Mexican families in catch-22 over illegal jobs

LAS PALMILLAS, Mexico - There are more stray dogs than young men on the streets of this dusty farm town, whose breadwinners are leaving in droves for illegal jobs on Long Island.

In the scruffy central square, children play with grandparents but almost never with fathers, who are cutting lawns and repairing roofs in Elmont or East Hampton.

Fretful wives wait in public phone centers to talk with husbands who call once or twice a month - and sometimes never.

Across Mexico, towns like Las Palmillas are being ripped apart as increasing numbers of men - and sometimes women - leave their families for jobs in the United States, known here as el Otro Lado (the Other Side).

"When he's gone, I feel like I could lose my mind from the loneliness," said Miriam Barrera, 23, a mother of three whose husband left Las Palmillas four years ago to build decks in Farmingville. "But who will stay here when the work doesn't pay enough to feed your children, or when there's no work at all?"

As the U.S. Senate grapples with reforms that could either penalize or help legalize a flood of undocumented immigrants in the United States, relatives here would welcome any policy that would lift loved ones from the legal shadows. But above all, those left behind want more and better jobs in Mexico to keep workers from leaving.

Half the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States are Mexicans. They are arriving at a rate of 400,000 annually, risking death as they take increasingly dangerous routes across the desert to avoid detection.

Last year, a record 473 people died from causes including heat and dehydration as they tried to sneak across Mexico's northern border, up about 50 percent from the previous year, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. Nearly all victims were Mexican.

For those who make it, there is work to be found. Mexicans in the United States will send home an estimated $23 billion this year, up 15 percent from last year. That is Mexico's second-highest earning after oil exports.

The money pays for basics like food and clothes. It also pays for televisions and stereos and new cement homes, which are popping up everywhere in Las Palmillas and other towns dotting central Mexico's Mezquital Valley - a place where residents estimate one-third of workers have left for Medford, Farmingville, New Jersey and other U.S. destinations.

'A parasitic economy'

But the luxury is relative. Most communities here lack running water and phone lines. Some residents still use donkeys for transport. And with little money being reinvested in the local economy, residents are increasingly dependent on dollars earned abroad.

"We've created a parasitic economy based on the sweat of millions of undocumented workers," said Gustavo Lopez Castro Zamora, a migration expert at the College of Michoacan. Until Mexico creates more jobs at decent pay, he warned, "nothing will stop Mexicans from seeking work on the other side - not even a wall."

A controversial bill passed last year by the U.S. House of Representatives calls for building a 700-mile barrier across parts of the porous, 2,000-mile border.

Families in Mezquital Valley are painfully aware of their catch-22.

"The first time my husband left for the United States, I didn't know for a month if he was dead or alive," said Ana Maria Cano, 36, a soft-spoken woman who lives in Arbol Grande, a hamlet down a bumpy dirt road from Las Palmillas. "But if he comes home, we won't have money to keep our children in high school."

She spoke from the four-room, half-finished cement house her husband began building on his last trip home from Long Island - a place that seems so far away she doesn't even know the name of the town where he shares a house with 20 other men.

Cano's house in Arbol Grande has almost no furniture, but it is her first with electricity. In one corner, the couple's son Efren, 16, who wants to be an architect, was designing a miniature building out of cardboard for a class project.

A dangerous trip back

On his first trip across the desert three years ago, Cano's husband nearly died of thirst, and bandits stole the little money he had. But now he earns about $10 an hour doing construction. That's what he made in a day working in the corn and alfalfa farms ringing Las Palmillas and Arbol Grande - so little that many family meals were tortillas and a weed called quelites that grew in wastewater.

About five years ago, Cano's husband lost even that scant wage as cheap U.S. corn imports drove many farms out of business. Farmers who survived began replacing day laborers with machines.

"We aren't thieves or terrorists," said Jorge Cruz, 76, a frail man in a cowboy hat from the Mezquital Valley town of Tepeitic, whose son is working construction at below-minimum wages in New Orleans. "We just want the jobs the Americans won't do."

U.S. legislators who want to outlaw undocumented workers and anyone who helps them say U.S. citizens would take those jobs if employers paid more.

In a visit to Mexico last week, President George W. Bush vowed that any new immigration law would provide some temporary jobs through guest-worker programs. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox also pledged to improve Mexico's economy. But the two presidents have been making such pledges for years, and immigration reform is in the hands of a bitterly divided U.S. Congress.

"The tragedy is that there is an absence of resources and political will," said Robert A. Pastor, director of North American Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. Only massive U.S., Canadian and Mexican investment in infrastructure and jobs in Mexico will reduce the income gap enough to stem the migration, he added. He said the European community took that approach to jump-start the economies of Greece, Portugal and Spain in the 1980s.

Families hope for resolution

Even as a partial solution, families here welcome a guest-worker program because it would let participants cross the border legally, making it easier for them to come home to visit.

Now, guides known as coyotes charge $2,500 a head to sneak an immigrant into the United States. Between the cost and the danger, more undocumented workers are skipping their annual trips home.

"Sometimes when I'd come back, my children wouldn't know me," said Aristeo Guerrero, 36, of Las Palmillas, who worked in Farmingville from 1995 to 1998. Helped by his brother, Guerrero now sells blenders at local markets.

"I was lucky I had a way to stay," he said. "Some people who can't are losing the most important thing of all: their family."