Job Programs Aim to Curb Migrant Flow

Neither the United States nor Mexico appears to want to face a central issue in the debate over immigration policy: how to develop poor rural villages and stagnant regional cities in Mexico so that would-be migrants can get decent jobs at home.

As Presidents Bush and Vicente Fox look for solutions ahead of a summit in Washington next month, most of the talk is about recognizing the reality of the endless flow of migrants. Hardly anyone is talking about how to prevent people in Mexico’s migrant-sending states from wanting to leave in the first place.

Maybe that’s because such development is so difficult, and such a long-term prospect--requiring decades, not just years.

But in Zacatecas state, where whole towns have been all but emptied by migration and have grown dependent on remittances, some people don’t think it’s impossible. University researchers, state officials and Zacatecan-born migrants are devising pilot projects here that aim to make local development a reality. Several imaginative initiatives are moving forward that could make a dent--if they get adequate support.

Andres Bermudez understands better than most people the collateral damage that migration has inflicted on Mexico. Bermudez, who left Mexico 28 years ago and made his fortune growing tomatoes in Central California, sweeps his arm out over his tidy home village and mutters: “Every one of these houses was made with dollars. And eight out of 10 of them are empty.”

Bermudez was elected mayor of the village of Jerez in central Zacatecas state in July on a single-minded platform: to create jobs so that the few young people still living here don’t have to leave and so that those who have left can return.

One goal of people such as Bermudez is to think beyond the “social investment” of recent years, in which clubs of Zacatecan migrants in the United States have sent money back for community projects such as paving roads and digging wells.

The next stage is to get successful migrants to invest in entrepreneurial projects in their hometowns that create jobs and earn profits. These could range from canneries and processing plants for the beans, chiles and peaches that the region produces to new mining projects to small textile assembly plants.

“We believe that each job we create is one less migrant who leaves,” state Economic Secretary Carlos Lozano said. “The problem is going to be solved here, not there.”

Officials compare this type of economic development plan to the aid program created for Spain and Portugal when they joined the European Union to spur job creation and reduce the need for people to emigrate to richer nations.

Such a support program for Mexico was never part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in 1994. So the playing field was never leveled. And migration accelerated.

Money does pour into Zacatecas from migrants in the United States--more than $1 million a day--but 95% of it is spent on food and basic survival needs rather than investment.

Wayne Cornelius, who heads both the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego, has argued for years that economic development in places such as Jerez is the only serious way to reduce illegal immigration to the United States.

“My preference, and that of the vast majority of immigration scholars, would be to focus first on creating alternatives to immigration in the sending communities, through investments, credits and infrastructure programs,” he said. “It’s not a magic bullet, even if perfectly implemented, given the wage differential. But don’t seal up the border before you’ve made the effort to create meaningful alternatives to emigration on the Mexican side.”

The easiest route for Mexico has been to exploit migration as an economic safety valve, rather than try to halt it and have to face demands from would-be migrants for work opportunities. And the United States never summoned the political will during the NAFTA negotiations for a World War II-style Marshall Plan for Mexico.

“If the two governments had listened to people like Wayne Cornelius 20 years ago, we wouldn’t be in this crisis,” said Rodolfo Garcia Zamora, a professor of migration studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas.

Garcia Zamora’s small team has joined state officials to try to make up the lost years, by leveraging migrants’ remittances into productive investments.

The financing arm of the InterAmerican Development Bank is developing a $2-million pilot project that would develop 60 small investment projects in 20 towns in Zacatecas and 20 more in Guanajuato and Puebla states. Successful migrants would be invited to invest in their home communities, assisted by state incentive packages designed to solve infrastructure shortcomings and financing costs.

Garcia Zamora challenged U.S. federal and state officials to join in exploring this long-term solution.

“The U.S. is going to put $12 million more into the militarization of the border. Why not put just $3 million of those funds into development projects that would reduce the pressure for undocumented crossings?” he said. “And couldn’t California help us develop more effective agricultural programs and move beyond just words?”

Although Mexico has made the issue of economic development in migrant areas one of its five points in immigration negotiations with the United States, Washington has been silent so far on the issue of development assistance.

