Mexico has job plan for deportees

HoustonChronicle.com ^ | Feb. 14, 2005 | HERNAN ROZEMBERG

[hedgetrimmer]

The Mexican government hopes it has found a way to tackle its economic and immigration crises with a program to link its deported citizens with jobs in cities on the Mexican side of the border.

The pilot project, dubbed Repatriados Desalentados, or Despondent Deportees, will seek to match migrants who fail in an attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexico border with employers willing to give them jobs or paid training in Mexico.

It will begin next month in Piedras Negras, across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, and later incorporate the cities of Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juarez and Nogales, Mexican officials said.

The program, revealed by Coahuila Gov. Enrique Martinez y Martinez during a discussion with the San Antonio Express-News editorial board last week, will be run by the Mexican government using almost $1 million in matching funds from the Inter-American Development Bank.

If a two-year experimental period is deemed successful, the program will be expanded along the entire border, he said.

The objective is to find a new way to curb the increase in dangerous illegal border crossings while pumping local economies with reliable workers.

"A lot of people bring with them the American dream in their heads," said Julian Anzaldua, who heads the labor department for Coahuila, which includes Piedras Negras. "But we want to show them that they still have a reason to dream about staying in Mexico."

After migrants are caught by U.S. Border Patrol and sent back to Mexico, labor officials will interview them and determine which are good candidates for the program — ideally, those who have been deported several times and have no money or desire to keep trying to get across, Anzaldua said.

Those with family in the United States won't qualify.

Eligible migrants will be given paid temporary housing and meals and offered jobs according to their experience. If no suitable match is available, they'll be offered paid training followed by job contract offers.

Positions will be in low-wage categories such as assembly line production or cleaning supermarket aisles. Salaries are expected to start at 90 to 140 pesos, or $8 to $12, per day. Besides medical coverage for themselves and their families, workers will get housing and food stipends.

Immigration activists reacted with heavy skepticism. Dan Stein, director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the nation's leading immigration-restriction group, chalked up the program as Mexico's latest chess move in a continuing push for a major immigration accord with its northern neighbor.

[hedgetrimmer]

For information and discussion

[hedgetrimmer]

Ping your ping list if you like.

[GeronL]

OK... how about give them these jobs before they come here??

[Marine Inspector]

Ping.

It's a good idea and I hope it works, even if only for a few.

[konaice]

So let me see if I understand this.... They are going to find jobs for the stupid ones, while letting those smart and determined enough to make it into the US illegally go about their business?

Talk about a brain drain!!

Why don't they offer some jobs to the Smart ones and let them create further jobs for the dumb ones?

[Bon mots]

I've got an idea... how about we give them all jobs! Building a fence/wall...


30 days on the chain gang for the first offense. 60 for the second... etc.

[Flyer]

the program will be expanded along the entire border

Hmmm. . . mass them along the border?

[AnimalLover]

This will take some thought!

[bahblahbah]

I think we need to amass some English language programs at the border. Maybe we should demand Mexico to include an English textbook with their illegal immigrant comic book. Seriously, it's going to get messy if they don't start adopting English. Hell this country still hasn't adopted the metric system yet.

[ApesForEvolution]

After migrants are caught by U.S. Border Patrol and sent back to Mexico, labor officials will interview them and determine which are good candidates for the program — ideally, those who have been deported several times and have no money or desire to keep trying to get across, Anzaldua said.

>>>

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! That's rich...

[ApesForEvolution]

I resemble that idea...

[TheSpottedOwl]

Is this a scam? It actually sounds reasonable and sincere.

[Lichgod]

This is a scam. It will encourage more poor mexicans to cross into the USA.

Think like a poor mexican without a job or hope for a better future. Now you can try to cross into the USA, if successful, report to the nearest welfare office. If you are caught and deported, you get food/housing/job right on the border until you are ready to try crossing again. Sounds to me like a Win-Win scenario for any loser idling away their life in a dirt village.

What do you bet the first "job training" class is how to cross the border and not get caught. Followed by where to apply for freebies in the USA. All with a constant tale of how wonderful life is in the USA.

[Ben Ficklin]

"Its a good idea

If you put it into a historical perspective, it is a bad idea.

Operation Wetback dumped a relatively large number of Mexicans just across the border and this created significant social problems for the Mexican and US border towns.

In response, local officials conceived the concept of the Maquilladoras which would create jobs for those men. At the time, everyone benefitted. But thru time, that is not the case.

Northern Mexico has become industrialized while to the south, industrialization has lagged.

Large numbers of Mexicans go to the border seeking one of the plentiful jobs. Those that don't get a job there tend to continue north into the US, even tho that was not their original intent.

Of course many do get jobs at the border causing the astounding population growth and skewing of the demograhics that lead to the location of more Maquilladoras at the border. The cycle repeats itself.

Capital investment and job creation should be directed towards other areas of Mexico.

It would be better if Mexico subsidized these jobs elsewhere. The added cost would not be significant.

[HiJinx]

Oh, I like, but I'm at work without it!

You guys have access to the list this AM? If not, I'll hit it at lunch.

We've been asking amongst ourselves why Mexico won't do something about their economy for quite some time. This isn't much, but...

