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 Editorials | At Issue | January 2006 
More Mexican Minors and Women Migrate North
 Frontera NorteSur/Mexidata.info
| | When undocumented migrant Marta Gomez Garcia broke her thigh bone in the Sonoran Desert, her smuggler threatened to shoot her to put her out of her misery. (Jay Rochlin) |
Youth Migration on the Rise
In their report "The Truncated Hope," Mexican researchers Blanca Villaseñor and Jose Moreno Mena provide additional evidence about the increased migration of Mexican youth to the United States. Drawing on data culled from the experiences of undocumented youthful migrants detained or sheltered in the Tijuana and Mexicali regions of Baja California, the authors report big leaps in teenage migration after 1996, citing for example a Mexican National Migration Institute statistic that revealed overall youth migration increased 50 percent from 1999 to 2000.
"A great number of adolescents, males as well as females, are joining the migratory process," write the authors of The Truncated Hope. "This fact is of great importance, because due to their (youth) they become one of the most vulnerable groups, and without the most basic rights."
While the total numbers of youthful migrants are sketchy, Villaseñor and Moreno give details about the gender, educational background, labor experience and motivations of adolescent migrants. More than 90 percent of the group examined – 92 percent to be precise – were between 15 and 17 years of age. Most came from traditional migrant expelling states – Michoacan, Jalisco and Guanajuato, but "more and more states from the country’s south are turning into zones of expulsion," according to Villaseñor and Moreno.
The two authors report that most teenagers who travel to the U.S. have limited formal education, with some differences between males and females. For example, only 24 percent of males and 27 percent of females finished middle school. A striking one percent of each gender group completed high school. Before traveling to the U.S., 65 percent of the migrants worked and 34 percent went to school. Although a 66.1 percent majority said they went to the U.S. to find better working and living conditions, almost 20 percent departed to join relatives and friends already in “El Norte.” Nearly seven percent left their homes to study north of the border, while 5.5 percent gave nebulous reasons, alluding to the Hollywood-created Land of Milk and Honey.
Once inside the U.S., 60 percent of the youth found jobs as agricultural laborers, service workers, gardeners, etc. The report coincides in some respects with a recent study from the Pew Foundation that contended most Mexicans who travel to the U.S. already had jobs and are moving north simply in search of higher wages. However, Villaseñor and Moreno say unemployment is a growing factor. They cite statistics from Mexico's National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics that report more than 1.5 million people over the age of 14 years look for work but cannot find it.
The two researchers note that Mexico needs to create more than 1 million jobs per year, but only about 400,000 jobs a year were created during each year of the Fox administration. An estimated 515,000 jobs were lost in Mexico during the first three months of 2005, a figure "without precedent in Mexico," according to the report.
Villaseñor and Moreno say that for Mexican youth, as well as adults, migration has been one of three "escape valves" in their country. The other two are drug trafficking, and the informal economy, an activity frequently characterized by the street-side sale of pirated recordings or illegally imported goods from the Far East and elsewhere.
Women Migrants on the Move
For a longtime, Mexican women took care of the home and even tended the farm while the men traveled across the border to labor in El Norte. Today the migration pattern is changing, as Mexican researchers Blanca Villaseñor and Jose Moreno Mena point out in their report "Women Migrants on the Northern Border." Villaseñor and Mena utilized data from Mexico's National Migration Institute (INM) about repatriated and deported women in Mexicali to report their findings. "Female migration has increased significantly in recent years," conclude the two authors. "More and more adult women and minors are actively joining the migration process."
Villaseñor and Moreno present INM statistics to support their case. In 1995, repatriated and deported women in Mexicali constituted just four percent of migrants; in 1996, eight percent; in 1998, 11 percent; and in 2002, 14 percent. Seven out of ten women migrants were between 18 and 32 years of age, though one exceptional case of an 85-year-old migrant was recorded. The figures contrast significantly with estimates from Mexico's National Population Council (CONAPO) that 95 percent of temporary migrants are men.
Like men, most women migrants were from the traditional migrant expelling states of Michoacan, Jalisco and Guanajuato, though southerners, principally from Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero, accounted for an increased share of the migrants. The findings provide additional evidence that migration, once a temporary activity regulated by the old Bracero Program and later marked by undocumented migration, has now become institutionalized in some regions of Mexico. What's more, greater than 90 percent of the municipalities in the country "already have migration experience" according to the report.
Although the Villaseñor-Moreno report did not look at internal migration, statistics reported by Mexico's National Women's Institute suggest a connection between earlier migration to the U.S.-Mexico border region and then later to the U.S. According to a 2003 report from the federal institute, Tamaulipas and Baja California were among the states witnessing an increase in the overall female population, while Mexico City, Veracruz, Guerrero, Durango, and Oaxaca saw a drop. It should be noted that migrants from southern states, including Veracruz, constituted a significant source of the population growth in cities like Ciudad Juarez in recent years.
In terms of educational background, Villaseñor and Moreno say that most of the women migrants studied had less education than the national average for women in Mexico. Only seven percent, for example, finished high school, compared to the national average of 26.4 percent. A total of 11 percent of the migrants did not have any schooling, compared to the national average of 8.5 percent.
One important consequence of Mexican female migration to the U.S. is found in the changing ethnic composition of U.S. society. According to CONAPO an estimated 10 million Mexican-born people lived in the U.S. in 2004. Another 17 million people were offspring of Mexican-born parents, bringing the total number of U.S. residents with Mexican heritage to 27 million people.
Sources: Proceso, December 25, 2006. Two articles by Rodrigo Vera. "Profile of Women and Men in Mexico," National Women's Institute, 2003 and 2004.
Frontera NorteSur (FNS)
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico |
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