Enrique's Journey Part 17

"Don't cry, mami," Jasmin says. Saddened by her mother's tears, Jasmin cries, too.

"Why are you crying?" Rosa Amalia asks the girl.

"Because my mami is crying. My mami cries all the time."

Maria Isabel hasn't told her daughter she is leaving. She can't. Still, Jasmin is bright.

A neighbor asks Maria Isabel, "Are you leaving already?"

Jasmin asks, "Where is my mother going?"

She asks her mother why she has moved all her clothes from her grandmother Eva's to Belky's hut across town. Why, she asks her mother, has Maria Isabel packed a white backpack with her own clothes?

"I'm going out," Maria Isabel says. "I'll be right back."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going downtown."

"Are you coming back?"

"Yes."

Jasmin believes her, and this time she does come back.

Sometimes when Jasmin asks if her mother is coming back, Maria Isabel is silent. She does not answer.

She doesn't like lying to Jasmin. But Maria Isabel is sure her daughter is too young, at three and a half, to understand the truth. She can't handle a scene, demands by Jasmin to take her with her. She doesn't want to see her daughter cry. This is easier, better, Maria Isabel tells herself.

Wednesday. The smuggler calls at 1 P.M. Maria Isabel must be across town, at Tegucigalpa's main bus station, at 3:30 P.M. The smuggler says he will be wearing a red shirt and blue jeans. What will Maria Isabel have on? A black blouse and blue jeans, Enrique's family tells him.

Maria Isabel heads back to Belky's hut with Jasmin. She holds her in her arms and gives her a last bottle of milk.

Maria Isabel heads over to Enrique's grandmother's. "I'm leaving now. Good-bye," she says.

"G.o.d bless you," the grandmother says. The family will pray for her during her journey north, she tells her.

Next door, at Gloria's, Maria Isabel hugs her mother and sister. Enrique's aunt Rosa Amalia takes Jasmin back to Belky's hut, hoping to prevent a scene. Jasmin will have none of it. She's overheard some of the good-byes, that Rosa Amalia is driving Maria Isabel to the bus terminal.

"I'm coming! I'm coming to drop off my mother," she tells Rosa Amalia, who relents.

Jasmin runs to the car and gets in. Maria Isabel takes the backpack, which contains a change of clothes and one picture of her daughter. Belky and her boyfriend climb in, too.

At the bus terminal, Rosa Amalia won't let Jasmin get out of the car. Only pa.s.sengers are allowed beyond the waiting room. Maria Isabel is relieved. She tells herself that it is all right, that Jasmin doesn't really understand what is happening.

Maria Isabel does not say good-bye to her daughter. She does not hug her. She gets out of the car and walks briskly into the bus terminal. She does not look back. She never tells her she is going to the United States.

Rosa Amalia lifts Jasmin onto the hood of her car. As the bus pulls out of the terminal, she tells the girl to say good-bye. Jasmin waves with both hands and calls out, "Adios, mami. Adios, mami. Adios, mami. Adios, mami."

AFTERWORD.

Women, Children, and the Immigration Debate.

An estimated 1.7 million children live illegally in the United States, most from Mexico and Central America. Like Enrique, almost all have spent time away from a parent before following him or her to the United States. One in four children in the nation's schools is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant-a group whose numbers, between 1990 and 2000, grew seven times faster than that of children with both parents born in the United States.

Children leaving Central America to find their mothers in the United States now face a tougher, more treacherous journey than ever before. Anti-gang crackdowns in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala have pushed many gangsters north into Chiapas, where they prey on migrants aboard the trains. Gangsters who once used border cities in Guatemala as their homes have moved their bases into Chiapas. Freight trains pull in to the station in Tonala, in northern Chiapas, with dead migrants atop the boxcars. In 2004, fed up with rampant violence, more than 5,000 Tapachula residents marched in the streets demanding that Mexico establish a death penalty for gangsters.

Since Enrique's journey, the number of police agencies targeting migrants in Chiapas has grown from five to eight. To elude the additional officers, migrants take ever greater risks to get on and off moving trains. The result: the number of migrants arriving at Tapachula's general hospital with train injuries has more than doubled.

The train is no longer stopped by la migra at La Arrocera, the checkpoint where migrants had to outrun bandits lying in wait. In 2003, when La Arrocera became too dangerous even for migra agents, the train stop was moved to Los Toros, Chiapas. There, reinforced by three other police agencies and the army, sixty to eighty officers swarm the train, using ladders to reach atop the cars, catching four of five migrants. Just south of the checkpoint, in Tres Hermanos, a new crop of bandits has emerged. Migrants who try to avoid the authorities by walking the tracks are robbed, injured, and even killed by local thugs.

