September 21, 2013
For Migrants, New Land of Opportunity Is Mexico
By DAMIEN CAVE
MEXICO CITY — Mexico, whose economic woes have pushed millions of people north, is increasingly becoming an immigrant
destination. The country’s documented foreign-born population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010, and officials now say the pace
is accelerating as broad changes in the global economy create new dynamics of migration.
Rising wages in China and higher transportation costs have made Mexican manufacturing highly competitive again, with some
projections suggesting it is already cheaper than China for many industries serving the American market. Europe is sputtering, pushing
workers away. And while Mexico’s economy is far from trouble free, its growth easily outpaced the giants of the hemisphere — the
United States, Canada and Brazil — in 2011 and 2012, according to International Monetary Fund data, making the country more
attractive to fortune seekers worldwide.
The new arrivals range in class from executives to laborers; Mexican officials said Friday that residency requests had grown by 10
percent since November, when a new law meant to streamline the process took effect. And they are coming from nearly everywhere.
Guillaume Pace saw his native France wilting economically, so with his new degree in finance, he moved to Mexico City.
Lee Hwan-hee made the same move from South Korea for an internship, while Spanish filmmakers, Japanese automotive executives
and entrepreneurs from the United States and Latin America arrive practically daily — pursuing dreams, living well and frequently
succeeding.
“There is this energy here, this feeling that anything can happen,” said Lesley Téllez, a Californian whose three-year-old business
running culinary tours served hundreds of clients here last year. “It’s hard to find that in the U.S.”
The shift with Mexico’s northern neighbor is especially stark. Americans now make up more than three-quarters of Mexico’s roughly
one million documented foreigners, up from around two-thirds in 2000, leading to a historic milestone: more Americans have been
added to the population of Mexico over the past few years than Mexicans have been added to the population of the United States,
according to government data in both nations.
Mexican migration to the United States has reached an equilibrium, with about as many Mexicans moving north from 2005 to 2010 as
those returning south. The number of Americans legally living and working in Mexico grew to more than 70,000 in 2012 from 60,000
in 2009, a number that does not include many students and retirees, those on tourist visas or the roughly 350,000 American children
who have arrived since 2005 with their Mexican parents.
“Mexico is changing; all the numbers point in that direction,” said Ernesto Rodríguez Chávez, the former director of migration policy at
Mexico’s Interior Ministry. He added: “There’s been an opening to the world in every way — culturally, socially and economically.”
But the effect of that opening varies widely. Many economists, demographers and Mexican officials see the growing foreign presence as
an indicator that global trends have been breaking Mexico’s way — or as President Enrique Peña Nieto often puts it, “the stars are
aligning” — but there are plenty of obstacles threatening to scuttle Mexico’s moment.
Inequality remains a huge problem, and in many Mexican states education is still a mess and criminals rule. Many local companies that
could be benefiting from Mexico’s rise also remain isolated from the export economy and its benefits, with credit hard to come by and
little confidence that the country’s window of opportunity will stay open for long. Indeed, over the past year, as projections for growth
have been trimmed by Mexico’s central bank, it has become increasingly clear to officials and experts that the country cannot expect its
new competitiveness to single-handedly move it forward.
“The fact that there is a Mexican moment does not mean by itself it’s going to change our future,” said Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal,
Mexico’s economy minister. “We have to take advantage of the Mexican moment to do what is required of us.” The challenge, he said, is
making sure that the growing interest in his country benefits all Mexicans, not just newcomers, investors and a privileged few.
Mexico has failed to live up to its economic potential before. “They really blew a moment in 1994 when their currency was at rock
bottom and they’d just signed Nafta,” said Kevin P. Gallagher, a professor of international relations at Boston University, adding that
those conditions created a big opportunity for Mexican exports.
But now, he and others contend, Mexico has another shot. If the country of 112 million people can harness the energy of foreigners and
newly educated Mexicans, become partners with the slew of American firms seeking alternatives to China, and get them to do more than
just hire cheap labor, economists and officials say Mexico could finally become a more equal partner for the United States and the firstworld country its presidents have promised for decades.
“This is their second chance,” Professor Gallagher said. “And this time, they really have to capitalize on it.”
Protection to Openness
“It’s a new era in terms of our perspective,” said Francisco Alba Hernández, a scholar at the Colegio de México’s Center for the Study of
Urban and Environmental Demographics. “We are now more certain about the value of sharing certain things.”
