Flood of Workers Flows North to Booming Tijuana

At the giant Hitachi plant where he works, Oswaldo Perez sometimes pauses on the television assembly line to think about Puebla, his hometown in southern Mexico, where he could be playing soccer with his friends, eating his mother’s cooking and enjoying the rainy season, his favorite time of year.

But Perez, 19, has little time for nostalgia. He’s more concerned with getting ahead and making money, the reasons that he left Puebla to make a new start in Tijuana. Although life here is dangerous, dirty and filled with daily jolts, he’s grateful for a job and to be saving some pesos.

“The work is the good thing about this place, and that you don’t lack for food. I feel that I’m moving forward,” said Perez, who borrowed $70 from his sister to make the three-day bus trip to Tijuana in July to look for work.

Perez has lots of company--perhaps too much. He is part of the virtually overnight migration of well over 100,000 Mexicans from the country’s interior to the northern border region, where an explosion of jobs has been a powerful magnet for those devastated by the country’s profound recession.

About 60,000 of them have landed jobs at Tijuana’s maquiladora factories within the last 20 months, helping to drive the city’s population growth rate to a virtually unmanageable 5% annually--double the pace for the country as a whole and too much for the city’s infrastructure to handle.

The influx of Mexican workers to border cities such as Tijuana and Juarez recalls the migration that helped shape America’s industrial belt in the years just before and after World War II--legions of black and white workers who moved from the agrarian South to Detroit and Pittsburgh for steady work in the auto and steel industries.

“It is the heaviest flow from the interior of Mexico to the border that we have seen since the 1960s,” said Wayne Cornelius, research director at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego.

The good news about this migratory surge is that jobs are at the end of the road: When out-of-work construction worker Felipe Ozuna moved his wife and three children from Acapulco to Tijuana this summer, he and daughter Patricia, 18, quickly landed jobs at Hitachi, where his son, also named Felipe, has been a security guard for two years.

They could just as easily have found work at one of the neighboring plants in the bustling Mesa de Otay industrial zone of Tijuana. Sanyo, Maxell and Matsushita are all hiring: Each displays Se Necesita Personal signs.

The unemployment rate here is a minuscule 2%.

The reason is that companies from around the world, driven by the North American Free Trade Agreement and the collapse of the Mexican peso, are flocking to the border region to produce goods for export. These maquiladora factories have added 170,000 jobs since the start of 1995--building blocks for a stronger Mexican economy.

Two-thirds of the jobs have been filled by emigrants from Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz and other southern states. And for each maquiladora job, another is created at a trucking firm, doctor’s office or grocery store.

The bad news is that those jobs are a drop in a leaking bucket--a national economy that needs 1 million new jobs annually just to absorb population growth but that lost 1 million jobs last year instead.

The flight to the border jobs is “a direct reflection of the desperation of people in the central plateau, the impoverished southern states and even the Mexico City metropolitan area, desperate about finding steady employment that pays sufficiently to maintain a family, a direct reflection of the magnitude and duration of the Mexican economic crisis,” Cornelius said.

Nor is it an unvarnished blessing for the border towns, literally overrun by the rapid growth. Perez and other workers cope with ramshackle housing that has sprung up in lieu of decent places to live, and with the crime that flourishes in the shadows of the big, new high-tech factories. Overloaded roads and public transport, inadequate health services and water pollution plague the community.

These conditions are facts of life in Mexico, but have become especially acute in the border region.

The insecurity is what Perez dislikes most. He has already been mugged in increasingly lawless Tijuana. He lives in a dismal one-room shack with five young men, all from Puebla, in an unpaved squatters’ barrio called 10 de Mayo that sprawls east of Tijuana’s big industrial zone. The place has no running water or sewage facilities.

To avoid the marijuanos, the drug dealers and users who prey on new arrivals, neither Perez nor his roommates venture out after 9 p.m.

“There are bums and gangs and the police don’t come out here. As soon as I’m home, we close our doors and we don’t leave,” Perez said, standing on a hot afternoon in front of his house, a half-hour walk from the Hitachi plant.