To the north, in Nuevo Laredo, along the Rio Grande where Enrique camped, a battle for control of the border rages among rival Mexican drug cartels. The body of El Tirindaro, the smuggler who crossed Enrique into Texas, was found in February 2002 near the road to the Nuevo Laredo airport. He had been blindfolded, tortured, and shot in the head, execution style. El Tirindaro, identified as Diego Cruz Ponce, was one of fifty-seven murders in Nuevo Laredo that year, and the violence has escalated since then. In 2005, the new police chief, who vowed to bring law and order to the city, was gunned down hours after taking office.

Across the length of Mexico, people who help migrants are troubled to see more pregnant women and parents with young children aboard freight trains. Some parents are carrying babies in their arms.

Despite the increased danger, more migrants are making the attempt. Between 2001 and 2004, the number of Central American migrants detained and deported each year by Mexico nearly doubled, to more than two hundred thousand. Most come from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and are trying to reach the United States. In Tapachula alone, up to seventeen buses full of detained migrants are sent south each day. Some of the buses are designated just for children who have been traveling alone through Chiapas. During the same period, the number of Central American children detained by the U.S. Border Patrol while entering the country illegally and without either parent nearly doubled.

Throughout Latin America, even in traditional societies such as Mexico, where most legal and illegal migrants to the United States come from, divorce and separation are increasingly common. That promises to produce more single mothers who feel forced to make the same choice Lourdes made long ago: leave their children and head north.

The growing influx of women and children will fuel questions already raging about immigration: Is it good for the migrants themselves, for the countries they come from, and for the United States and its citizens?

For immigrants, the material benefits of coming to the United States are clear. The money Lourdes sent Enrique allowed him to eat and dress better and attend school longer. Once he arrived in the United States, Enrique drove his own truck and could make a decent living if he worked hard. Enrique loves how clean the streets are compared to those in Honduras, how most people respect and obey the laws. His aunt Mirian notes that the United States is less cla.s.s-driven than Honduras. Here, people don't look down on her if she dresses humbly. Lourdes enjoys taking showers with indoor plumbing, as well as the relative safety of her neighborhood, where she can wear a gold necklace without worry. She has the freedom to get in her car and go anywhere she wants.

Enrique acknowledges drawbacks. He must live in the shadows, knowing he can be deported at any time. He faces racism. When he goes into a restaurant and can't order well in English, he gets dirty stares. "They look at you as if you are a flea," he says. Salespeople in stores often attend to Anglo customers first. Even Mexicans look down on Central Americans, whom many view as inferior. Enrique's aunt Mirian says her restaurant employers pay her less than they pay her Anglo colleagues-and a.s.sign immigrants the hardest tasks.

Life in America, Enrique and others say, is too hurried. In Honduras, people work half a day Sat.u.r.day and rest Sunday. Here, Enrique paints seven days a week in an endless struggle to pay bills. "Here," he says, "life is a race."

For most immigrants who come to the United States, the biggest downside is the toll parent-child separations exact on families. The family conflicts are most visible in the nation's schools, where teachers and administrators from New York to Los Angeles struggle daily to mend the damage caused by the years apart for parents and children.

NEWCOMER TRAUMAS.

Life inside Los Angeles's Newcomer School, a transitional school for newly arrived immigrant students, shows both how common and devastating these separations are for the immigrants themselves.

Each day, the school's soft-spoken counselor, Gabriel Murillo, finds the small wooden box outside his office full of "request to see the counselor" slips. More than half of the 430 high school students will ask to see him by year's end. The reason? Problemas familiares, they write: family problems. Most have recently reunited with a parent, usually a mother. On average, they have not seen the parent in a decade.

Hour after hour, parent-child meetings play out with a scary similarity, Murillo says. Idealized notions each had of the other quickly shatter. Some children felt resentful before coming north; others have deeply buried anger that emerges after months with their mothers.

Inside Murillo's office, children usually fire the first salvo: "I know you don't love me. That's why you left me there." Some mothers, to avoid traumatic farewells, told their children they were going out to the market or to see their children's teachers, and instead left for the United States. The children say their mothers lied to them from the start. They prayed their mothers would get caught by the U.S. Border Patrol and sent back. They demand that their mothers admit their mistakes and apologize for leaving them.

Mothers endured pain leaving their children and struggled to work hard and send back money, and they demand respect for their sacrifice. They are certain the separations were worth what was gained.

But their children say they would have preferred being together, even if it meant going hungry. "I didn't want money. I wanted you there." They tell their mothers they would never leave their own children. They tell them they are worse than animals. Even an animal doesn't desert her litter.

Murillo fights what is usually a losing battle. "It's a huge emotional scar. For some, the damage continues for the rest of their lives. It is irreparable," he says. Some eventually improve their relationships with their mothers, but it takes years.

Mothers expect to finally have the perfect family when their children arrive. Instead, they face rejection and constant fights. Eventually, they realize the choice they made may have cost them the love of their children. Children who thought they would find love and an end to loneliness discover that they feel more distant than ever from their mothers, even though they are now with them.

Some children are resentful because they were abused or neglected by their caretakers or bullied by others back home. One in twenty girls at the school admits to being molested by a male relative. They blame their mothers for not being there to protect them.

