Understanding Immigration
A Conexiones Publication
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Mexico's Ghost Towns by John Gibler
Mexico’s Ghost Towns
The other side of the immigration debate
By John Gibler (ZACATECAS, Mexico )
Cerrito del Agua, population 3,000, has no paved roads — either leading to it or within it. No restaurants, no movie theaters, no shopping malls. In fact, the small town located in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas has no middle schools, high schools or colleges; no cell phone service, no hospital. Its surrounding fields are dry and untended. The streets are empty.
The explosion of emigration to the United States over the past 15 years has emptied much of central Mexico, even reaching into southernmost states like Chiapas and Yucatan. But it has simply devastated Zacatecas, a dry, rolling agricultural region located about 400 miles northwest of Mexico City.
A little more than half of Zacatecas’ population — about 1.8 million people — now live in the United States, especially in areas surrounding Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2005, three out of its four municipalities registered a negative population growth. A 2004 state law created two new state legislative posts for migrants living in the United States. In 2006, depopulation cost the state one of its five congressional districts.
In Mexico's Cerrito del Agua, freshly painted concrete
houses line empty streets because most of their owners
are working in the United States.
“Well, you’ve seen what this place is like,” says Dr. Manuel Valadez Lopez, gesturing out the door of his small private clinic when I ask him how emigration has affected the town. “There has not been even minimal development here. There is not a single yard of pavement. The few people who have sidewalks in front of their houses built them themselves. Most people defecate outdoors.”
Lopez, 40, a native of Cerrito del Agua, is one of the few to leave the town and return. All six of his brothers now live and work in the United States. All four of his sisters married men who left to work in the United States.
In his teens, Lopez himself had moved to Guadalajara (about a five-hour drive southwest of Zacatecas) to attend high school and university, then stayed on to study medicine and receive a specialist’s training in gynecology. He later returned to Cerrito del Agua for a visit and realized “there was so much work to do here that I stayed,” he says.
That was eight years ago.
“The whole culture now is that people grow up and go to the U.S. — their parents, their uncles, their brothers and sisters, everyone goes,” Lopez says. “The kids who are strong and smart, they all go to the U.S. There are no basic services here; the government has not carried out a single project.”
The situation has been so dire, he says, that the staff at the clinic had to install its own sewage system. “There is running water, but it’s not clean,” he continues. “People get all sorts of infections, a typical Third-World situation.”
Worst of all, says Lopez, is that “people who could possibly stay here and do something, they all go.”
The new U.S. colony
A January report by Richard Nadler, president of the conservative Americas Majority Foundation, found that the strongest state economies in the United States are those with high numbers of migrant workers. Nadler writes: “An analysis of data from 50 states and the District of Columbia demonstrates that a high resident population and/or inflow of immigrants is associated with elevated levels and growth in gross state product, personal income, per capita personal income, disposable income, per capita disposable income, median household income and median per capita income.”
Those who are leaving Mexico — those whose land goes unplanted, whose roads remain unpaved — are laboring in the United States, building shopping malls and factories, washing dishes in restaurants and cafés, picking grapes and pulling lettuce.
They are creating within the U.S. economy precisely the goods and services that their hometowns lack. At the same time, their anemic home economies falter on the brink of collapse.
“I think that the U.S.’s plan is to make Mexico into a kind of colony,” says Lopez, with a half smile. “People go to the U.S. to work and earn dollars. They come back to Mexico and spend their dollars on American products. It’s a nice, round business.” He continues: “Everyone here depends on the U.S. If this isn’t a colony, then how do you define colony?”
Condemned to disappear
In the heated debates over U.S. immigration policy, the pressing questions seem to be “How many immigrants should be allowed in, if any?” and “How should they be processed into the system?” But rarely considered is what this massive influx is doing to Mexico.
With nearly half a million Mexicans crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every year to look for work, Mexico has become the world’s largest exporter of its people. More people flee destitution in Mexico than in China or India — each with populations 10 times larger than Mexico’s.
