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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2006 
Fox Predicts Mexico's Successes Could Eliminate Illegal Crossings
 Sandra Dibble - Union-Tribune
| | A man wearing a mask of Mexican President Vicente Fox allows a ball to go between his legs and into the net during a match in which a squad of women who had been raped and violently attacked played a symbolic match against a team representing Mexicos government on the main square of Mexico Citys central plaza, Sunday, June 4, 2006. The women claim Foxs government has not done enough to combat violent crime and protect the nations women. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte) |
Could Mexico's plunging birthrate and growing economy end illegal immigration to the United States?
Mexican President Vicente Fox says they could. As soon as 2015, Mexico will be using “100 percent of its work force,” he said, and his countrymen won't need to cross the border in search of jobs.
But demographers, economists, business analysts and others who follow migration and Mexico's economy have been quick to challenge the president's upbeat assessment. His comments last week followed the release of economic figures showing the best growth period of his administration and came just weeks before the country's July 2 presidential election.
A range of factors playing out on both sides of the border will affect the northbound flow in the coming years, and the lower birthrate and state of the Mexican economy are but two elements in a complex equation.
The lure of higher paying U.S. jobs, the pull of cross-border family ties, and the deep-rooted tradition of migration in many Mexican communities are not going to go away. They are among the factors likely to influence Mexican emigration in the coming decade.
“What sustains it are the income gaps between the United States and Mexico,” said Rodolfo Tuirán, former director of Mexico's National Population Council and currently a researcher at the Autonomous National Technological Institute in Mexico City. “That gap is not going to close in the next ten years.”
Nobody is disputing that Mexico's demographic makeup is changing. The birthrate has dropped dramatically, and the annual population growth rate has fallen from 3.5 percent to 1 percent during the past 30 years. Mexico's population is also getting older, and the pool of young workers who make up the bulk of the border crossers will shrink.
During the coming decade, fewer Mexicans overall will be entering the job market. Tuirán estimates the numbers will fall from 1.2 million today to around 700,000 in 2015.
Fox, who took office in December 2000, has largely failed to live up to his promises to create millions of new jobs and foment economic growth for his country of 103 million people. An estimated 400,000 Mexicans cross into the United States each year.
But figures from January through March of this year show an encouraging upswing in Mexico's economy, as output grew by 5.5 percent. The Mexican president has seized on these figures and the decline in population growth to show that migration could fall dramatically as Mexicans find opportunities at home.
“By 2015, Mexico will be needing 100 percent of its work force . . . to support our economy and our retirees,” Fox said in an interview last week in Ensenada. He also said Mexico must create more jobs, “so that the only people who leave are those who want to go, and not out of necessity.”
Still, the 2015 time frame “is a totally unrealistic date,” said Andrés Rozental, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States and director of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. “The migration issue to the United States obviously relates to employment, but employment is not the sole issue.”
Most migrants had jobs in Mexico before deciding to cross, studies show, but the lure of higher pay – workers can make about 11 times more here than in Mexico – is a powerful magnet.
“The real problem, on the Mexican side, is that the new jobs being created there don't pay enough to enable most families to lift themselves out of poverty,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UCSD.
Studies suggest that the powerful incentive to migrate for purely economic reasons would decrease only if “you get that ratio down to about four to one,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City.
Decreasing that wage gap depends on factors inside and outside Mexico. Damian Fraser, head of Latin American equities strategy with the banking group UBS Warburg in Mexico City, says Mexico needs to address a range of issues hindering its productivity: improving education, rethinking agricultural policy, splitting up monopolies, strengthening the legal system and overhauling a bureaucracy that inhibits investment and growth.
“To be more productive, Mexico needs to have a more competitive economy,” Fraser said. “That lack of competition inhibits investment.”
If Mexico is able to sustain its 5.5 percent growth rate, that may create enough jobs for new workers. But that does not address the huge numbers working off tax rolls in the informal economy – about half the work force, Tuirán said. To offer those people formal sector jobs that have benefits and require income tax, he said, “we're going to have to grow even more rapidly.”
There are also external factors that influence Mexican migration to the United States, experts agree, and the state of the U.S. economy is a crucial one.
Mexicans workers won't cross if there are no jobs to fill in the United States, said Carlos Angulo, an attorney with Baker & McKenzie in Mexico City and member of the Phoenix-based Border Trade Alliance.
“If the economy of the United States has the need for this type of work force, if there are going to be jobs for this type of person, that's one of the first things to consider,” he said.
A healthy U.S. economy is also crucial if Mexico's economy is to grow, and create jobs, said UCSD's Cornelius. The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1994 between the United States, Canada and Mexico, has tied economic growth in Mexico “much more closely than in the pre-NAFTA era to the health of the U.S. economy,” Cornelius said. “Economic recessions in the U.S. will translate inevitably into less job creation in Mexico during those periods.”
Sandra Dibble: (619) 293-1716; sandra.dibble@uniontrib.com |
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