Like immigrants the world over, many of Mexico’s newcomers are landing where earlier arrivals can be found. Some of the growth is
appearing in border towns where foreign companies and binational families are common. American retirees are showing up in new
developments from San Miguel de Allende to other sunny spots around Cancún and Puerto Vallarta. Government figures show that
more Canadians are also joining their ranks.
But the most significant changes can be found in central Mexico. More and more American consultants helping businesses move
production from China are crisscrossing the region from San Luis Potosí to Guadalajara, where Silicon Valley veterans like Andy Kieffer,
the founder of Agave Lab, are developing smartphone applications and financing new start-ups. In Guanajuato, Germans are moving in
and car-pooling with Mexicans heading to a new Volkswagen factory that opened a year ago, and sushi can now be found at hotel
breakfasts because of all the Japanese executives preparing for a new Honda plant opening nearby.
Here in the capital, too, immigrants are becoming a larger proportion of the population and a growing part of the economy and culture,
opening new restaurants, designing new buildings, financing new cultural offerings and filling a number of schools with their children.
Economics has been the primary motivator for members of all classes: laborers from Central America; middle-class migrants like
Manuel Sánchez, who moved here from Venezuela two years ago and found a job selling hair products within 15 days of his arrival; and
the global crème de la crème in finance and technology, like Mr. Pace, 26, whose first job in Mexico was with a major French bank just
after graduating from the University of Reims.
Mr. Pace, bearded and as slim as a Gauloises, said he moved to Mexico in 2011 because college graduates in France were struggling to
find work. He has stayed here, he said, because the affordable quality of life beats living in Europe — and because Mexico offers more
opportunity for entrepreneurship.
Sitting at a Belgian cafe with a laptop this spring, speaking Spanish with a lilt, he said he recently opened a communications business
that was off to a blazing start. One of his partners was French, the other Mexican, and in their first few months of operation, they got
more than 30 clients, including VivaAerobus, a discount airline aimed at Mexico’s emerging middle class.
“We’re not going back to France,” Mr. Pace said. “The business is doing well and we’re very happy in Mexico.”
Some Mexicans and foreigners say Europeans are given special treatment because they are perceived to be of a higher class, a legacy of
colonialism when lighter skin led to greater privileges. But like many other entrepreneurs from foreign lands, Mr. Pace and his partners
are both benefiting from and helping to shape how Mexico works. Mr. Rodríguez, the former Interior Ministry official, Cuban by birth,
said that foreigners had helped make Mexico City more socially liberal.
And with so many Mexicans working in the informal economy, foreigners have little trouble starting new ventures. Many immigrants
say Mexico is attractive because it feels disorderly, like a work in progress, with the blueprints of success, hierarchy and legality still
being drawn. “Not everyone follows the rules here, so if you really want to make something happen you can make it happen,” said Ms.
Téllez, 34, whose food business served more than 500 visitors last year. “No one is going to fault you for not following all the rules.”
Mr. Lee said that compared with South Korea, where career options were limited by test scores and universities attended, Mexico
allowed for more rapid advancement. As an intern at the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency here, he said he learned up close
how Samsung and other Korean exporters worked. “Here,” he said, “the doors are more open for all Koreans.” He added that among his
friends back home, learning Spanish was now second only to learning English.
The results of that interest are becoming increasingly clear. There were 10 times as many Koreans living in Mexico in 2010 as in 2000.
Officials at a newly opened Korean cultural center here say at least 12,000 Koreans now call Mexico home, and young Mexicans in
particular are welcoming them with open arms: there are now 70 fan clubs for Korean pop music in Mexico, with at least 60,000
members.
A Creative Magnet
Europe, dying; Mexico, coming to life. The United States, closed and materialistic; Mexico, open and creative. Perceptions are what
drive migration worldwide, and in interviews with dozens of new arrivals to Mexico City — including architects, artists and
entrepreneurs — it became clear that the country’s attractiveness extended beyond economics.
Artists like Marc Vigil, a well-known Spanish television director who moved to Mexico City in October, said that compared with Spain,
Mexico was teeming with life and an eagerness to experiment. Like India in relation to England, Mexico has an audience that is larger
and younger than the population of its former colonial overlord. Mr. Vigil said that allowed for clever programming, adding that he
already had several projects in the final stages of negotiation.
“In Spain, everything is a problem,” he said. “Here in Mexico, everything is possible. There is more work and in the attitude here, there
is more of a spirit of struggle and creativity.”
Diego Quemada-Díez, another Spanish director who said he was the first person in his family to leave Spain since at least the 1400s,
moved to Mexico in 2008 after working as a camera operator in Hollywood. He went to film school at the American Film Institute and
completed a short film that won several awards, but he said he moved to Mexico because the United States had become creatively
restrictive. He wanted to make a film without famous actors, about Central American immigrants. In Los Angeles, no producers would
bite. Here, the government provided more than $1 million in financing. The film, La Jaula de Oro, had its premiere at Cannes this year,
with its young actors winning an award.
“Europe feels spiritually dead and so does the United States,” Mr. Quemada-Díez said. “You end up wanting something else.”
He struggled to make sense of Mexico at first. Many foreigners do, complaining that the country is still a place of paradox, delays and
promises never fulfilled for reasons never explained — a cultural clash that affects business of all kinds. “In California, there was one
layer of subtext,” Mr. Quemada-Díez said. “Here there are 40 layers.”
Mexico’s immigrant population is still relatively small. Some officials estimate that four million foreigners have lived in Mexico over the
past few years, but the 2010 census counted about one million, making around 1 percent of the country foreign-born compared with 13
percent in the United States. Many Mexicans, especially among the poor, see foreigners as novel and unfamiliar invaders.
Race, ethnicity and nationality matter. Most of the immigrants who have the resources or corporate sponsorship to gain legal residency
here come from the United States and Europe. The thousands of Central American immigrants coming to Mexico without visas — to
work on farms or in cities, or to get to the United States — are often greeted with beatings by the Mexican police or intense pressure to
work for drug cartels. Koreans also say they often hear the xenophobic refrain, “Go back to your own country.”
Mr. Sánchez, the hair products salesman from Venezuela, said Mexicans who had not been able to rise above their economic class
mostly seemed to resent the mobility of immigrants. In a country still scarred by the Spanish conquistadors, he said many of his
Mexican neighbors responded with shock when they discovered that his younger sister was studying medicine at Mexico’s national
university. Not that the quiet scorn is enough to deter him. “I earn more here in a year than I would in 10 years in my own country,” he
said. “Mexicans don’t realize how great their country is.”
Many do, of course, especially those with experience elsewhere. Mexico has allowed dual nationality for more than a decade, and among
the growing group of foreigners moving here are also young men and women born in Mexico to foreign parents, or who grew up abroad
as the children of Mexicans. A globalized generation, they could live just about anywhere, but they are increasingly choosing Mexico.
In Mexico, rails are risky crossing for a
new wave of Central American migrants
By Nick Miroff, Published: July 15, 2013
| in HUEHUETOCA, Mexico — At a makeshift church shelter beyond the industrial parks north of Mexico
City, the train riders wait under a canvas tent, listening for a locomotive horn. They keep their shoes on and
their backpacks zipped.
The tracks outside run through Mexico’s central highlands and all the way to the Texas border. The shelter is a
halfway point for Central Americans on the 1,500-mile trip north, but many do not arrive here in one piece.
“They got me on the roof of the train,” said Arlen Acosta, his posture bent by two broken collarbones and his
face disfigured from a bad suture job. He had set out from Honduras two months earlier. “They told me to give
them $100. Then they threw me off.”
Central Americans have been catching freight trains to the U.S. border for years, risking injury or worse for a
free ride and a path clear of Mexican government checkpoints. But at a time when illegal immigration to the
United States remains near its lowest point in four decades, the number of Central Americans going north has
soared, putting new attention on the rail system that takes thousands to the border each year.
With lawmakers in Washington considering a broad revision of U.S. immigration laws, the image of the illegal
border-crosser is no longer a farmworker jumping the fence in Tijuana, analysts say. It is a Central American
teenager riding on top of a Mexican freight train.
The dangers of the journey are widely known and perhaps worse than ever. Neither the Mexican government
nor the two dominant railroad companies here — one of which is a U.S. subsidiary — have managed to stop the
masses of people from climbing atop the trains, or the criminals from targeting them along the route.
The result is a rolling gauntlet of rapes, kidnappings, homicides and maimings aboard Mexico’s freight rail
system, the backbone of the $1 billion-plus-a-day trade partnership between the United States and Mexico.
Each day, the trains rumble north loaded with new automobiles, washing machines, cement and the other fruits
of NAFTA commerce. When they slow for curves or track switches, migrants run alongside and grab onto
boxcars or jump into the open-top containers known as gondolas.
For the kidnapping gangs, cartel operatives and corrupt Mexican officials who await them, the train riders are a
renewable natural resource: abundant and easy to prey upon, like salmon going up an Alaskan river.
