March 2005 Page 7
Dr.Victor Zúniga from the University of Monterrey (UDEM) visited
with us at the professed house and gave us an excellent presentation on
immigration. His area of specialty is education of immigrant children from
Mexico in the U.S.
For more information on Dr. Zúniga, click here.
High schools in
the
U.S.
have a serious problem. They are
doing things they way they did 40 years ago.
The result is that things are even worse for immigrant students.
Besides the academic issues, many parents want to send their daughters
back to
Mexico
when they reach about 15 because of all the discipline, sex, alcohol, and drug
problems that they face in the
U.S.
high schools.
Overview of Immigration in the
U.S.
This the largest and the longest stream immigration: over 150 years. It
started in 1848…300,000 Mexicans migrated without moving. The largest part was
in
Texas
, but also including AZ, CO, NM. This
flow has never stopped. Most people
who migrated did so in a cycle (coming here to earn money and then return to
Mexico
) until 1986 with IRCA (the
Immigration Reform Control Act). This
law changed immigration to the
U.S.
forever.
IRCA had three initiatives:
v
control the frontier The
budget was increased by 26 times.
v
punish employers who employ people who are undocumented
v
amnesty
o
3 million people received legal documention; 2.4m were Mexicans.
- Control
the border People
simply changed the routes that they use to cross.
There
has been no reduction in immigration. Therefore
more people have died in trying to cross. Before
IRCA, the average was 1.4m attempted crossing; now there are 9.4 million
attempts.
- Punish
employers who hire undocumented. But
people are hired through sub-contractors.
No one really claims them as their employees.
The workers themselves earn less and less because each of the
subcontractors “takes a bite.”
- Amnesty:
With amnesty, people could leave the safe zones and go elsewhere.
By 1990 people started to move to any place in the
United States
: the borderization of the
United States
.
- 40% of the children in public school
in
Dalton
,
GA
are Mexican children.
- 1 of 9 Americans are Latino.
- 2 of 9 Americans will be Latino in
2013.
Why do people move? The crisis
in CA was terrible for work and anti-immigrant feelings.
Workers move because the businesses look for places where they can get
tax-breaks; the workers follow. These
businesses need a very flexible workforce; they have to different hours—often
longer hours: only immigrants will accept this work.
Immigrants will not ask for a union.
They move for the work and then bring the family—the extended family.
Nestor Rodriguez (Univ of Houston): Why can the
U.S.
—the most powerful nation in the world—not stop the flow of migration?
Because the family ties are much
stronger than national loyalty.
People will
suddenly leave work in the
U.S.
for family events. Family ties are stronger than anything else.
IRCA is an ineffective and hypocritical (because it makes people think
that immigration is controlled) law. It
also impedes the return migrants to
Mexico
.
The receiving communities
- There is no initiate debate between the
new community and receiving community.
- There are intra-ethnic debates.
- Migrants arrive in the context of
civil rights. People feel
their culture is superior, but they do not express it because of the
social and political context. People
come to work; they earn a lot of money.
- It is not a migration caused by a war
or natural disaster, and the people want to return to their country.
- Migrants who move to these
communities are often much more cosmopolitan because they have lived and
worked in many other parts of the
U.S.
We
need to create bonds between the receiving and migrant communities.
(A good place to start to look for resources is on the Migration and Refugee
Services (USCCB) website, particularly at http://www.usccb.org/mrs/welcome.shtml)
Next Page
Last Month's
Edition Index
of TexLaMex
1
2
3
4
5
6 7
8 9
10 11
12 13
14 15