Their remittances — the money Mexican immigrants in the United States save and send back to their families — equaled $24 billion last year, and made up the third-largest source of revenue for the Mexican economy (after illegal drugs and oil).
“Theories of migration always show the interests of the North,” says Raul Delgado Wise, director of the Graduate School of Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas and an expert on migration. He says migrants born in Mexico contribute 8 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) — about $900 billion — which is more than Mexico’s entire GDP.
Wise is one of several researchers studying Mexican migration at the University of Zacatecas. Together they publish an international journal called Migration and Development and are laying the groundwork for an alternative think tank to the World Bank, which will be called the Consortium for Critical Development Studies.
“With all of this, we need to see really how much it is costing Mexico, how much Mexico is losing,” Wise says.
He says that the mass migration from Mexico to the United States cannot be fully understood without considering the U.S.-Mexico economic integration. Begun in the ’80s, this integration reached its maximum expression with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which took effect Jan. 1, 1994.
What Mexico really exports, Wise argues, is labor.
The supposed growth in Mexico’s manufacturing sector is a “smokescreen,” he wrote in a 2005 article in Latin American Perspectives, a scholarly journal. Almost half of all manufacturing exports come from the maquiladora assembly plants (foreign-owned factories in Mexico) that import production materials and export their final products — and their profits. Mexico adds only the labor.
Neoliberal policies — first implemented in the ’80s, and later through NAFTA — cut government investment in public works and agriculture, privatized key state enterprises and created low interest rates that attracted foreign capital. These policies opened the way for a 25-fold increase in maquiladora sales between 1982 and 2003 (though that growth peaked in 2000 and has since fallen as maquiladora owners seek ever lower wages and looser environmental regulations to compete with China’s abundant labor supply).
From 1994 to 2002, Mexico lost more than 1 million agricultural jobs. And from 1980 to 2002 — the same period maquiladora sales soared — migration from Mexico to the United States grew by 452 percent, with more than 400,000 people crossing each year, on average.
“In Mexico, we have exported the factory of migrants,” says Rodolfo Garcia Zamora, an economics professor who also teaches at the Graduate School of Development Studies. Zamora, author of Migration, Remittances and Local Development, says Mexico “is mortgaging its future” with migration and remittances. In the 10 Mexican states with the longest migration histories, he says, 65 percent of municipalities have a negative population growth. “This means that in the future,” says Zamora, “these communities will not be able to reproduce, neither economically nor socially, because the demographics of migration have condemned them to disappear.”
No escape?
“The United States economy demands cheap labor. Mexico has an excess of laborers. We complement each other,” says Fernando Robledo, director of the Zacatecas State Migration Institute, a government office that administers development projects in conjunction with several U.S. migrant organizations.
He dismisses talk of depopulation and an abandoned countryside as “fatalism.” “Zacatecas has a 120-year history of migration,” he says. “Migration is historical.”
Robledo describes the state government’s development priorities as variations on the “three for one” program — where local, state and federal governments match each dollar provided by U.S. migrant organizations for use in local development projects, such as building interstate highways heading north and constructing greenhouses for growing export crops.
“If you had $50 million in the budget,” Robledo says, “would you use that to increase production in the countryside or to build an interstate highway? It is a political and economic decision.”
Robledo puts priority on the highway.
But doesn’t building super-highways toward the Mexico-U.S. border and changing agriculture to a cash-crop export reproduce the very neoliberal policies that dispossess migrants in the first place?
“We do not live in a socialist country,” he responds, “where the government controls every aspect of the economy. We are in a neoliberal country. We cannot escape from neoliberal economics.”
Garcia Zamora, who helped write the Zacatecas state development plan, is unconvinced. The main problem, he says, is the lack of real political alternatives to neoliberalism. According to Zamora, “there is only one political party in Mexico — the PRI,” referring to Mexico’s notoriously corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000. “The PRD government in Zacatecas now acts just like a PRI government,” Zamora says, this time referencing the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the opposition party to the PRI. “The same lack of planning and nepotism. It spends its time mainly implementing federal programs. They drafted a good development plan, but they … have never carried out a serious regional economic development policy that seeks to diminish the massive exodus of 40,000 Zacatecas residents who abandon Mexico every year.”
