Ghosts, Migrants and Visa Gold

Similar to the San Diego and El Paso areas, the influx of Mexican migrants fleeing crime and violence has spurred economic activity in south Texas and San Antonio.

Mier, Mexico. Courtesy : twtex.com

(LAS CRUCES, N.M.) - A new report by Mexico’s National Institute of Geography, Statistics and Informatics (Inegi) provides aesthetic details on the emptying of the countryside in the Mexican state of Michoacan.

Of 537,000 homes in rural Michoacan, nearly one in four, or 23 percent, stand abandoned throughout the entire year or portions of it, the Inegi study finds. According to the federal agency, Michoacan’s population dropped from approximately 4.2 million people in 1995, a year after the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a time when economic crisis clawed the landscape, to an estimated 3,926,000 inhabitants today.

Every year for the last 15 years, between 25,000-30,000 residents of Michoacan have moved to the United States, said Zaira Mandujano Fernandez, secretary of migrant affairs for the state government of Michoacan.

Despite economic downturn and tougher US border security, Mandujano said she expected the current rate of migration to the US to continue for the next 20 years.

Besides traditional economic motives or desires for family reunification, public insecurity could be another driving force behind migration, though neither the Inegi report nor Mandujano directly touched on the issue.

Michoacan is one of the main battlefronts in the so-called narco war. At times violence in some areas of the southwestern state has rivaled or surpassed blood-letting in other places where criminal activity has pushed cross-border migration, including Baja California, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas. Interestingly, the same crime syndicates that are battling in Michoacan-Zetas, Gulf, La Familia and Sinaloa-are fighting for control of Tamaulipas.

A recent tour of the Tamaulipas borderland by a team of Mexican journalists led the reporters to call the towns of Mier, Camargo, Ciudad Miguel Aleman and Nueva Ciudad Guerrero “ghost towns” marked by closed businesses and abandoned homes. A number of the former residents have apparently fled across the border to neighboring Texas.

Victor Castillo, member of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, told the reporters that 400 Mexican families have moved to McAllen and other nearby towns during the last six months. Further inland, in San Antonio, a representative of the RE/MAX real estate firm said that Mexicans now make up 80 percent of the local company’s clients, a dramatic increase from four years ago when Mexicans accounted for 35 percent of the customer base.

Unlike their working-class countrymen, many of the newer migrants possess economic clout and the ability to obtain business visas.

Similar to the San Diego and El Paso areas, the influx of Mexican migrants fleeing crime and violence has spurred economic activity in south Texas and San Antonio. On the other hand, many migrant-sending zones in Mexico have seen steep drops in money sent home during the last two years. Michoacan state official Mandujano noted two other trends accompanying local migration. First, more and more migrants are women.

Second, migrants are coming back home with less frequency than before, with return visits even plunging 20 percent in 2009, according to Mandujano. While migrants are mostly staying put in the US, Mandujano did not discount a significant return in the near future if Arizona’s SB 1070 law takes hold and greater numbers of people without papers are deported.

SB 1070 is a hot topic in Michoacan and other migrant-expelling areas of Mexico. Civil society groups in the states of Michoacan and Puebla have scheduled demonstrations against the Arizona law and in favor of comprehensive immigration reform for Saturday, July 17, and Sunday, July 18, respectively.

Sources: Cambio de Michoacan, July 16, 2010.

• El Sol de Morelia, July 15, 2010. Article by Hector Hugo Espinosa.
• La Jornada, July 15, 2010. Article by Ernesto Martinez Elorriaga.
• Tribuna de San Luis/El Sol de Puebla, July 15, 2010. Article by Ivan Tirzo.
• El Universal, July 14, 2010. Article by Ignacio Alvarado, Alberto Cuenca and Thelma Gomez.

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico