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By John Gibler
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.
“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, 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 — 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, which took effect January 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.
Neo-liberal 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
neo-liberal 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 neo-liberal
country. We cannot escape from neo-liberal 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 neo-liberalism. 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 Garcia 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.”
Garcia, 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,” Garcia 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 Garcia 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.”
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