Abandoned by migration
A few years ago, Mario Garc’a left Zacatecas to work in construction in Southern California, but after about five months he decided to return to El Cargadero, a tiny town about 50 miles west of the city of Zacatecas, the state capital.
“I thought, ‘In Mexico, if you work a couple of shifts, you can live OK’, ” he says. “Without so many luxuries and freeways, but you can live a more peaceful life.”
Garc’a, in his early 40s, is a small farmer and municipal delegate. His wife and three daughters live in El Cargadero. All nine of his brothers and sisters, and more than 50 cousins, live in the United States.
El Cargadero, with a population of about 350, and a population in the United States of more than 1,000, is supposed to be a success story. Most of its roads are freshly paved, and residents have electricity and potable water, thanks to remittances and the “three for one” program.
“There are many points of view, but as you can see here, this is a community abandoned by migration,” Garc’a says. “The government should work to keep people in the country, to find jobs, better living conditions. Here we have pretty streets, but where are the people?”
Driving from the city of Zacatecas to El Cargadero, mile after mile of empty fields, closed restaurants and boarded-up houses span the countryside. José Manuel, a taxi driver, who worked in California for four years, washing dishes and making salads, accompanies me on the drive. He says he remembers when these roads weren’t paved yet, but the fields were full of corn and beans. It is now vast emptiness.
“Nobody works most of this land anymore,” he says. “The owners went to the U.S. and left the land behind.”
This is precisely what brought Mario Garc’a back. “The countryside is broken,” he says. “The rural economy needs to be reactivated. But we export one of the most valuable things: our workers. And now we don’t produce anything.”
The legalization debate is misguided, he says, because it focuses, always, on the U.S. economy: how many immigrants to allow in and how to stamp their passports. That focus needs to shift to include Mexico.
“Mexico does not need an open border with the U.S. that invites Mexicans to go work there. People always talk about legalization, but no, what needs to be legalized is the Mexican’s ability to stay [home] so that Mexico can grow and produce.”
John Gibler is a Global Exchange Media fellow who writes from Mexico. He is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, forthcoming from City Lights.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Immigration in Focus Documentaries show various angles of immigration
"Life & Debt in America" Documentary Report Shows a Different Kind of "American Dream"
Highlights the need for compassionate immigration and documents a certain perspective of the American economy and the "American Dream."
Video Documentary "Latin America - Life & Debt" alludes to root causes of immigration
It alludes to Root Causes of Immigration - which is where we must look to deal with the issue.
The Issue of immigration as it is portrayed in the media
We must engage in interpreting social messages and to inform our research for solutions related to the subject of immigration (and the other areas we study).
We do not necessarily agree with everything the different media voices or pundits say, but they each have a voice, and from a historical perspective, all voices must be heard and documented - especially with regards to important issues that affect many people.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Banco Internacional de Desarrollo (BID) reporta que se desacelera envio de remesas a America Latina
La recesión estadounidense es una de las causas de la desaceleración en el envío de remesas. |
La desaceleración en el envío de remesas a México es debido a la crisis hipotecaria en Estados Unidos y el menor crecimiento económico que registra este país, coinciden analistas y la CEPAL.
Al cierre del 2007, México recibió US$23.979 millones en remesas, lo que representa un crecimiento de apenas 1% respecto al 2006.
Sólo en enero, los envíos tuvieron una caída de 5,87%, al sumar US$1.757 millones, revelan cifras del Banco de México (Banxico).
"Tal evolución es atribuible a varios factores, entre los que destacan la desaceleración de la actividad económica en Estados Unidos y especialmente en la industria de la construcción, misma que representa una importante fuente de ocupación para un número elevado de trabajadores de origen mexicano", explica el banco central mexicano.
Además, agrega, los trabajadores mexicanos han enfrentado mayores problemas para emigrar a Estados Unidos.
