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 News from Around the Americas | August 2006 
U.S. Makes Legal Entry Tough for Mexicans
 Kevin Diaz - Mcclatchy Newspapers
| | Felipe Armandiaz (right) lived undocumented in the U.S. for 20 years. He now runs a shop in Nogales, Mexico. (Suchat Pederson) |
Jesus Rojas wanted no part of the arduous trek across the Sonora desert and no part of life underground in the United States, working in the shadow of the law.
So when a nephew in his central Mexican town of Guanajuato introduced him to a recruiter for an American landscaping company that would sponsor him legally, the 52-year-old handyman jumped at the chance.
"I was one of the lucky ones," said Rojas, who ended up mowing lawns in Delaware every summer for five years. "I had a connection. That's the hardest part."
Congress has adjourned for August without reaching an immigration deal. Republicans in the House of Representatives are holding hearings around the nation to build support for their border-security-first approach, which calls for stopping illegal immigrants at the border. No resolution in Congress is expected this election year.
But although a chorus of U.S. lawmakers are demanding that foreign workers enter the United States legally, they've taken few steps toward opening legal channels to Mexicans such as Rojas, whose low-wage labor is in great demand in the United States.
Last year, the State Department issued fewer than 89,000 temporary work visas to low-wage Mexican workers. That's not many compared to the estimated 400,000 to 500,000 of Mexico's poorest who crossed the border illegally to find work.
"It shows the disconnect between the demand for labor here and the supply of legal workers from abroad," said Stuart Anderson, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official who now heads the National Foundation for American Policy. The Washington area research center promotes expanded legal immigration.
Trying to work legally in the United States is a daunting task for people such as Rojas. There are two classes of visas for non-professional workers.
H-2B visas -- the category under which Rojas qualified -- are capped at 66,000 worldwide. These visas typically go to workers in industries with short, seasonal spikes, such as construction, hospitality and food service. Last year, 60,259 went to Mexicans, according to U.S. consular officials.
The other category, agricultural visas, known as H-2A, isn't capped. But industry experts say that because of legal and bureaucratic obstacles, these visas are used infrequently. Last year only 31,892 were issued; 28,563 of them went to Mexicans.
Both types of visas require advance arrangements with U.S. sponsors, who typically find laborers through Mexico-based recruiters. They, in turn, can charge prospective workers upward of $1,250, the amount Rojas paid to get his first landscaping job with the Brickman Group, a nationwide landscaper.
"It requires money and connections," said Rachel Micah Jones, the executive director of the Center for Migrant Rights, a law center in central Mexico. "The poorest are not the ones who are getting the jobs."
Immigration advocates argue that an expanded guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration. Since the 1960s, when the U.S. government ended a far-reaching agricultural guest-worker initiative known as the Bracero Program, illegal immigration has climbed.
The White House backs Senate legislation that would reopen the spigot of legal workers, but it faces stiff opposition from House Republicans who want to shore up border security first.
Critics of an expanded guest-worker program say it would do little but overwhelm the low-skill job market in the United States, pushing down wages for American workers who have only high-school educations or less. That category includes a lot of welfare-to-work cases and inner-city teenagers.
"I don't find any evidence of a labor shortage," said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research center devoted to immigration issues. "When I look at the data, it looks like we're letting in a lot of unskilled workers from Mexico."
The application process has to go through three departments of the U.S. government: Labor, State and Homeland Security. The complicated legal procedure is often beyond all but the most resourceful and educated. |
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