Returnees find hard times in Mexico

Mogotes, Mexico —- Since he was a young man, Santiago Mosqueda, 46, has traveled to Atlanta to find work, leaving behind the poverty of his desolate hometown.

But with the U.S. economy shrinking, Mosqueda has recently decided to try his luck at home, scraping by on $10 a day he earns from construction work and odd jobs around town.

He has crunched the numbers, and it doesn’t make sense to return to the United States now.

“I need to know that if I return I will have a job,” said Mosqueda, standing waist-deep in a muddy pit as he shoveled dirt on a government water project. “I’m not going to pay $3,000 [to a human smuggler] and risk jumping the border if there’s not going to be a job. If there’s nothing up there, it’s better to see how things go down here.”

Mosqueda is among a growing number of people returning to Mexico after spending time as undocumented workers in the U.S.

Just how many migrants have and will come back to Mexico is a matter of debate. But most analysts agree on one assessment: Mexico isn’t prepared to absorb a significant number of returnees.

The same bone-grinding poverty that’s been sending migrants north for decades stubbornly endures in Mexico, particularly in rural areas. The job market remains moribund; the country has shed tens of thousands of jobs in recent months, and business groups are predicting just 170,000 new jobs for 2009, in a country where about 1 million young people enter the work force each year.

Officials in many parts of Mexico are scrambling to prepare economic stimulus projects for returning migrants. Experts worry that the Mexican government’s proposed anti-crisis plans are too little, too late.

The town of Mogotes, in Guanajuato state, is typical. Like countless communities in Mexico, it is dotted with expansive homes built with migrant money and trucks with license plates from Florida and Texas. But there is precious little work for returnees.

Manuel Quiroz, a 37-year-old former undocumented migrant, has been trying to squeeze out a living since returning home three years ago from Colorado. He manages to find work just a couple of days a week, jumping at the chance to work on government projects or hiring himself out to more successful migrant families.

He fears an influx of his countrymen.

“If the economy keeps going down, then those without papers will come back and there will be less opportunity for jobs here,” he said. “There will be more people, more hunger and fewer jobs.”

Local officials say that a large wave of returning workers from the U.S. would mean a significant increase in the number of residents working in the informal sector —- selling clothes, tacos and pirated DVDs for cash on street corners and in markets.

“We’re not prepared,” said Eleazar Cardenas, secretary of Valle de Santiago, the municipality that includes Mogotes.

Experts say that in some ways Mexico is in a worse position today to receive migrants than it was during the Great Depression, when nearly 400,000 Mexican migrants returned or were deported to Mexico.

In the 1930s, Mexico was embarking on a modernization of the country that included vast public works projects, the building of factories in northern Mexico and agrarian reform that awarded land to dispossessed farmers.

This time, several Mexican states have rushed to implement programs that would spur rural job development and help returning migrants use their savings to start new businesses. Migrant money creates about 20 percent of new small businesses in Mexico.

Those most likely to return, experts say, are more recent immigrants, people without papers who haven’t had time to develop a network of friends and countrymen to help them find increasingly scarce jobs in the United States.

But the scope of the returning migration is difficult to measure.

“From my point of view, the numbers will be directly related to the crisis in the U.S.,” said Fernando Robledo Martinez, the director of migrant affairs in Zacatecas, one of Mexico’s traditional migrant-sending states.

More established migrants in the United States —- those with homes, kids in school and extensive social contacts —- will view Mexico as a last option, academics say. Those long-term migrants will look for jobs in other industries or move to different states before they see returning home as a viable option.

“They will resist until the last moment,” said Miguel Moctezuma Longoria, an immigration expert at the National Autonomous University of Zacatecas. “The question is, what are they returning to if there are no options?”

Meanwhile, fewer would-be migrants are leaving Mexico. Between 2005 and 2007, the number of people emigrating fell 32 percent, according to Mexican government census figures.

Manuel Ramirez Garcia, who has periodically migrated to the U.S. for 38 years, said he has begun warning young people in his small ranching community in Guanajuato not to go north, at least for the time being.

Ramirez, a legal resident of Bakersfield, Calif., said that in recent months he’s seen undocumented migrants in the U.S. squeezed into apartments in groups of 10 or 12 to save on rent and making just enough to eat.

“I tell the kids that it’s worse than if they had stayed [in Mexico],” Ramirez said.

Huber Quiroz, who returned to Mogotes last month when he lost his landscaping job in Colorado, said he believes that eventually he’ll find work on the other side.

“[The economic crisis] might reduce the need for Mexican workers a little bit,” he said. “But Americans still won’t do the jobs we do.”