Crisis de vivienda
Sin embargo, hay quienes consideran que el endurecimiento de las medidas migratorias en Estados Unidos tienen poco que ver en la caída de las remesas.
El factor central de esta caída es la crisis en el sector de la construcción, particularmente en la vivienda, área en la que se ocupan gran parte de los inmigrantes mexicanos, coinciden Jorge Máttar, director adjunto de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) y Jonathan Heath, economista en Jefe para Latinoamérica del HSBC, al ser consultados por BBC Mundo.
Es un ingreso que iba en aumento y le iba dando un sostén de vida a muchas familias. (Con la disminución) hay menos posibilidades de que México pueda mantener el ritmo de consumo en su economía Jonathan Heath |
Heath, en tanto, explica que "la desaceleración que estamos viendo en EE.UU., primero, no es homogénea, sino regional; y segundo, este fenómeno se origina por el mercado de vivienda, donde hay un sobreinventario de casas, lo cual ha afectado mucho al sector construcción".
En su reporte de febrero, el Departamento del Trabajo de Estados Unidos, informó que en ese mes se perdieron 63.000 empleos, de los cuales 39.000 correspondieron al sector de la construcción, donde labora la mayor cantidad de inmigrantes mexicanos.
Futuro sombrío
Aún no se sabe hasta qué punto la desaceleración económica de Estados Unidos llegará a agudizarse.
Sin embargo, los analistas consultados consideran que en el corto y mediano plazos traerá efectos negativos para las familias de los inmigrantes que envían dinero a sus países.
"Es un ingreso que iba en aumento y le iba dando un sostén de vida a muchas familias. (Con la disminución) hay menos posibilidades de que México pueda mantener el ritmo de consumo en su economía", dijo Heath.
"Se va a tener un efecto negativo en el corto y mediano plazo, aunque después de cierto tiempo las familias se adaptan y se dan cuenta que tiene que salir y buscar trabajo , y ya no depender tanto de las remesas", agregó.
La mayor parte de los ingresos que reciben las familias que viven de las remesas son para la sobrevivencia, no para invertir o ahorrar, señaló el economista del HSBC.
Jorge Máttar opina que en términos macroeconómicos el efecto negativo será mínimo, pues las remesas representan sólo 1.8% del Producto Interno Bruto en México, y 2.5% del consumo total.
Países como Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haití y República Dominicana podrían verse más afectados, pues el peso de los envíos de dinero en el PIB nacional es mucho más grande que en México.
Sin embargo, dice Máttar, sí afectara a muchas familias pobres que tenían como único ingreso este dinero.
Retos
El lograr mejores empleos debe ser una aspiración de los gobiernos de estos países, aunque sea difícil de alcanzar en el mediano plazo Jorge Máttar |
"No sólo en el aspecto económico, sino en la protección social", dice.
"El lograr mejores empleos debe ser una aspiración de los gobiernos de estos países, aunque sea difícil de alcanzar en el mediano plazo", apuntó.
Jonathan Heath se muestra menos optimista al respecto, pues considera que aunque hay que eliminar la brecha salarial entre Estados Unidos y los países latinoamericanos.
