I listen to Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s speech and think of a young woman I met almost four years ago in Guadalajara. She was 18 and living in a farming village.
“I want to go the United States just to see my father,” she said. He left before she was born. “I know he has another family and kids over there, but I still want to see him. I would go with my heart in my hand. I don’t expect to be a part of his family or anything. I just want to see his face and how he smiles and how the wind blows through his hair.”
I listen to Calderon’s speech and remember visiting a village leader’s home. It was built with money his children sent from Utah, where they were living illegally. A fourth son had returned and was working in the village as a mechanic. He earned as much as $600 a week in Utah.
Do you know how much he makes here, the man asked me. “Six hundred pesos a week.” About $60. Still, that was roughly three times the minimum wage in the region.
I listen to Calderon’s speech and I see the face of a prominent Guadalajara businessman. I asked him about illegal immigration. He said: “For Mexico, it’s really a shame. . . . The problem is since the time of the Spanish, there has been two Mexicos. The very structure, the skeleton of Mexico, has to change to improve things.”
The priorities must be job creation and education, he said. Illegal immigration, he said, is the poor seeking a cure for their own poverty. Illegal immigration, he said, takes the government off the hook. It is the government’s great escape hatch.
Calderon’s visit occurredas we debate, again, the future of millions of illegal immigrants, as we seek to balance national security, civil liberty, economic needs, social well-being. It occurred within the larger context of our complex relationship to Mexico, including our mutual reliance upon each other’s goods and markets.
It is reasonable to ask: What are you doing on your end about illegal immigration, Mr. President?
Calderon was not unprepared for that question. Mexico, he told Congress, created 400,000 new jobs in the first quarter of this year. It has embarked upon fiscal, energy and pension reforms. It has increased investment in infrastructure to levels not seen in decades. Its poverty-relief program is reaching 6 million impoverished families.
Mexico has increased investment in free, public university educations, and today, Calderon said, about 90,000 students a year are graduating as engineers and technicians. Mexico, he said, is moving to implement universal health care by 2012.
“Today we are doing the best that we can do in order to reduce migration, to create opportunities and to create jobs for Mexicans in our own country where their homes are, where their families are, as many jobs as we can,” he said. “Mexico will one day be a country in which our people will find the opportunities that today they look for outside the country.”
No one underestimates the work ahead. The drug war rages, thousands of Mexicans killed, while the country continues to see an increase in income inequality and job creation lags “dramatically behind demand,” according to the U.S. State Department.
It reminds me of something the businessman said. With investment in education and job creation, it will take 25 years to prepare the next generation.
The men left the village. The industrious. The ambitious. The healthy. The curious. Mexico’s future. Some abandoned their families. Mexico’s strength.
It is the poor in both countries most affected by illegal immigration. It is the powerful in both countries who most benefit from the status quo..
Since my Guadalajara visit, the recession has undercut the lives of families here and in Mexico. The pace of Mexican migration into the U.S. has slackened, but the share of children of illegal immigrants born here has been increasing and so the number of mixed-status families grows. The meaning of this was made clear earlier this week by a second-grader who told Michelle Obama that her mom says Barack Obama is taking everybody away who doesn’t have papers and her mom doesn’t have papers. Unspoken, but plain, is the child’s next question: “Is Barack Obama going to take my mother away?”
It is common to describe illegal immigrants as living in the shadows. They don’t. They live in daylight among us, but they are not fully part of us. They are separate, but intertwined. The consequences are obvious. They cannot fully integrate. They are more likely to live in poverty and to remain there.
They cannot fully develop their potential in Mexico or here, which is another way of saying we are wasting a vast, untapped resource. This is not a right or left problem. Never has been. Our mistake has been to reduce it to such.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