[TheSpottedOwl]

What do you bet the first "job training" class is how to cross the border and not get caught. Followed by where to apply for freebies in the USA. All with a constant tale of how wonderful life is in the USA.

I still think we should come up with comic books of our own, then back up the existing laws. They already know how wonderful life is in the USA. Now all they need to know is just how wonderful their own countries could be, with the right kind of effort. They just need a little encouragement ;)

There is always the possiblility that this proposal is really what it says it is, so let's watch and wait.

[hedgetrimmer]

More on the topic:

When Lazaro Cardenas Batel, a member of Mexico's leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party and the son of the party's founder, became governor of Michoacan in 2002, he recognized the need to establish more formal links between the state government and the millions of Michoacanos living in the United States. He created the Office of Coordination of the Michoacano Migrant, charged with providing services to migrants and helping to coordinate development projects jointly.

One national program administered by the office -- also functioning in 22 other Mexican states -- is the "Tres por Uno," or "Three for One" program, where the federal, state and municipal governments each pledge to match donations or investments made by migrant groups in the United States to fund development or infrastructure projects in Mexico. In Michoacan alone, the state government estimates that more than 138,000 people have benefited from the 254 projects in the state -- be they school or road construction or agricultural start-ups.

According to Eneida Reynoso Acosta, the sub-director of planning and linkage in the Office of Coordination of the Michoacano Migrant, Tres por Uno has also been responsible for the creation of more than 700 new jobs in Michoacan in only two years in operation.

"In truth it is a small number of jobs, but we are hoping to see a big increase this year and next year now that the program is rolling," Reynoso Acosta told United Press International.

Rafael Herrera Arreola is the founder of the Federacion de Michoacanos del Condado de Orange County California, a cluster of small clubs formed by migrants living in Orange County from the state of Michoacan who support projects in their hometowns in Mexico and organize around common issues affecting Mexicans living in Orange County.

Herrera Arreola, who was visiting Morelia to meet with officials in the Office of Coordination of the Michoacano Migrant, said that the hundreds of Michoacanos his group represents are interested in creating opportunities for their fellow Michoacanos back home, but they also have no intention of returning themselves to their native land.

"We would like for migration to be an option for Michoacanos, not a necessity because of poverty or lack of job options," Herrera Arreola said. "There is such a strong culture of migration already, but we hope that one day people can choose, without feeling like they are being forced to leave."

In working to create sustainable, or "productive," jobs that will give Michoacanos a reason to stay, the Office of Coordination of the Michoacano Migrant is focusing on farming enterprises because of Michoacan's natural agricultural wealth.

Claudio Mendez Fernandez, the general coordinator, said that the Tres por Uno program has helped to initiate a new tomato business and that the office is looking into expanding existing avocado enterprises in the state, which happens to be Mexico's No. 1 supplier of avocados.

"We also see potential in the organic sector, and are exploring ways to help Michoacano farmers enter into this market," Mendez Fernandez said. "The export potential with the United States is enormous, but the demand for organic food is still not very strong in Mexico, except in the big cities."

Though agricultural projects seem to be the most promising in terms of creating new jobs in Michoacan, the farming sector and its discontented workers are also the source of so much of Michoacan's people drain.

According to Heriberto Lugo, the president of an association of lentil growers in Michoacan in the town of Huaniqueo, Mexican farmers receive little of the technological or financial support from the government necessary to help them survive. The North American Free Trade Agreement has also had a devastating effect on so many Mexican agricultural products like lentils, which opened up the Mexican market to American farmers, heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. American producers were permitted export products with virtually no trade barriers to Mexico, which ultimately undercut small Mexican farmers and inundated the Mexican market with cheaper U.S. and Canadian products.

"Lentil farmers, like so many other Mexican farmers, have really suffered in the last 10 years since NAFTA went into effect," Lugo said. "Many of us still use horses to plow our fields, harvest our lentils by hand, and don't have any of the mechanization that makes farming so efficient in the United States and Canada."

Though Mendez Fernandez and Reynoso Acosta with the Office of Coordination of the Michoacano Migrant were optimistic that Michoacan can continue to create more jobs, Lugo, who has watched his own and neighboring towns hemorrhage people to the United States was not upbeat about job prospects in rural Michoacan.

"At least 70 percent of the people in this region have gone to the United States," Lugo said. "We have had a crisis, and it will take a lot of money and investment to get us out of it."

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050214-062808-6527r

[NewRomeTacitus]

This is a good step but rescinding NAFTA is what they really need. You can't tie a mule to a team of racehorses and expect it not to be dragged to it's death.

Something like that.

[ApesForEvolution]

Any plan that secures the borders FIRST I'll take seriously.

They can float the entire raft of shi* they have in their arsenal, but none of it amounts to ANYTHING supportable unless and until our sovereign borders are restored from Criminal Invasion ad nauseum...

[spectre]

"After migrants are caught by U.S. Border Patrol and sent back to Mexico, labor officials will interview them and determine which are good candidates for the program — ideally, those who have been deported several times and have no money or desire to keep trying to get across, Anzaldua said.

Those with family in the United States won't qualify. (LOL)

First they have to sneak in here...and next they have to be caught and deported. Several times is the ideal qualifier.

Other than that, it's a good program.

sw