History Forum / General / British History / June 2007

This is about a year old but gives a very good picture of the
situation, the Mexicans are about half of the immigrants and the
numbers have been pretty steady for many years. I can remember when a
similar situation existed in Brazil and other South American countries
and the Japanese came into the picture. Now the Japanese wnat all
their lost population back.

Give and take across the border
1 in 7 Mexican workers migrates -- most send money home

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Sunday, May 21, 2006

(05-21) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The current migration of Mexicans and
Central Americans to the United States is one of the largest diasporas
in modern history, experts say.

Roughly 10 percent of Mexico's population of about 107 million is now
living in the United States, estimates show. About 15 percent of
Mexico's labor force is working in the United States. One in every 7
Mexican workers migrates to the United States.

Mass migration from Mexico began more than a century ago. It is deeply
embedded in the history, culture and economies of both nations. The
current wave began with Mexico's economic crisis in 1982, accelerated
sharply in the 1990s with the U.S. economic boom, and today has
reached record dimensions.

It is unlikely to ebb anytime soon.

"There is no scenario outside of catastrophic attack on the United
States that would make immigration stop," said Demetrios
Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a
nonpartisan think tank.

The fierce immigration debate now under way in Congress focuses almost
exclusively on the U.S. side of the equation. Senate legislation
attempts to reduce the flow by hardening the border, sanctioning
employers who hire illegal migrants, and expanding avenues for legal
immigration. The House passed a bill focused solely on U.S.
enforcement.

Yet whatever the United States decides about immigration will have a
huge impacton its closest neighbors, especially Mexico.

What happens in Mexico, by turn, has a big effect on immigration flows
to the United States. Those events include a hotly contested election
six weeks away that pits a leftist populist against a market-oriented
heir to President Vicente Fox.

"We want Mexico to look like Canada," said Stephen Haber, director of
Stanford University's Social Science History Institute and a Latin
America specialist at the Hoover Institution. "That's the optimal for
the United States. We never talk about instability in Canada. We're
never concerned about a Canadian security problem. Because Canada is
wealthy and stable. It's so wealthy and stable we barely know it's
there most of the time. That's the optimal for Mexico: a wealthy and
stable country."

What isn't wanted, Haber said, "is an unstable country on your border,
especially an unstable country that hates you."

Three-quarters of the estimated 12 million illegal migrants in the
United States come from Mexico and Central America. Mexicans make up
56 percent of the unauthorized U.S. migrant population, according to
the Pew Hispanic Center. Another 22 percent come from elsewhere in
Latin America, mainly Central America and the Andean countries. These
same countries send many of the half-million new illegal immigrants
who arrive each year.

Migration is profoundly altering Mexico and Central America. Entire
rural communities are nearly bereft of working-age men. The town of
Tendeparacua, in the Mexican state of Michoacan, had 6,000 residents
in 1985, and now has 600, according to news reports. In five Mexican
states, the money migrants send home exceeds locally generated income,
one study found.

Last year, Mexico received a record $20 billion in remittances from
migrant workers. That is equal to Mexico's 2004 income from oil
exports and dwarfing tourism revenue.

Arriving in small monthly transfers of $100 and $200, remittances have
formed a vast river of "migra-dollars" that now exceeds lending by
multilateral development agencies and foreign direct investment
combined, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

The money Mexican migrants send home almost equals the U.S. foreign
aid budget for the entire world, said Arturo Valenzuela, director of
the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and
former head of Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council
during the Clinton administration.

"Where are we going to come up with $20 billion?" to ensure stability
in Mexico, Valenzuela asked at a recent conference. "Has anybody in
the raging immigration debate over the last few weeks thought, could
it be good for the fundamental interests of the United States ... to
serve as something of a safety valve for those that can't be employed
in Mexico?"

Migration has caused significant social disruption in Mexico, though
research is scant, said B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies
at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at
Georgetown University.

"We do know that it can break up families, and has done so in many
traditional sending areas," he said. "The husband comes to the United
States and stays for many years. His wife is on her own with the
children. In some cases, the couple comes to the United States and
leaves their children behind with relatives."

The migration is driven in part, experts say, by the large income
differentials between the two nations. A rural Latin American migrant
may earn 10 times in the United States what he or she can earn at
home.

But an equally intense pull comes from U.S. employers, including
private households, who employ large numbers of illegal immigrants as
nannies, housekeepers and caregivers, said Jeffery Passel, a senior
demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.

The U.S. information economy has created a split labor market, one
with a powerful demand for high- and low-skilled workers, economists
say.

