Reversing South-North Immigration

It’s time to look south when thinking about immigration. It’s likely that in the coming couple of years more Mexican immigrants will be heading south, not north. That’s because the number of deportations is steadily increasing. What’s more, many Mexicans (and Central Americans) are themselves deciding to return home. The deteriorating U.S. economy and the ongoing immigrant crackdown are wearing down the determination of many immigrants to make their permanent homes in the United States. As yet, there are few hard numbers on this reverse flow of immigrants. And it is unknown whether it’s the economy or the crackdown that is causing most of the returning immigrants to abandon the United States. Estimates vary greatly for the projected number of returning immigrants. The UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA, or CEPAL in Spanish) warned this week of the likely return of 2-3 million immigrants in the next few years. ECLA’s executive secretary Alicia Bárcena explained that the agency’s projection was based on conclusions about the U.S. economy, particularly the hard-hit construction industry. “We are facing a very uncertain situation,” she said, “With respect to the return of immigrants, these numbers of between two and three million is because the calculation was done from the United States,” noting how difficult it is to study illegal immigrants. Luz María de la Mora, head of the economic relations department of Mexico’s ministry of foreign relations, called ECLA’s estimates “reasonable numbers.” Mexican government estimates, however, run much lower. Mexico’s labor secretary Javier Lozano estimates that 200,000 Mexican immigrants will return to Mexico, and the government of Mexico City recently projected that 20,000-30,000 will return to the city in the coming year. Senator Silvano Aureoles predicts that Mexico can expect 800,000 returning immigrants between this November and February 2009. In a new study the Pew Hispanic Center reports that the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States appears to have declined. It estimates that the population dropped from 12.4 million in 2007 to 11.9 million in April 2008. Furthermore, it estimates that inflows of unauthorized immigrants averaged 800,000 a year from 2000 to 2004, but fell to 500,000 a year from 2005 to 2008 with a decreasing year-to-year trend. While immigration flows traditionally respond to economic trends, the new politics of the immigration crackdown since 2001 have made it increasingly difficult to cross illegally into the United States and increasingly difficult to live here. Forced returns have risen dramatically since 2005 when the immigrant crackdown began in earnest. DHS repatriated 349,041 immigrants in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. That’s a 20% jump over the previous year. This increase occurs at a time when apprehensions of illegal border crossers has dropped dramatically – about 18% down from last year, and 39% from 2005. In 2005, immigration authorities arrested 1.2 million immigrants while 724,000 were arrested in fiscal 2008. A decline in apprehensions indicates that fewer immigrants are attempting to cross illegally into the United States. If immigration flows over the past several years were equal, one would expect a higher rate of arrests in the past couple of years given increased border security, including several thousand more agents patrolling the border. Tough times in the United States do not, of course, mean that illegal immigrants will automatically return home. As economic conditions worsen in the United States, they are also eroding south of the U.S. border. In the past, illegal immigrants crossed back and forth into the United States to work temporary jobs and to return to Mexico to visit family. But with increased border enforcement, crossing illegally has become more difficult and much more expensive. As a result, unauthorized immigrants who cross back into Mexico probably know that they are going back for good. Only when the U.S. economy picks up will we get a good indication of how effective new U.S. border control efforts really are. Meanwhile, DHS chief Michael Chertoff hopes that the new administration continues on the enforcement regimen that he has started. When asked by a reporter about declining immigration flows related to the stagnating economy, Chertoff said:

“We can make real good use of this time to continue to build the border protection that we need and the enforcement that we need. Each year, assuming we continue along the path we have charted, it is going to be harder and harder and harder for people to cross the border.

“I think we can actually lock in the progress that we have made, if we continue to keep the pace up over the next year or two, so that if economic conditions change down the road, although the incentives to come in may increase somewhat, the deterrents will have really increased because we will have more fence, more border patrol, more technology, more enforcement...”

