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."
CHART (1):
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at
clochhead@sfchronicle.com.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
The migration of workers from Mexico can be tracked in dollars.
-- Transfer of human capital: One in every 7 Mexican workers
migrates to
the United States.
In 2005, illegal immigrants came from:
Mexico 56% (6.2 million)
Rest of Latin America: 22% (2.5 million)
Asia: 13% (1.5 million)
Europe and Canada: 6% (750,000)
Africa and other: 4% (500,000)
-- Migrant dollars: Many Mexican workers in the United States
send home
$100 and $200 each month.
In 2005, the total remitted was $20 billion.
Percentage of adults receiving money sent from workers in the U.S.
in 2005
(Country population)
Mexico 18% (107 million)
El Salvador 28% (6.8 million)
Honduras 16% (7.3 million)
Guatemala 24% (12.3 million)
Ecuador 14% (13.5 million)
Sources: Pew Hispanic Center, Multilateral Investment Fund John
Blanchard /
The Chronicle
CHART (2):
Coming to the United States
Immigration by decade in millions
Illegal
migrants
1820s 0.1
1830s 0.6
1840s 1.7
1850s 2.6
1860s 2.3
1870s 2.8
1880s 5.2
1890s 3.7
1900s 9.0 0.2
1910s 6.0 0.3
1920s 4.1
1930s 0.5
1940s 1.0
1950s 2.5
1960s 3.8 0.5
1970s 7.0 2.5
1980s 10.0 4.0
1990s 14.0 6.2
2000s 16.0 6.5
Due to changes in how immigrants have have been counted, these figures
are approximations.
-- Mexico to United States migration
Average annual immigration in thousands
'91 337
'92 329
'93 332
'94 372
'95 443
'96 388
'97 390
'98 507
'99 496
'00 530
'01 437
'02 378
'03 369
'04 459
Sources: Pew Hispanic Center, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 2004
Article taken from SFGATE.com
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/21/MNGFQIVNAF1.DTL
