2006 Star-Telegram and Wire Service Sources. All Rights Reserved

/ Posted on Sun, Mar. 26, 2006 /

Growing emptiness
By JAY ROOT
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
JOAQUIN AMARO, Mexico -- Decades ago, before massive waves of young men fled north, Pedro Avila Salamanca helped his father harvest corn and fatten pigs. He learned to write his name in a one-room schoolhouse. Sometimes, he rode to town on a donkey.
It's all a distant memory now. Everywhere, abandoned houses are crumbling. The towns are shrinking. And Avila, 89, who wears donated clothes and lives on the meager checks his daughters send from the United States, can't remember the last time he ate meat. "What would I buy it with?" he asked.
Avila is a part of the immigration debate that neither Mexican political leaders nor cheap-labor advocates in the United States like to talk about: Heavy migration has all but emptied much of the Mexican countryside.
Money sent back to Mexico from those working in the United States reached a record high last year -- $20 billion -- making remittances from migrants Mexico's second-largest income source, surpassed only by oil exports.
But the reduction of labor has been devastating. It has left the land dotted with near ghost towns inhabited by the very old and the very young, their lives dependent on whatever money their relatives send home.
If there were economic development, there would be few working-age people to reap its benefits.
"For the governing class, immigrants become the solution. They leave. They reduce the political and social pressure. ... They even reduce the costs of public-works projects," said Rodolfo Garcia Zamora, an economist and immigration expert at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, the government-operated university in Zacatecas state. "They can only hope that everybody leaves and sends home collective remittances."
Money and population
In five states, including Zacatecas in central Mexico, remittances from abroad now equal 100 percent or more of local salaries. In the state of Michoacan, which faces the Pacific Ocean, money from the United States is 182 percent of in-state incomes.
No corner of Mexico has been untouched by emigration. In 31 percent of Mexico's municipalities, population is shrinking steadily because of migration to the United States, according to figures provided by Garcia Zamora.
In Zacatecas, known for silver mines and dry, mountainous terrain, 45 of the 58 municipalities are shrinking. The state's population of 1.5 million would double if all its emigrants and their offspring returned from the United States.
The population drain is no secret in tiny Joaquin Amaro, just up the road from the tiny rancho where Avila was born in 1916. Nine times as many people from this town live in Cicero, Ill., than in Joaquin Amaro.
Florentino Rodriguez, 75, is back after spending most of his working years -- from 1951 to 1994 -- in the United States. Nine of his 10 living children reside there. His wife recently died.
Tears rolled down Rodriguez's face when he was asked to describe life in his shrinking hometown.
"It's hard. I'm all alone," he said. "The men go to the United States, and they stay. Only the old ones are left behind."
A need for change
The exodus has sparked a fierce debate in the U.S. Congress and beyond. Many business and farm interests say industries would collapse without immigrant labor. Conservative activists favor deportation and a border wall. Liberal groups want to put immigrants on a path to U.S. citizenship.
If anything binds the sides together, it's the conviction that something needs to change. The number of illegal immigrants estimated to be in the United States has grown by nearly 50 percent in six years, to 12 million from 8.4 million in 2000, according to a report released this month by the Pew Hispanic Center. More than half of them come from Mexico.
As Congress debates enhanced border security and guest worker proposals, experts and many immigrants say the only way to keep people in Mexico is to create good jobs.
That was the idea behind a proposal put before Congress in 2004 to create the North American Investment Fund, which would have sent $20 billion in American and Canadian development aid to Mexico to start projects. The proposal went nowhere.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who sponsored the 2004 bill, said it may be a long time before Congress is willing to take that step.
"We've got a lot of education to do," Cornyn said. "I don't think the American people support the idea of just taking their tax money and giving it to somebody else just because we want to help them out."
Mexico's development efforts have been less than impressive. None of the 16 states with the highest rates of migration have made economic development a major priority, according to Garcia Zamora, the economist in Zacatecas.
Encouragement?
Critics say state and federal leaders in Mexico encourage their citizens to go to the United States illegally.
The Mexican government has been criticized for its efforts to help illegal immigrants. A little over a year ago, the Foreign Affairs Ministry published a 32-page booklet, modeled after a popular comic book, titled Guide for the Mexican Immigrant. While counseling against illegal crossing, it gives advice on when to cross the desert, how to dress for a swim across the river and what to do when lost: "Guide yourself with light poles, train tracks or dirt roads," it says.
This year, the independent federal Human Rights Commission published maps showing illegal immigrants how to find water and highways when crossing the desert into the United States. After an uproar, plans to distribute the maps were shelved.
In Joaquin Amaro, people don't need maps.
The young men know the way, and the old people can't leave anymore. Their contact with the modern world comes mostly at the end of a telephone line, at $1 a minute, from a bank of telephones in a trailer in the town square.
STORIES AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAY ROOT