Drug Czar Sees"Terrorist Criminals" in U.S. and Mexico

U.S. drug czar John Walters took the Bush administration’s macho drug war message to Mexico last week, calling the drug cartels battling the Mexican government and fighting each other for dominance “terrorist criminals.”

"They have a choice: Come in and face justice, or die," Walters said of the drug gangs.

Who believes that?

At a time when the U.S. State Department is warning U.S. tourists that they are taking their lives in their hands if they venture into drug war-torn northern Mexico, when the U.S. consulate in Mexico has come under fire by narcos, and when the number of gruesome gangland executions keeps increasing.

In Mexico, where police are uniformly corrupt and the military notorious ineffective, there is no institutional justice. Criminals, whether narcos or common criminals, operate with impunity. When it comes to dying, it’s the police not the drug gangs who are dying.

In Mexico, the drug war is mostly a government show, not a credible commitment to public safety. The army routinely issues media releases about public burnings of confiscated marijuana. Meanwhile, news about government success in obstructing trafficking in dangerous and more profitable illegal drugs is rare.

For the U.S. government, the drug war is largely a righteous moral crusade led by ideologues like Walters, who has a long history of leadership in right-wing organizations. For Walter, drugs are evil, whether medical marijuana or crack. Prior to his Mexico visit, Walters spoke out against a medical marijuana law in Michigan.

Reacting to rising public sentiment in favor of using marijuana as a medical treatment for cancer and other patients, Walters in 2003 said that medical marijuana made no more sense than “medical crack.”

Walters also apparently sees little difference between the narcos in Mexico, who are responsible to more than 3000 murders this year, and marijuana farmers in California. Last years Walters called northern California marijuana growers “violent criminal terrorists.”

As the U.S. government maintains its enforcement-first approach to the illegal drug problem, other governments are deciding that the drug war should not be taken to drug users.

Commenting on Mexico’s recent proposal to decriminalize personal possession of illicit drugs, Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said, that this “is consistent with the broader trend throughout Western Europe, Canada, and other parts of Latin America to stop treating drug use and possession as a criminal problem. But it contrasts sharply with [the approach taken in] the United States [the U.S. government] should think twice before criticizing a foreign government for its drug policy, much less holding out the U.S. as a model. Looking to the U.S. as a role model for drug control is like looking to apartheid South Africa for how to deal with race."

Walters will likely be gone from the president’s National Office on Drug Policy in a few months. Among the important questions facing the new president will be whether to end the failed drug war model and adopt a new drug policy based on treatment and legalization.

See TransBorder Profile of John Walters

Mexicans Heading Home

The rural areas of the poorest states in Mexico, notably Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Zacatecas, have been depopulated over the past couple of decades by a massive emigration to the United States. Now, as the U.S. economy sinks and immigration controls tighten, many of those who hoped for a better life on the “other side” of the border are heading home. Mexico’s safety valve is experiencing a reverse flow for the first time since the 1950s when the U.S. ended the Bracero Program. Gabriel Hernández García, the Oaxacan state director of the national campesino organization Antorcha Campesino, says various communities of the Mixteca region of the state are experiencing a massive return of immigrants. The communities of the Tlaxiaco area are being hit particularly hard by this reverse diaspora. According to Hernández, the situation requires an emergency response plan but the phenomenon has the federal and state government totally unprepared. He said that the campo has been totally forgotten by the government, which caused thousands of fellow campesinos to emigrate but now the flow north has reversed itself – not because there is more opportunity in Oaxaca but simply because an increasing number of Oaxacan immigrants are no longer able to pay the rent or buy food in the United States. Compounding the crisis of this massive return of destitute immigrants is the continuing fall in remittances to these villages – creating crisis conditions in the Mixteca. The return of thousands of unemployed will likely intensify the tense political situation in Oaxaca, which has been rocked by protests and government crackdowns over the past few years.

Photo: Protest march in Oaxaca against PRI government.