In Mexican Villages, Few Are Left to Dream of U.S.

 

All across Mexico’s ruddy central plains, most of the people who could go north already have. In a region long regarded as a bellwether of illegalimmigration — where the flow of migrants has often seemed never-ending — the streets are wind-whipped and silent. Homes await returning families, while dozens of schools have closed because of a lack of students. Here in El Cargadero, a once-thriving farm community of 3,000, only a few hundred people remain, at most.

“It’s not like it used to be,” said Fermin Saldivar Ureño, 45, an avocado farmer whose 13 brothers and sisters are all in California. “I have three kids, my parents had 14. There just aren’t as many people to go.”

As Congress considers a sweeping overhaul of immigration, many lawmakers say they are deeply concerned that providing a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States would mean only more illegal immigration.

They blame the amnesty that President Ronald Reagan approved in 1986 for the human wave that followed, and they fear a repeat if Congress rewards lawbreakers and creates an incentive for more immigrants to sneak across the border.

“The big problem with immigration is convincing people in the country that it won’t turn into a 1986 endgame,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who is in the bipartisan group of senators working on a bill.

But past experience and current trends in both Mexico and the United States suggest that legalization would not lead to a sudden flood of illegal immigration on the scale of what occurred after 1986. Long-running surveys of migrants from Mexico found that work, not the potential to gain legal status, was the main cause of increased border crossings in the 1990s and 2000s. And as Mr. Saldivar points out, times have changed.

The American economy is no longer flush with jobs. The border is more secure than ever. And in Mexico the birthrate has fallen precipitously, while the people who left years ago have already sent their immediate relatives across, or started American families of their own.

“It’s a new Mexico, it’s a new United States, and the interaction between them is new,” said Katherine Donato, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University who specializes in immigration. As for Congressional action spurring a surge of illegal crossings, she added: “You’re just not going to see this massive interest. You don’t have the supply of people. You have a dangerous trip that costs a lot more money, and there has been strong growth all over Latin America. So if people in Central America are disenfranchised and don’t have jobs, as was the case in Mexico three or four decades ago, they might decide to go south.”

Of course, hundreds of thousands of people, from all over Mexico and other parts of the world, still try to reach the United States each year, and the country’s magnetism will partly depend on the details of what Congress approves. Who will be eligible? How long will they have to wait, and what barriers will lawmakers erect to prevent new immigrants from entering illegally and finding work?

Some scholars argue that granting any form of legal status encourages illegal migration because it creates a more settled immigrant class, attracting other relatives. “If that person is a green card holder, the power of that network would seem to be significantly stronger,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which advocates reduced immigration.

Many lawmakers, particularly Republicans, see the 1986 law — the Immigration Reform and Control Act — as the prime example of what can go wrong.

Billed as a sweeping effort to halt illegal immigration, it gave legal status to around 2.7 million immigrants through two programs: one for farm workers and another for immigrants who had been living in the United States since 1982. For the first few years after it passed, illegal crossings fell because migrants who had once entered the United States illegally suddenly had papers allowing them to come and go at will.

But by 1990, the flaws began to show. The documentation requirements for agricultural workers were loose enough to allow for widespread fraud, encouraging people to cross the still relatively unprotected border and apply.

More significant, experts say, work visas for Mexico’s masses of poor, young men were hard to obtain and sanctions against employers using illegal workers were rarely enforced. As a result, American companies and immigrants continued to seek each other out.

“The great wave of Mexican migration to the U.S. in the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s was driven by the abundance of jobs generated by the U.S. economic boom of this period,” said Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “Any delayed effects of” the 1986 amnesty “were inconsequential compared with the incentives created by U.S. job growth,” he said.

Here in central Mexico, local economics and demographics also played a significant role. The collapse of the Mexican peso in 1994 and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it harder for Mexican farmers to make a living, pushed some families to Mexican cities and accelerated a migration pattern that would soon reshape both sides of the border. More immigrants now living in the United States come from central Mexico than from any other place in the world, according to census and survey data in both countries.