Government human rights officials estimate that more than 11,000 migrants are kidnapped crossing Mexico
each year, with many forced from the trains at notorious rail junctions whose names are spoken with fear along
the route: Medias Aguas, Orizaba and Coatzacoalcos, where one group of Hondurans was hacked with
machetes last month.
“You used to worry about falling asleep on top of the train and slipping off. Now, it’s the kidnappers,” said
Oscar Rivas, a 40-year-old Honduran deportee trying to get back to a carpentry job and three children in
Philadelphia. He said it was his sixth train trip north since 1986.
The last time, he was chased by a bandit with a machete.
This time, he saw a severed head outside the city of Tlaxcala.
“It was stuck on a pole,” he said.
Local news reports confirmed the account. Police found the head by the tracks, with a bag over it.
‘We know how easy it is’
On the U.S. side of the divide, the number of Mexicans taken into custody since 2000 has dropped 84 percent.
But of 365,000 arrests made by the U.S. Border Patrol during fiscal 2012, nearly 100,000 were individuals
classified as “Other than Mexican,” the highest percentage to date and almost twice as many as in 2011.
The vast majority were from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Central America’s Northern Triangle,
where economic failure and rampant violence exert a powerful push, even at a time when the pull of the U.S.
labor market remains weak.
“There’s a feeling that Mexico has changed demographically and has turned the corner economically, and we’re
never going to go back to what we had at the turn of this century,” said Eric Olson, a Central America expert at
the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, referring to the historic wave of Mexican migration that peaked in
2000, when Border Patrol agents made 1.7 million arrests.
“The real growth is projected to come from Central America,” Olson said.
The United States has been leaning on Mexico to tighten immigration enforcement within its borders,
particularly the porous 600-mile boundary with Guatemala that presents little barrier to people, weapons or
drugs. The administration of new Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto says it is preparing to act.
“We know how easy it is to cross,” Interior Secretary Miguel Osorio Chong said at a recent meeting with the
foreign news media, estimating that 200,000 Central Americans entered Mexico illegally last year.
With U.S. assistance, technology and security aid, Mexico plans to set up new immigration checkpoints along
its southern border and build a database of the unauthorized immigrants it detains, taking fingerprints, retinal
scans and other biometric data that can be shared with the United States.
But the checkpoints could push even more people onto the rails.
The Mexican Railroad Association, a trade group, said it is in talks with government officials about tightening
security. Migrants and their advocates say the private guards who work for the railroad companies, including
Kansas City Southern de Mexico, a U.S. subsidiary, have been just as venal as the police who shake the
migrants down until they’re left with nothing.
“The train system is totally unsupervised,” said Rafael Gonzalez, one of the priests running the shelter here,
which opened last year on the edge of town after gangsters forced the previous one to shut down.
Limited resources
Central American migrants can avoid the trains by hiring smuggling guides to drive them north. But few can
afford it and turn to the rail system instead.
No one knows how many migrants are killed or mutilated in attacks or accidents along the way. Two Honduran
women were shot and stabbed to death in the southern state of Chiapas in May when they didn’t pay the toll
demanded by gang members.
Much of the violence occurs in the rail yards, where migrants might end up waiting days for a train.
The gangs that rob and abduct migrants are often made up of other Central Americans working under the
protection of Mexico’s crime syndicates.
“We’ve asked over and over for the authorities to clean up the system and arrest the criminals — and they know
who they are,” said Marta Sánchez, an activist with the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement. “But it would
require some intelligence work and the firing of many corrupt officials.”
Gustavo Mohar, a former Mexican intelligence official who was also in charge of immigration policy under
President Felipe Calderón, said stopping the migrants from climbing atop the freight trains would require a
massive, sustained police operation that the country can’t afford.
“From a humanitarian point of view, what’s happening is terrible,” he said. “But controlling the train system
over long distances is almost impossible when you have limited resources.”
For now, such controls do not exist. At the shelter set up here in a dusty lot, Guatemalan Andrea Mendoza, 20,
waited for the train — “the long, long one” — that would take her and a friend to Monterrey. Once there, she
said, she would call “her coyote,” the same guide who had smuggled her father and husband to Houston.
Mendoza said she knew how to run and reach for the train when it slowed, and not to fall asleep. It wasn’t her
first time. She had made the trip once before, she said, when she was 15.
After this article was published, Kansas City Southern de Mexico responded in a letter to the editor.