by José de la Isla
José de la Isla
Wilhelm Scholz, a photographer, and I meet up with Wilkin Sherris, who is selling folk paintings along the seawall on George Washington Avenue in the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo. Sherris tells us his parents came from Haiti, that he has relatives scattered throughout the Caribbean and others in Miami.
Scholz and I were on an assignment that spread over two years to learn firsthand about how people are migrating across North America. As it turns out, we witnessed only the tip of the iceberg.
From a worker, we learned about the yolas, the flimsy rafts taken by people to cross the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico. Like Cuban balseros, these rafters want to get to the other side, where things are mythically better.
Ahh, going to a U.S. territory is ethnocentrically satisfying knowledge. It is comforting to think that where we live is so desirable everyone else wants to be here, although we also learn many Dominicans also leave their homeland for Venezuela and Spain and Italy.
Now data tell us we should consider leaving our national egos at the hat-check stand.
There’s a bigger picture out there. It’s not all about us. Canada and Mexico have decided to work out a new six-to-ten-month guest-worker program. Its enticements range beyond agriculture to include tourism, construction and financial services, building on the current program which includes about 18,000 farm-related workers. All this is happening while we can’t get our own guest-worker program underway.
Mexican workers are a new high-demand group in, of all places, Dubai. This month Emirate Airlines plans to begin interviewing in Mexico. Already, about 23 Mexicans work as pilots there and the airline seeks others for cargo jobs. Dubai expects tourism to increase from 40 million now to 75 million by 2015.
An airline official told Newspaper Tree, an online source, Mexicans are nice, friendly, work well in a team and speak English well. The lesson here is that if you raise your kids ethnocentric, you jeopardize their employment future. And if they have an attitude – well, you know the rest.
The same source reports that more than 16,000 Uruguayans left home in 2007, mostly for European destinations.
In the past decade, migration to Chile tripled to 290,000. The pattern changed from mostly Argentineans to Bolivians and Peruvians. Peruvian restaurants are all the rage in Chile. Other immigrant populations include Colombians, Ecuadorians, Cubans and Mexicans.
Costa Rica, having posted growth in high tech and tourism, is another magnet. Nicaraguans are contracted for transportation jobs. Brazil seeks professional workers for entertainment and in petroleum. Bolivians seem to be forming a new urban working class there. Work permits in Brazil are up 46 percent over 2004.
Too often in the United States our microscopes onto the world about these movements come through fuzzy, like an old analog TV set, instead of the Hi-Def we need.
Now is not a bad time for our presidential candidates to face the challenges of a hemisphere in motion by proposing realistic — and humane — solutions to receiving and sending workers. A continent-wide meeting to reach accords about migration would help.
Maybe we have had it all wrong all along. It’s not that we can become isolated and insulated. We are already. The issue is how can we become more open and accommodating of the world movement around us? And which candidate will take his or her head out of the sand?
For Wilhelm and me, a factoid now makes sense. It didn’t register then, but it does now — how the phone book in Anchorage, a town of 275,000, lists 30 Mexican and Latin American restaurants. It’s a signpost of a new geography.
[José de la Isla, author of “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (Archer Books, 2003), writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3@yahoo.com]. ©2008