Likewise, life is hard, dry and dusty at Ozuna’s shack in the Eagle’s Nest colonia east of the Hitachi plant and in the shadow of the steel fence separating Mexico from the United States.

Then again, the rest of Mexico is no picnic. And here, there is work.

Ozuna lost his job when the construction business in Acapulco, rocked by interest rates exceeding 50%, ground to a halt. The family jumped on a bus and headed here, where five family members had already found jobs. Patricia, who works in quality control at Hitachi, needs money for school.

“She has a dream to be an accountant, but there’s no money to pay for her college. Construction is paralyzed in Acapulco. I don’t want her to lose the dream, so we all came up here to try to finance her education,” Ozuna said.

Maquiladoras--the foreign-owned plants located mostly along the 2,000-mile border--were created after a 1965 joint U.S.-Mexico accord for the twin purposes of creating jobs for Mexicans and legitimizing the use of low-cost Mexican labor by U.S. and other foreign firms. Companies are taxed by Mexico only on the value of the labor performed on the goods, not on components coming in or the full value of products shipped out.

U.S. government officials trumpet the relatively good-paying maquiladora jobs--Perez makes $44 a week and has health and other benefits--as also dampening illegal immigration by giving Mexicans reason to stay. But academics from both countries say the evidence of this is unclear, and that those looking for jobs in the maquiladoras and those looking to cross over into the United States are two distinct groups.

“It’s very difficult to demonstrate . . . that maquiladoras are deterring illegal immigration,” Cornelius said.

Still, they are one of Mexico’s few shining economic lights. While jobs in all of Mexico decreased by 3% in 1995, the worst year for Mexico’s economy since 1930, overall payrolls at maquiladoras grew by 10.5%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of El Paso. And jobs are growing by 19% so far this year.

“Maquilas were of tremendous importance during the crisis,” said Federal Reserve economist Lucinda Vargas. “Ciudad Juarez in the middle of a recession had a net job gain of 16,000 workers when the whole country was losing 1 million workers. So they cushioned the crisis for Juarez and for Tijuana, Mexicali and all the cities along the border,” Vargas said.

Today’s maquiladora work force is more male and more geographically diverse. As recently as 1984, about 90% were women--and only those who could prove that they had lived here for a year. Ostensibly, the practices were designed to ensure a stable work force, when in fact they were put in force to tap the huge pool of low-cost female labor, said sociologist Jorge Carrillo of Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, who has studied maquiladoras for 20 years.

But the rapid growth has used up the female labor pool, and the work force is now 40% male. And the new employers, many of them Asian consumer electronics manufacturers, don’t care where applicants are from or whether they have roots in Tijuana, says Hitachi administrative manager Jose Ibarra.

Thus two-thirds of Hitachi’s new employees come from southern Mexico, compared with one-third before the peso crisis.

Some say these emigres tend to be more stable than the locals. But one thing hasn’t changed: high employee turnover. Maquiladoras replace 8% of their workers on average each month. Although workers from central Mexico are generally more dependable than those from other areas, they are more likely to quit to return home after building up a nest egg, Carillo says.

So the journey seems worth it.

At Perez’s last job in Puebla, his employer sometimes went three weeks without paying him for his hazardous work as a marble cutter. His other jobs included butcher, Jacuzzi molder, shoemaker and cook, a subsistence living at best.

Hitachi, the first place he applied to in Tijuana, hired him to hoist 35-inch color television tubes onto an assembly line that stretches the length of a football field. Perez’s 329 pesos, or $44, a week is about one-third more than he’s ever earned. For the first time, he has medical and disability benefits.

He is paid on time every Friday and has free access to two on-site doctors, an amenity offered by many of the larger maquiladoras. He’s been able to save $150 in his short time on the job. He figures to stay five years and salt enough away to open a shoe repair shop in Puebla.

Patricia Ozuna will stay until next year, when she will return home for school. The notion of crossing into the United States, she says, “doesn’t occur to me. My family is here and there is work.”