| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2008 
Returning Migrants Find Mexico, Themselves Unready to Adapt
 Chris Hawley - Arizona Republic
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| | Teresa Cervantes, 21, returned home to live with relatives in San Jose de Lourdes, Mexico, after she and her husband could no longer support their family in Chicago. (Chris Hawley/The Arizona Republic) | |
San Jose de Lourdes, Mexico - When her 3-year-old son begs for pizza, or when her family is shivering through yet another night in the Mexican highlands, those are the moments when Rosario Araujo misses America the most.
Just three months ago, Araujo and her husband, José Zavala, were still living comfortably, though illegally, as migrant workers in Gilbert.
He hung drywall for $10 an hour, and she cleaned houses. They had a small apartment, a washing machine and an occasional night out with their two American-born children.
But when work dried up in the economic crisis, they were forced to head south. Now, they live in a cinder-block house, huddle near a space heater and wash clothes by hand.
The family is part of a small but growing number of Mexican migrants who are heading home because of the U.S. recession and finding Mexico is barely prepared to receive them.
"It was a difficult decision," Araujo admitted. "We took a lot of risks to get (to America). We miss it."
Even in bad times, most illegal immigrants - they number 11.9 million, according to Pew Hispanic Center estimates - are staying put. U.S. salaries average about four times as high as those in Mexico, and Mexico's flat job market and drug-war violence have made home inhospitable.
But the collapse of the U.S. economy - particularly the housing industry, which relies heavily on migrant labor - means that some workers could simply run out of cash in the months ahead. That could push many to return to their homeland, where at least family can provide shelter and food.
"We have to face the possibility of a very large number of Mexicans (coming home)," Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said last month.
The trend eventually could ease some of the strain that illegal immigrants place on services such as schools and hospitals in U.S. border areas, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank.
The impact in Mexico could be enormous because the country has long depended on emigration as a kind of safety valve for the economy, which doesn't produce enough jobs for those entering the labor force. Espinosa said the government is trying to prepare schools and social agencies for an influx of poor migrants.
That will be difficult. Many children who are returning home don't even speak Spanish. Other migrants bring expectations shaped from having lived in a developed country for years.
Zavala worries about his children's education. "The schools there (in the United States), they take the children in a bus and give them food, books, everything," he said. "Here, you walk to school and you get nothing."
For now, the couple are barely scraping by off their dwindling savings. Zavala spends his days tending his father's three cows, waiting for planting season and worrying about the future.
Migrants return
A few miles down the road in San Jose de Lourdes, population 7,000, about 50 migrant workers have returned in the past few months, Mayor Abel Hernandez said.
Even by local standards, the town in central Mexico is not a particularly inviting place.
Tethered horses stand in the dirt streets. A battered welcome sign hangs askew from a post, knocked loose by a drunken driver. The most bustling businesses are a feed store and a factory that processes corn husks for tamales.
Most local farms have been divided and subdivided so many times that they're no longer profitable, said Robert Rodriguez, former president of the local farmers association. That's why so many people left for the U.S. in the first place, he said.
Signs of a long tradition of emigration are everywhere. At a gasoline station outside town, there is a U.S. highway map on the wall and a Western Union window for picking up wire transfers from relatives in the United States.
Still, residents who were deported or came back to town for family reasons said they were postponing their return to the U.S. until things improved.
"Why go back now? There's no work," said Rogelio Ortíz, who returned from Memphis in August to visit his wife and children. He is waiting to see if President-elect Barack Obama can solve the economic crisis.
Teresa Cervantes, 21, said she and her husband decided they could no longer support a family in Chicago after his construction work dried up.
She returned this month with their two children; he will probably join them next year, she said.
The migrants who remain in the United States are sending home less money, Hernandez said. Nationwide, migrant remittances dropped to $5.92 billion in the same period this year from $6.33 billion in the third quarter of 2007, a decline of 6.5 percent. The effect has been amplified in poor towns that rely heavily on migrants abroad.
In San Jose de Lourdes, store owner Ana María Guardado said her sales have fallen off 30 percent as families cut back on staple foods.
The town had to shelve plans for a new clinic after migrant donations to the construction fund fell off, Hernandez said.
Rodriguez said his sisters used to wire him $100 every eight days. They also paid for his phone line so they could keep in touch with family back home.
He hasn't gotten a wire in six weeks, he said. The phone company shut off the phone line.
Changing patterns
Among the thousands of Mexicans who are on the move, most are heading to other U.S. states, said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador in Washington.
In some Mexican consulates, the number of requests for consular IDs has doubled as migrants update their addresses, he said. Many people in Arizona, Colorado and Virginia are moving to California and the Northeast, places seen as more migrant-friendly, he said.
"We are seeing very significant and very profound migration patterns within the United States," Sarukhan said.
For those who do return to Mexico, the federal government is expanding the Seguro Popular health-insurance plan to absorb returning migrants and is hoping to create jobs for them with new infrastructure projects, said Espinosa, the foreign minister.
In Mexico City, which has about 450,000 citizens in the United States, the city government is expanding unemployment benefits to include returning migrants.
It also is trying to speed up the provision of driver's licenses as well as other documents so children born abroad can enroll in city schools.
The local government is bringing in psychologists from a university to help migrant children fit in at school, said Guadalupe Chipole Ibañez, director of Mexico City's Center for Migrants.
Many of the new arrivals have trouble in grammar and literature classes, she said.
"There are children who speak and understand well in both Spanish and English, but many of them only write in English, and that is causing them a lot of problems in school," Chipole Ibañez told a news conference.
Positive changes
Not all the change is negative. Araujo, the housekeeper, said she won't miss the constant threat of deportation.
In Maricopa County, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio's so-called crime-suppression sweeps caught 200-plus illegal immigrants, she and her husband were afraid to leave their home.
The state's employer-sanctions law, one of the country's toughest, made it harder to get jobs with a false Social Security number, Zavala said. And anti-Mexican sentiment seemed to be growing among regular Arizonans, said Blanca Castillo, Araujo's sister-in-law, who also returned.
"Suddenly, people were shouting things at you on the street," Castillo said. "It was like, as the economy went down, the racism went up."
Despite all the problems, Zavala said he would return to the United States in an instant if things improved. "Maybe things will get better next year," he said. "I hope so, anyway, because there's nothing for us here - nothing."
Reach the reporter at chris.hawley(at)arizonarepublic.com. |
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