While U.S. professionals toil in office buildings, others come to
clean their offices, prepare their food and provide the host of
services that support modern life. In a bygone era, teenagers, women
and rural U.S. migrants filled these jobs. The U.S. labor market
offers opportunities to "a younger, vibrant labor force and Mexican
immigration has been filling that void," said Armand Peschard-
Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project for the Center for Strategic
and International Studies.

U.S. demand has driven a record increase in wages for newly arrived
immigrants, about 30 percent between 1994 and 2000, according to
Lowell. The migration has also raised average wages in Mexico by 8 to
9 percent, economists estimate. As the first U.S. Baby Boomers turn 60
this year, this demand is only expected to intensify.

Once migration starts, social and economic networks sustain and fuel
it, which explains in part why flows have not fallen despite solid
economic growth in Mexico.

Most illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America have not
completed high school, although education levels are rising. Harvard
economist George Borjas found that in 2000, 63 percent of Mexican
immigrants had not finished high school.

New immigrants are much more broadly dispersed than previous waves. A
lower percentage are going to the traditional magnet states such as
California and New York. The fastest-growing destinations for new
arrivals, according to demographer William Frey of the Brookings
Institution, are North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona,
Iowa and Nebraska.

This geographic dispersal may account in part for rising public
discontent over immigration, many believe. Migrant workers have also
shifted from the fields to the cities, working in hotels, restaurants
and construction, where they are more visible to the public.

Mexico is aging too, which will eventually cause migration to ebb. Its
population trails the U.S. age profile by 30 years. By then,
demographers expect Mexico may be importing labor.

While migration has long served as a safety valve for Mexico, the
current wave may also be hindering the political and economic reforms
that most agree are needed -- in education, taxes, energy, agriculture
and law, where systemic corruption is a serious barrier to growth.

"The good news is that a million Mexicans were on the street recently
demanding good jobs and good government and justice," Roger Noriega,
former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs,
told a recent panel at the American Enterprise Institute. "The bad
news is they were marching in someone else's country. Every day,
thousands of Mexico's most industrious people leave their families
behind ... leading many to wonder why Mexico's political class is not
capable of creating economic opportunity for its citizens in a land
rich in mineral wealth, hydrocarbons, agricultural potential and human
capital."

The United States is not the only country that shares a long land
border with a poorer nation. So does Germany, with Poland. France once
did with Spain. Many point to Europe's unification as a better way to
integrate the North American economies without disruptive migration
flows.

Before the European Union opened its labor markets, its wealthier
countries invested billions of dollars to develop the economies of its
poorer members -- at the time, Spain, Portugal and Greece -- that had
been sending migrants abroad. Since then, Spain has become the
economic engine of Europe, and this month opened its labor market to
Poland. The Irish, who once fled economic calamity by the millions to
the United States, are today having their gas pumped by Eastern
Europeans.

Many contend that U.S. investment in Mexico would be less expensive
and more effective than a wall. Poorly developed Mexican credit
markets make it all but impossible for a low-income family to get a
mortgage.

If, when the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994,
"the United States had approached Mexico and its integration into the
North American economy in the same way that the European Union
approached Spain and Portugal in 1986, we wouldn't have an immigration
problem now," said Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey, co-
director of the Mexican Migration Project, a survey of Mexican
migrants.

Given the predominance of Mexicans and Central Americans in illegal
immigration to the United States, Papademetriou wonders why the
Senate's guest worker program would be open to all comers, if it is
intended to provide temporary workers for the U.S. market.

"If 60 percent of our illegal immigration comes from a single country,
and another 20 percent comes through that country, logic would say the
vast majority of visas should go to the country of origin," he said.
"The last thing you would do is create a global temporary worker
program, as if somehow we should need Bangladeshis or Russians to pick
our fruits and vegetables."

Targeted visas could also leverage Mexican cooperation in undertaking
politically difficult reforms, and would be more likely to keep guest
workers temporary. "You keep it a neighborhood project," Papademetriou
said, "so you have people going back and forth visiting their
families, not spending thousands of dollars to come from all over the
Earth. People who already have a network in place that will support
them in the United States, that will help them find jobs."

Given that Mexico is the second-largest U.S. trading partner, the two
nations' economic integration is well under way, and labor is part of
that, experts say.

Even a new wall -- already under construction on the border with
Mexico with bits of triple fencing here and pieces of National Guard
units there -- has not stopped migrants entering yet and probably
works more to trap them in the United States, many believe.

"These are human beings," said Audrey Singer, an immigration expert at
the Brookings Institution. "It's not like a water faucet we can turn
on and off. I think of managing them better -- because it's very hard
to stop them." http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/21/MNGFQIVNAF1.DTL&type=
printable

Better than getting beaten to death in Texas.