The New U.S. President and Our Immigrants

The United States is preparing itself for a change of government. Barack Obama triumphant elections as the next U.S. president awakens great expectations for North America and for many countries in the world.

For Mexicans, the long border adjoining the most powerful country in the world represents a great attraction that drives them to emigrate in order to receive a better income for their work, motivated further by the shortage of well-paid jobs in our country.

The movie “A Day Without a Mexican” sought to express the reality that Mexican labor is required and appreciated in the United States, since they perform quality work with lower salaries and generally without being granted the benefits of social security.

For Mexico, the positive results of migration are the remittances that almost all migrants send to their families. These remittances are believed to be a principal pillar of the national economy, but in spite of their profit and the fact they sustain the economy of many cities, they don’t always translate into the development of communities.

The states of the republic with the greatest migration rates are Zacatecas and Michoacán. It is sad to see towns in which only women and children live, although little by little the women are also emigrating. In these two states it is women who go looking for new and better opportunities two percent of the time.

It is calculated that there are currently 175 million migrants in the world, of which 48 percent are women. Of the working migrant women rooted in the United States, 56 percent are single and 42 percent send money to their families. In 1999, the Survey of Population in the U.S. estimated that there are around 306 million Mexican women who live in that country and only 25 percent of those are recognized as citizens.

There are many motives for female migration, but the primary one is poverty. Some women arrive in the U.S. to reunite their family, but others develop a migration plan in which both personal expectations and the welfare of the family left behind depend on the remittances that the mothers send them.

Everything is not positive in the process of migrating to the United States, however. Once they make the decision to “go to the other side,” they accept a series of risks, from being swindled by those who’ve been hired to “smuggle” them across to dying in the attempt to cross the border.

Migrants are reclusive because they have to continually hide from authorities. Beatings and insults from police are the most common forms of human rights violations they suffer, along with solitary confinement, deprivation of freedom, retention of documents and robbery.

The breakup of the family is the most serious consequence of migration. Some men leave looking for better living conditions for their families, yet many do not return because they die crossing the border or because they create another family while over there.

This loss of human resources not only hurts us as a country, but it damages families, the essential building blocks of society, as they lose a father, some brothers and sisters, and at times a mother, whether temporarily or permanently.

Many mothers are visited by their husbands once a year. This leaves them with a new pregnancy which they must deal with alone. Others contract sexually-transmitted diseases from their husbands.

The migration process doesn’t have to be so painful and traumatic. When Mexicans go to the U.S. there is mutual need for both Mexicans and Americans. The U.S. requires the migrants’ labor, so it would be ideal if the exchange of work and money could be made legally, with clear rules set down and no guilt on either side. Mexicans should be legally contracted in conditions of equality and in the respect of human rights.

Furthermore, the situation’s lack of definition and the United States’ ambivalent attitude that uses the labor of the migrants and at the same time pursues them as illegal immigrants, create a climate of aggression towards Mexicans. The 75 percent increase in racial hate crimes over the last five years clearly demonstrates this.

This situation urges Mexico to create sufficient jobs that pay well, so that Mexicans who want to go to the United States do it by free will and not for the necessity of living in dignity. It is also necessary that our neighbor country recognize its need for Mexican migration and establish equitable conditions.

Certainly the resolution of the inherited financial crisis will be a priority for the new president of the American States, but it is just as important to address the migration issues his ancestors have left hanging. Will there be migration reform under his administration? Will he continue the construction of the wall between the countries or will he return to the “good neighbor” policies?

Barack Obama’s origin encourages the world to hope for change and the rupturing of paradigms. It makes us dream of a new era where discrimination and segregation do not exist. We hope that he does not disappoint those who are hoping for these changes.