by Jorge Mújica Murias
According to some people who are supposed to know what they are talking about, everybody left Arizona before knowing that Judge Susan Bolton was about to strike down the worst parts of SB1070. They left because the did not want to be arrested for being suspiciously Brown while driving or walking the streets of Phoenix and Tucson, and those who did not want to meet in person Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
No one knows exactly how many left, but a poll by the New York Times tried to know why by asking three questions: “1. SB 1070 is already working and illegals are already leaving”; 2. “They are leaving because they fear to be unjustly persecuted”, and 3. “I do not know”. The first answer was the favorite of one out of every three respondents, and only two in one hundred live out of this world and “did not know”. The largest portion, almost 7 out of every 10, knew it very well and opted for the “fear to be unjustly persecuted.
Nobody knows, either, where did they go, but nobody relieves they left for México, as supporters of the law wanted, According to the last report of the U.S. Census office, as a fact, “Hispanics have been leaving Arizona since the recession started; approximately 40,000 left in 2008”, it says, making clear that “those who left did not go back to México, but dispersed to states more amiable to immigrants.
In other words, event partially stroke down, SB 1070 had the same effect that 15 years ago Proposition 187 had. Then California governor Pete Wilson forced hundreds of thousand Mexican immigrants to leave for México… but México del Norte, meaning all over the United States.
And Into the United States
And as we all very, very, very well know, immigrants will keep coming here. A few days ago, in its last “socio-demographic report”, the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) stated that last year five Mexicans out of every one thousand left the country for a foreign land. In numbers, this means one thousand 465 Mexicans a day, and when INEGI says “a day”, they include “weekends, vacations and holydays”.
Altogether, in the whole year, some 535 thousand Mexicans left for other lands in 2009. In a reverse motion, the National Occupational and Employment Poll (ENOE), states that some 214 thousands Mexicans went back to their country. Adding and subtracting, México lost about 321 thousand citizens in 2009.
Just to state the obvious, including recession and all, most of them did not go to South Africa to be there during the Soccer World Cup, nor to Bora Bora even with its wonderful climate. They came here to México del Norte.
Reinforcing the obvious, INEGI states that “Most Mexicans who left the country are between 20 and 30 years of age, their most productive years,” and that “economic motives are among the most important causes determining the change of residence; for the youth, these include seeking better employment opportunities and improved wages.” INEGI sounds here like they just rediscovered the Moon. It is obvious that when the same job pays six times over the wages on the other side of the border, everybody runs North…
To compound the problem, it so happens that Arizona is arresting people going south. As absurd as it may sound, the Border Patrol in the Nogales area is arresting people “to catch those with criminal dockets or who are involved in (guns and people) trafficking, according to Guadalupe Ramírez, chief of the border authority in that city.
With this “strategy”, the theory that the undocumented were going to “deport themselves” sounds more wrong than ever. The Border Patrol enters the information of each detainee into a database before deporting them, unless they are real criminals, drug or weapons dealers.
Our good friend Isabel García, from a Human Rights organization in Tucson believes this operation is only good to increase the numbers for the Border Patrol, but the whole thing is so absurd that even William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration, a very anti immigrant organization, is asking President Barack Obama a “safe passage” policy, a special program that “allows undocumented immigrants to depart without negative consequences.”
In short, those who complain today that there are Mexican and other immigrants from Alaska to Alabama should rememberproposition 187, and realize that SB 1070 will only increase the tendency: more than even, they will now find Mexicans in every small town and corner of the United States.
And that’s good for us, because the more common “gringos” get to know us, the more they will realize that we are just common folk, normal human beings, and we will have more acceptance among them. www.mexicodelnorte.com