In states like Zacatecas, many areas emptied out gradually. If a visa could not be obtained, the sons and daughters of farming families crossed with smugglers, calling local radio stations back home to announce to their relatives that they had survived the journey.

“It became a way of life,” said Eduardo López Mireles, president of the municipality of Jerez, which includes El Cargadero. “There are 50,000 people from Jerez over there, and 57,000 here.”

But over the past few years, the traffic patterns have changed. In Jerez and other places, the established cross-border networks of family connections that made possible one of the greatest immigration waves in American history are either tapped out — with most close relatives already in the United States — or they are sending people home. Not only were more than 10,000 Zacatecans deported in 2012 alone, according to state figures, but thousands of others have returned voluntarily because of a lack of work.

Many of these returning migrants — like Angel Castro, 38, who was sitting on a bench wearing a watch with an American flag — say they do not intend to head north again for a shot at legalization. “It’s just too hard,” Mr. Castro said.

In a half dozen towns in Zacatecas, scores of residents of all ages said that crossing the border had become too expensive and dangerous to consider seriously. In Perales, a hilltop village surrounded by fields of oats, corn and beans, a dozen men gathered by a church said it was not just all the extra American enforcement; they also feared the criminal gangs that now dominate smuggling.

Though most of the men had worked illegally in the United States before, they all said that even if they got in again, new rules would probably make it harder for them to work and impossible for them to qualify for any proposed pathway to citizenship. And because of increased prosecution in the United States, they said, getting caught without papers now could torpedo any chance of a visa later on, even just to visit relatives.

“The amnesty, it’s for them, the people who are there,” said Jose Luis Lopez, 32, a laborer in Perales with a brother in Dallas and another in Los Angeles. “It doesn’t mean much for us.”

Over the long term, experts predict that eventual citizenship for 11 million more immigrants could greatly increase legal migration as families reunite. Congress appears interested in limiting the swell, with the senators drafting legislation saying the bill might eliminate visas for married adult children and siblings of American citizens.

Regardless, the pool of potential applicants is shrinking. In a sign of just how much family reunification has already occurred, legally or not, remittances to Jerez have fallen to $100,000 or less per day, down from $1 million in the late 1980s, according to Jerez officials.

Especially in the small towns that have been sending migrants north for decades, the void is stunning. In Santa Ines, three secondary school grades were combined this year into just two classes, including one with only 11 students.

On the main road into El Cargadero, most homes are locked up and gathering dust. On a recent afternoon, there were only two people on the street: an old man in a wheelchair and another with a cane. The sound of a radio inside a home blocks away could be heard as clearly as the men’s conversation.

Nearly everyone in the town has relatives in the United States — one woman counted 150 — but the families still here tend to be intact, suggesting that legalization would be less of a magnet than before. And there are simply not as many young people over all: the birthrate across Mexico has fallen from nearly seven children per family in 1970 to just over two, partly because of a government push for family planning. Mr. Saldivar, the avocado farmer, says his daughter’s sixth-grade class has seven students, compared with 30 when he attended.

He doubted that his three children would bother heading to the United States. His son is in a college preparatory program. He and his wife, whose nine siblings are also all in the United States or Canada, live comfortably in a small, well-kept home with flowered curtains. Their main nod to migration is linguistic: they pay an English teacher to instruct their children so they can communicate with their American cousins. They are among the many here who no longer see the United States as a dreamland, recoiling at the anti-immigrant sentiment there and the stories of struggle that relatives share in phone calls and e-mails.

At least initially, many Zacatecans said, legalization may actually send more people south than north, as millions of immigrants would be able to come and go from the United States legally for the first time in years.

J. Reyes Sanchez, 53, one of the men chatting near the church, said he wanted nothing more than to see his three children in the United States, and his American grandchildren, and a pathway to citizenship could let that happen. “They could come see their family, they could come see me,” he said. “They’d practically be tourists here, but they need to come.”

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