tijuana-based Colegio de la Frontera Norte began its study in 1993. Even legal workers saw a similar increase in stay, to about 45 weeks.
"It is not the desire of Mexican migrant workers to stay," said Rodolfo Cruz Pineiro, a researcher on the survey. "If they can cross the border without any problem, they would come one or two times a year."
Garrison Courtney, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents in the field have noticed a drop in the number of annual returnees.
Christmas is a focal point of Catholic Mexico, where towns all but abandoned during the American growing and construction seasons reanimate as workers return laden with gifts and money.
While workers continue to send cash, they are less likely to send themselves.
Investigators at the Inter-American Development Bank tracked the $9.3 billion Mexican workers sent home in 2001. They had expected to see the flow to slow that fall as people hoarded cash during uncertain times. In fact, the bank's surveys showed a surge in remittances. The explanation: Money for plane tickets was wired home instead.
The reasons for the shift go beyond the border crackdown, according to American and Mexican researchers. A wobbly U.S. economy means Mexican workers might stay longer to reach their savings target; the deterioration of subsistence farming in rural Mexico weakens the pull home; Mexican workers have fanned out to states thousands of miles from the Southwest border, making a trip home more journey than jaunt; Mexicans now work in factories and construction, jobs that are less tied to seasons; and single men once dispatched to provide for their extended family have sent for their wives and children, making a return trip less pressing and more expensive.
Around 10 percent of Mexican workers returned in 2000 - down from more than 20 percent in 1997, according to Public Policy Institute of California researcher Belinda Reyes.
During those three years, as tighter security in California and Texas funneled crossers into the deadly deserts of Arizona, deaths surged from 129 to 491 Mexican crossers, according to Mexican consulates that send their bodies home.
Deaths have since ebbed yet remain three times higher than when the border crackdown revved up six years ago. The number of illegal crossers apprehended has also fallen, but in 2003 stood at nearly 1 million - a historically high number that suggests increased security has not deterred Mexican migration.
Because crossing is harder, hiring a human smuggler is more expensive. The $1,500 average is a fortune for workers whose wages in Mexico average a 10th of the United States. And the shift to more remote routes makes the work of bandits easier.
"You play with your life like dice in your hand," said one Mexican-born worker named Roberto with a flick of the wrist.
Roberto, 41, lives in his van around San Francisco and waits on corners to score $8-an-hour jobs, mostly in construction.
Until the crackdown, he returned to Mexico regularly. Now he speaks of the border as despair and desperation.
"You feel it," he said. "People are afraid."
In Nebraska, the Rev. Damian Zuerlein ministers to Omaha's Mexicans, many of them employed in meatpacking. He hasn't seen the statistics, but he has seen the change.
A few years ago, Christmas midnight mass attracted about 100 parishioners. Last year, more like 500 people came.
"I hear it over and over again. They're telling me they're not going home," Zuerlein said. "There is a little sadness, and you can kind of see that at the midnight mass."
In Alabama, the story is the same.
"They say, 'No, now it's more dangerous. I don't want to leave my kids here,'" said Hernan Prado, head of the Alabama Latin American Association.
Prado cites Spanish-language news beamed by satellite television into even packed, hardscrabble shacks. Reports from the border are inevitably grim: more than a dozen crossers die together, traffickers exchange gunfire after stealing each other's human cargo.
And then there are the Border Patrol agents with more technology than ever to intercept crossers. The government budgeted $9 billion for border protection in the current fiscal year, up $400 million from last year. The number of Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexican line rose from 8,500 in 2000 to at least 9,500 today
Miguel Escobar Valdez is the Mexican consul in the border town of Douglas, Ariz. Escobar, who has arranged for the bodies of dozens of crossers to be returned, said he understand why Mexican migrants are staying north.
"They're going to be yearning for their homeland," he said. "But first things come first - a job and the possibility of working and earning some money to send back."
Across the small checkpoint, in the Mexican town of Agua Prieta, Miguel Garcia Romero sits in a public park and wishes he could return to the sheep-herding job in Ogden, Utah that paid him $900 a month. He went home to see his family but he has been trying for two weeks to cross back, only to be caught by the Border Patrol and marched back to Mexico.
Garcia, 43, is trying to scrounge money to buy a bus ticket back to his home state of Chihuahua.
If only he could make it back to Utah, he said, he would stay as long as he could - and his wife and three children would know he made it because of the money he would send back every month.
Not going to happen, as this article makes clear. I'd favor a different approach: attack the businesses that hire illegals. If you really crack down on them and make it expensive in terms of fines and jail time, they'll stop hiring. Without jobs, the illegals here will leave, and the ones not here won't come.
Oh, yeah. I'm totally in favor of that. Of course, as the fall-out from the crackdown on Wal-Mart a few weeks ago showed, powerful American corporations can exert a lot of pressure on politicians to make sure that the INS doesn't bother them too much.
I find it hard to blame illegals for coming here- they're looking for a better life and a job. The real blame goes to American companies (and the American consumer) who would rather save money in the short-term than worry about what having millions of illegals in this country does to the US, Mexico or the illegals themselves.
Don't sneak across my border illegally and you won't get locked in. Just another "sob story" about the plight of criminals in my country. It's getting old.
Then keep your rhumba in Mexico
I don't know about all, but it would solve a lot of them and it's a good start.
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