New U.S. Law Also Worries Mexico : For Illegal Aliens, the Dream Fades

Perhaps Chicago’s streets were not paved with gold, but at least they were paved, and Saul Vasquez saw in the relative affluence of the big American city a chance to make more money in a few weeks than he would make in a year at home in Mexico.

Last November, Vasquez crossed the border, illegally, and boarded a bus for Chicago, where he took a job as a cook at a candy factory that paid him $3.65 an hour.

But after only 3 1/2 months on the job, Vasquez, 21, returned to his hometown, Tarimbaro. Now he is unemployed, living in his simple brick home on an unnamed dirt street. The road to riches in Chicago had reached a dead end.

Vasquez’s bosses laid him off, he said, along with 20 other undocumented immigrants, because beginning in May a new law will make it a criminal offense for employers to hire illegal aliens.

“Chicago is finished for us,” Vasquez said recently. “The employers are not waiting for the law to go into effect. They are firing us now.”

Vasquez and his hopes for windfall wages are an early casualty of the new U.S. immigration law enacted by Congress and signed by President Reagan last year. In an effort to stem the flow of job-seekers from south of the border, the law provides for fining employers who hire undocumented workers. To get a job, an immigrant must show proof that he or she is a citizen, a resident alien or is otherwise authorized to work in the United States.

Although more than two months remain before it goes into effect, the new law is creating uncertainty among laborers who travel to the United States in search of work, and it is stirring concern over the sudden return of immigrants to economically stagnant Mexico.

The concern is especially strong in places like Tarimbaro, which for several generations has sent workers north in search of jobs.

“I pray to God that not too many workers are thrown back into Mexico,” said Father Jose Flores, the parish priest in this town of 5,000 people. “If many come back, there will be problems. There is no work for them here.”

U.S. Earnings Go Far

Tarimbaro lies in a corn-producing valley about 160 miles west of Mexico City in the state of Michoacan, about 500 miles from the frontier with the United States. Michoacanos have been leaving home for several generations because good farmland is scarce, industry is rare and, more so than ever these days, a dollar earned in the United States goes a long way in Mexico. One U.S. dollar currently fetches more than 1,000 Mexican pesos. At $3.50 an hour, earnings from a single hour’s work in the United States exceeds a full day’s minimum wage in Mexico.

“We can earn a million pesos in a couple of months in the U.S.,” Vasquez said. “Here I could never see a million pesos in a year.”

It is too early to gauge whether the law will reverse the flow of workers from Mexico and Central American countries to the United States. Vasquez said that of the 21 workers fired at the candy plant, three returned to Tarimbaro. A few others went home to other Mexican towns, but most planned to await full implementation of the law before making a decision.

Their fate is complicated by a provision in the law that permits aliens who have lived in the United States for five years or more to apply for legal residency. Theoretically, this provision would benefit many of Vasquez’s colleagues, but because the law specifies continuous residency, laborers who come and go seasonally, which many do, may be forced back to Mexico.

In any event, employers seem to be jumping the gun and dismissing workers who in any way appear to be ineligible to stay on legally in the United States.

Roberto Ayala, 23, who lives two blocks from Vasquez on one of Tarimbaro’s few paved streets, said he worked in Chicago for 3 1/2 years before returning to Tarimbaro for a visit last Christmas. Ayala said that he had reached an understanding with his employers that on returning he would be given his restaurant job back at the same wage. Over the years he had been promoted from busboy to salad maker and was being paid $5.50 an hour.

But when Ayala returned to Chicago, his employers told him that he would have to take a pay cut of $1 an hour and somehow acquire papers to legalize his stay in the United States, he said. Offended by the reduction in pay and seeing no prospect of obtaining legal residence, he returned to Tarimbaro to work in his family’s tomato patch and help his mother grind corn to be sold for use in tortilla batter.

The loss represented a sizable reduction in income for Ayala’s family. With his previous earnings, Ayala had been able to buy an old adobe house in Tarimbaro for $2,500. Such a purchase would have been impossible without the U.S. wages, he said.

Further, his fruitless trip to Chicago meant that he had wasted the $600 that he spent on a so-called coyote, or guide, to lead him safely across the border and past the U.S. Border Patrol.

“Life is tough in the United States,” said Ayala, reflecting on the city’s severe weather and the memories of sharing dingy apartments with co-workers. “But here we go hungry.”

Word from other Tarimbaro workers suggests that many Mexicans will not come home until they are thrown out. Farmer Raul Acosta said his two teen-age sons, who are picking hops in Oregon, plan to stay on even though they have been told that, come May, both will lose their jobs.

“They phoned to tell me that their boss said he might be able to fix their papers,” Acosta said, “but the boys think he just wants to keep them on until the government intervenes.”

Acosta, 44, is himself a 15-year veteran of the fields in California. He came back to Michoacan, he said, when picking lettuce gave him a backache.

Hermilo Camarena, a schoolteacher from Morelia, recently returned to Michoacan after a four-month fling in the United States that he saw as an “adventure.”

“I wanted to see what the country was like and how our workers live there,” he said.

Camarena, 26, said he found work as a busboy in Reno, Nev., but when he traveled to Santa Ana, Calif., hoping to obtain similar work, he found none.

“The competition is terrible, and it’s worse with some people losing their jobs,” he said.

Any large influx of returning workers could create problems for Mexico’s government, which opposed the new immigration law. Emigration to the United States has long been a safety valve for Mexico’s unemployed. The country’s economy has declined in the past five years and cities and towns are crowded with unemployed and semi-employed youth who scratch out a living washing windshields on street corners or selling trinkets.

An exodus of migrants from the United States would further tax Michoacan’s ability to provide work for an already largely underemployed labor force. The possible return of many emigrants is already a hot political topic. Michoacan, with a population of 4 million, is known as one of Mexico’s poorest states and small landholdings in ejidos-- communal farms--are already overburdened with workers.

Michoacan’s new governor, Luis Martinez, recently told reporters that he would be able to offer returning emigres jobs through a plan of “integral exploitation of state resources.” He did not elaborate on what that meant.

The mayor of Tarimbaro, Pablo Ramirez, was more modest. He said that returnees will probably have to rely on their families to provide work in the fields. “The workers may not be unemployed but they’ll be underemployed,” he said.

Common citizens are skeptical that returning workers can be absorbed into Michoacan’s economy.

“If I were one of our workers in the U.S., I’d stay, papers or not,” said schoolteacher Camarena. “There is very definitely nothing to do here.”