"No hay política en el mundo que pueda hacer esto en dos o tres generaciones", expresó.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Immigrants searching for the American Dream are Increasingly Returning to Home Towns
A video documentary from BBC World News 3.25.08
Brazilians end American dreamThe economic downturn in the US has meant many immigrants are returning home for better economic prospects.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Taking a Closer Look at the Correlation Between Immigration and Crime
Americas Program CommentaryTruth about Illegal Immigration and CrimeBy Tom Barry | January 18, 2008 | |||
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World Bank Reports on the Impact of Immigration on Source Countries
Massive Brain Drain From Some of the World’s Poorest Countries | ||
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A new World Bank publication shows remittances from migrants alleviate poverty and help raise levels of child health, school attendance and investment back home. However the report also shows some of the world's most vulnerable low income countries face a massive brain drain. And more than fifty percent of the university educated professionals from many countries in Central America and the Caribbean also live abroad. They're just two of the findings of a new World Bank publication, entitled International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain. The volume is a product of the International Migration and Development Research Program of the Development Research Group, the Bank's research department. "The report reveals the brain drain is massive in small and poor developing countries," says World Bank economist, Maurice Schiff, a co-editor of the volume. "While over 50 percent of college graduates leave countries in Central America and the Caribbean, in some of them, the figure is as high as 80 percent." L. Alan Winters, the director of the Bank's Development Research Group, says while the mobility of highly skilled workers can offer many benefits, the consequences of the brain drain could be serious for many developing countries. And he says understanding the so-called brain drain remains one of the highest priorities for development research in the future. The report's findings are based on the most comprehensive and rigorous database on the brain drain to date, created by researchers Frédéric Docquier and Abdeslam Marfouk, and presented in chapter five of the volume. Larger Countries Less Brain Drain Schiff says the report shows the extent of the drain brain problem in larger countries is much less. "On average for countries with more than 30 million people, the brain drain is less than five percent of all college educated people. The reason is that they have a large population of skilled people, so that even with a large share of skilled people in the migrant population, their share in the skilled population is nevertheless small," he says. Countries such as China and India only have about three to five percent of their graduates living broad. And it's a similar situation in Brazil, Indonesia and the former Soviet Union. By contrast in Sub-Saharan Africa, skilled workers only make up four percent of the total workforce. But these workers comprise more than 40 percent of people leaving the country. "Most of these college educated professionals from developing countries go to the United States, as well as the European Union, Australia and Canada. In fact Canada and Australia have the largest share of educated migrants out of the total number of migrants to those countries," Schiff says. A Brain Waste? With all the college graduates leaving their homelands, it raises the question as to whether their skills are being put to good use in the destination country. Part of the volume looks at this issue, with co-editor and Bank economist Caglar Ozden finding that skilled migrants to the United States often fail to get jobs that match their education levels. Overall, immigrants from Latin America and Eastern Europe with similar education levels are more likely to end up in unskilled jobs in the U.S. than immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Schiff says the data from the U.S. show educated migrants from India and the United Kingdom are more likely to get jobs in the US equal to their skill level. "One of the main reasons is language. Both tertiary educated people from India and the United Kingdom speak English, and of course that's a big advantage when they come to the U.S. ," he says. A Home Benefit Regardless of the type of migrant - educated or not - the report clearly shows the money the migrants send back home does help alleviate poverty in their former home. Close to 200 million people are living outside of their home countries, with remittances estimated to reach about US$225 billion in 2005, according to a forthcoming Bank publication, Global Economic Prospects 2006. The World Bank's Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics, François Bourguignon, says the household survey evidence presented in the volume demonstrates a direct link between migration and poverty reduction A survey of Filipino households shows the remittances they receive mean less child labor, greater child schooling, more hours worked in self employment and a higher rate of people starting capital intensive enterprises. In the Guatemala case study, remittances reduced the level and severity of poverty. The biggest impact was on the severity of poverty, with remittances making up more than half the income of the poorest ten percent of families. The report shows the money migrants sent back to Guatemala was spent more in investments - such as education, health and housing, rather than on food and other goods. An Exception in Rural Mexico While the report shows the money migrants sent back home generally meant a greater investment in education, one exception noted in the report is the case of rural Mexico. Studies in the report find that children aged 16 to 18 years in households from which someone had migrated had lower levels of schooling compared to households where no-one migrated overseas. It's a finding that's been put down to the special situation of Mexico's rural migrants in the US labor market - the fact that their low level of education only gets them unskilled jobs in the US, whether or not they spend an additional year in school. So people from rural Mexico planning to migrate to the US have little incentive to invest in education. What Next? The next phase of the research program will use existing information and generate additional data on a variety of issues in order to examine the effectiveness of a number of policies and programs. The objective is to derive policy recommendations based on solid evidence and analysis. |