U.S. funding for Mexican development could set off isolationist sentiment on both sides of the border--with fears of U.S. interference in domestic affairs on Mexicans’ part, and a reluctance on the U.S. side to spend potentially vast funds on Mexico. But Robert A. Pastor, an expert on U.S.-Latin American affairs at Emory University in Atlanta, said that as policymakers weigh the huge costs of unending migration, “the option of supporting a large development fund might become quite practical.”

Pastor said managers of so-called maquiladora factories concentrated on the Mexican border had told him that the main obstacle to locating their plants in migrant-sending states was poor infrastructure, such as narrow, potholed roads. “So the answer is a simple one: Invest in the infrastructure of Mexico. If we just put together a fund that permitted $10 billion in investments a year for 10 years, the effect would be electric.”

Presumably, the U.S. would foot a large part of that bill, although Fox has said the Mexican government will match certain migrant investments.

Much of the new energy for local development is being generated by Ricardo Monreal, the state’s young governor from the left-of-center Democratic Revolution Party.

Monreal knows the migration issue well, and its impact on the state: From 1992 to 1997, an average of 13,500 Zacatecans resettled in the United States each year. They came home less often, partly because of stricter border controls, and they became more organized as they grew more rooted in the United States.

Monreal campaigned in California in 1998, recognizing the political and financial influence of the migrants. Estimates of Zacatecans in the United States range from 600,000 to 1 million. There are 50 active Zacatecas clubs in Los Angeles alone, with 20,000 members, many of them well-established and successful.

That’s a potent pool of investors.

Lozano, Monreal’s economic secretary, said Zacatecas is the No. 1 producer of beans and chiles in Mexico but doesn’t have one processing plant. “We are creating financing funds for small businesses to let people develop their own businesses and root themselves here,” he said.

“It would be cheaper to put money into creating jobs here than into walls on the borders to keep people out,” he said. “We want to identify constructive projects for [Zacatecan migrants] to invest in. What we need is to create conditions for them to make competitive investments.”

Nobuyuki Otsuka, an operations specialist for the InterAmerican bank’s financing arm, the Multilateral Investment Fund, is helping craft the pilot project. He said it is fashionable to talk about local development but that the Mexican migrant investment initiative is a rare practical example.

“The migrant really cares about his hometown,” he said, “so why don’t we use their interest as a driving force for local development?”

Juan Hernandez, head of a new presidential office for Mexicans abroad, is constantly drumming up commitments among migrants abroad to invest back home to create jobs. Like a traveling salesman, Hernandez visits migrant clubs in California, Illinois, Texas and New Jersey to promote investment.

He has pushed the padrino, or godfather, project, seeking to entice the most successful migrants to invest at home. The first such padrino, New Jersey trucking magnate Jaime Lucero, has invested in several textile factories in Puebla state, planning ultimately to employ 6,000 people.

But Garcia Zamora says the bulk of the investment projects must be more locally driven, and backed by newly successful migrants without the vast resources of people like Lucero. These new entrepreneurs will need more help from the state with infrastructure, training and financing costs.

Like many Mexican municipalities, Jerez is more like a county than a town. It contains 57 villages, including El Cargadero, a hamlet in an arid valley where Bermudez was born in 1950--and which gave him 1,400 votes, to just one for his opponent.

Driving a visitor along a ridge above El Cargadero, Bermudez pointed out the recently paved roads and the new street lighting, all paid for by Zacatecas clubs in the United States. Zacatecas pioneered the “3-for-1 program,” in which each dollar contributed for such projects by migrant clubs was matched with three additional dollars, one each from the federal, state and local governments.

But such projects don’t create decent jobs. Bermudez knows he needs factories and agricultural industry if he is to staunch the exodus of young men from this town of 57,000. Already, he notes, there are another 57,000 people from Jerez living in the United States who did not find opportunities at home in years past.

“If the U.S. wants to stop migration,” Bermudez said, “it can put some factories here.” Bermudez wants textile plants and canneries for the beans, cactus fruit and peaches that grow well in Zacatecas if there’s reason to plant. He wants to put a computer in each village and network them. He plans all sorts of projects after his inauguration Sept. 15, so that by the time the migrants come home at Christmas, “we’ll get people’s attention and give them a reason to come back.”