LIFE
The divide after a great escape
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Call them illegal aliens, undocumented immigrants or the mojados, but their remittances from the United States, statistics show, are now Mexico's second-largest source of income, behind only oil. However, `is their quest for a better life in America worth it', asks DICK J. REAVIS.
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AP
If he could have made it, there would have been economic gains, but emotional losses.
THE adage that our neighbours know us best is justified by the experience of nations, as well as by that of the families or individuals who live next door. Mexico and the United States share a 2,000-mile-long land border, and for several reasons, it's probably the Mexicans who know Americans best.
They see Americans as masters, and not as friends, as if their country were a servants' quarters for ours.
There are about 110 million Mexicans on the globe, but only 100 million live in Mexico. The other 10 million live in the United States. These immigrant Mexicans observe their American neighbours in an intimate way.
Most Mexican immigrants have come to the United States within the past 20 years, through a vast underground, without visas or passports. The federal government styles them as "illegal aliens", sociologists, as "undocumented immigrants". The Mexican vernacular calls them "mojados", or "wet ones," because to make a land crossing from Mexico into Texas, undocumented Mexicans must ford the perilous Rio Grande river.
Once they've arrived, mojados buy forged identity papers and almost always find jobs. The American Social Security administration collects payroll taxes, assigning each native-born or legally-processed worker a number. It reports that 10 per cent of the names on its rolls do not match the numbers that ought to correspond, mostly because document forgers concoct Social Security numbers out of thin air.
For 30 years, I have been a journalist on both sides of the Mexican border. I've written one book about mojado immigrants and translated another. Some of the mojados have been my friends, some, before they came here: I crossed the Rio Grande in an inner tube with one old friend, and in the era when amateurs could get away with smuggling, helped other mojados get it.
To date I've never known a mojado who came to the United States by choice. Mexicans come with hunger on their heels.
Theirs is not an individual quest. Recent studies show that one in five residents of Mexico is receiving money, by mail or wire, that was earned in the United States. Simply put, Mexicans come to the United States to enable their families to stay at home.
Remittances from the United States, Mexican statistics show, are now the country's second-largest source of income, behind only oil. For Mexico, supplying the United States with workers is a vital source of income.
The lure of the United States is its wage scale. Mexican workers earn about $5 a day; the minimum wage in the United States is slightly above $5 an hour. Upon receiving his or her first pay cheque, a mojado's immediate sensation is that he or she has struck it rich.
But the feeling doesn't last long, because wealth is a relative thing, closely tied to status and place, and people from strong cultures — the Mexicans are certainly among them — do not live for cash. By the time that a mojado is established in the United States — usually, six months to a year — he or she has usually been disillusioned by life here.
The angst that Mexican immigrants come to feel for life in the United States has only a little to do with the economics of American working-class life.
But America speaks through money, and Mexicans quickly learn to interpret the tongue.
As individuals, mojados become conscious of their disenchantment once they can afford to bring spouses or siblings to the United States, usually a year or two after they've arrived. Most pay alien smugglers, or obligate themselves to pay about $2,000 for passage to cities in the Southwestern United States. Before bringing a relative or spouse, the immigrant must first pay his own entry debt and then ask, "would the money I've saved to bring a loved one do more good if I just sent it home?"
Most send money as long as they can stand the loneliness.
In about half of the cases, after three to five years in the U.S., the mojado gives up and returns to Mexico, taking what savings he or she can.
Those who stay long enough to accrue retirement benefits stream back by the thousands. Retirees have usually raised families in the U.S., and their offspring, having been raised here and acquired an American sense of things, in most cases stay behind. The sojourn which began for family reasons, if it lasts for many years, divides families twice, once when the mojado leaves home, and again, when he or she returns.
In the United States, immigrants come to own cars, refrigerators and air-conditioners, goods that were beyond their reach at home. They open bank accounts and acquire credit cards, as they could not in Mexico. Economically, they gain. But they lose access to intangibles: a sense of belonging and common respect.
They're stunned to find that solidarity, and fellowship, are rare even among immigrant groups. Mistreatment comes, as in the 2000 movie by British director Ken Loach, "Bread and Roses", from Mexican-Americans and other Latin American immigrants, as well as from "Anglos", the vernacular term for whites. In New York, for example, Puerto Ricans outrank Dominicans, and the Dominicans outrank the Mexicans, who are relative late-comers to town. Most Dominican restaurants in New York employ a dishwasher whom waiters and cashiers call "Mexico", as if he or she had no real name.
In Mexico, one's family and one's regional traditions are still the crux of life, and it is what they see in their children that most disillusions the mojados who stay.
"Our children don't respect us," is the universal complaint of mojados who have stayed in the United States. Immigrant parents blame television, youth and consumer culture — cultures in which they did not participate at home — for the estrangement of their offspring.
"Here, you pretty live well, but you lose your family, even your kids," they say.
Because the life of mojados is legally insecure and because they are victimised by smugglers and authorities alike, Mexican president Vicente Fox in 2001 proposed a guest-worker plan to regularise the labour flow. His programme would have legalised the import of workers for three-year sojourns, after which they would be replaced and returned home.
But Fox was rebuffed, initially because, aides to George Bush claimed, the crisis of 9-11 meant that American border controls needed to be tightened, not loosened. Formally, that happened, but in daily practice the new strictures didn't touch the lawless Rio Grande. Subsequent studies show no decline whatsoever in unauthorised immigration from Mexico. The traffic in workers remains brisk, and as for the past 40 years, is regulated only by employers' needs.
A more plausible reason why Bush did not join Fox in an immigration accord is that the Republican party is itself divided, along both regional and ideological lines. Some employers, Midwestern meat-packers, for example, favour legalisation because their labour markets are tight. But in Texas and California, both politically potent states, a guest-worker programme would only mean closer supervision of wage, overtime and workplace safety laws. As things stand, employers in the big states have an ample and easily-intimated labour force, thanks in great part to illegal immigration.
The ideological objection to legalisation is ugly and simple, and touches broader swathes of the world. Much of the popular base of the Republican Party, and some leaders, are wary of immigration from anywhere but Europe. Mexicans are mostly Catholic, as are many Europeans, so religion is not what counts. If Mexicans do not speak English, neither do Russians, or Poles or Bosnians or Greeks. The skills of Mexican immigrants, humble though they may be, are already in demand, as their success in finding work shows. They are unwanted here, then, mainly because their skins are darker than those of the exclusionist crowd.
One's neighbours know what one is. The United States, a settler-colonialist nation, is at least officially uncomfortable about living next door to the neighbour that it chose. It wants Mexicans to clean the American house, to remove the dishes from the dining room and wash them as "Mexico" does in New York. It wants the Mexicans to quietly, as the segregationists used to say, "stay in their place", a place that is not to be found on any maps, but whose borders are well-known. That place is the slave quarter of old, the shanty town across the tracks, the ghetto of Poland, the favella of Brazil, the place where working men and women of all colours have eternally waited for the mutuality that, in their good faith and naivete, they expect neighbours and even their masters to concede.
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