Others are angry because they had to leave behind a grandmother who became the person who loved and nurtured them most-a real mother. They worry that their departure means the loss of the grandparents' only source of income. They know they may never see their grandparents again.

Actions by both mothers and children make matters worse. Children act out, doing everything possible to push their mothers away. It is their way of testing whether their mothers really love them, whether they can trust them, whether their mothers will abandon them again.

Mothers, beset by guilt, don't discipline their children or set rules. To pay off their debts to the smugglers, they often work overtime, and after so much time apart, children feel their mothers are ignoring them again. Some mothers continue to work as live-in nannies or housekeepers after their children arrive. They place their children in an apartment with relatives or friends, calling at night, visiting on weekends.

The conflicts Murillo sees are most acute when the child was the last to be brought north because the mother couldn't afford to bring everyone at once. Such children come to believe that the mother favored the children she brought north first.

The clashes are also severe when the mother has a new husband or has given birth to additional children in the United States. Some mothers, fearful of how children left behind would react, have hidden these new families from them. Newly arrived children try to create conflicts between their mothers and the new husbands, hoping to drum them out. Children born in the United States, jealous that their mothers are showering the newcomers with attention, tell lies about the new children, hoping to get them in trouble and shipped back.

Some mothers, Murillo says, do many things right. They leave children with relatives who constantly emphasize that the parents left to help their children. They keep in constant contact during the separation. They are open and honest about their lives in the United States. They never promise anything, especially a visit or reunion, until they are positive they can deliver. Even in these cases, Murillo says, the reunions are rocky. He has dealt with students who tried to stab their mothers, who asked to have guardianship transferred to someone else, who turned suicidal.

One mother says: "I think it's like the Bible says. People will move around. But not find peace."

Many reunified children, not finding the love they had hoped for with their mothers, search for love elsewhere, Murillo says. Some boys find a family in the local gangs and end up selling drugs. A girl might find unconditional love by getting pregnant, having a baby, and moving in with the father. Gangs and pregnancy are much more common among reunited children than among those born here, says Zenaida Gabriel, a case manager at Sunrise Community Counseling Center, where some Newcomer students go for help.

Newcomer School psychologist Laura Lopez estimates that only 70 of 430 students will complete high school. Indeed, immigration expert Jeffrey Pa.s.sell says nearly half of all Central American children who arrive in the United States after the age of ten don't graduate from high school.

A Harvard University study found that immigrant children in U.S. schools who spent time separated from parents are often depressed, act up, have trouble trusting anyone, and don't respond to the authority of parents they weren't raised with. Los Angeles Unified School District psychologist Bradley Pilon believes only one in ten immigrant students ultimately accepts his or her parent and puts the rancor he or she feels toward the parent in perspective.

Murillo's conclusion: "The parents say: I had to do it. But that's not enough for these children. All of them feel the resentment." Special education teacher Marga Rodriguez adds, "This isn't worth it. In the end, you lose your kids." But she admits she doesn't know what it's like not to have anything to feed your hungry children.

Oscar Escalada Hernandez, director of the Casa YMCA shelter for immigrant children in Tijuana, Mexico, agrees. "In the end, it is a mess," he says. "The effect of immigration has been family disintegration. People are leaving behind the most important value: family unity."

The survivors, like Enrique, try to block out problems with their mothers and focus on what is good for them and their futures. They work to ensure that the love they feel for their mothers overcomes the rancor they also feel inside.

LANDS LEFT BEHIND.

The exodus of immigrants has been bittersweet for the countries they leave as well. It has provided an escape valve for countries with enormous economic problems, such as Mexico and Honduras. The outflow of workers has kept unemployment from climbing even higher.

Immigrants also send huge amounts of money from the United States to their families back home-typically one in ten dollars they make. This brings $30 billion a year to Latin America alone. The cash flow makes up a whopping 15 percent of El Salvador's gross domestic product and is Mexico's second largest contributor to the economy, after oil. Recipients use money sent back by immigrants for food, clothing, and medical expenses and to educate children. Grandparents who get money to care for children left behind would be dest.i.tute without the payments.

Immigrants who return to their home countries also bring skills acquired while living in a more technologically advanced country, says Norberto Giron of the International Organization for Migration in Honduras. They bring lower levels of tolerance for corruption and stronger demands for democratic processes, says Honduran immigration expert Maureen Zamora. Immigrants' desire to communicate with families back home in Honduras has resulted in improved telephone and Internet services.

But the separation of children and parents has had lasting negative consequences. Huge groups of parentless children have fueled rampant growth in juvenile delinquency and gangs in Honduras, says Glenda Gallardo, princ.i.p.al economist with the United Nations Development Program. "If your mom leaves you, if she disappears, it marks you in a way for life," she says.

The Mara Salvatrucha, 18th Street, and Mao Mao gangs control whole neighborhoods, where they impose a "war tax" on taxis, bicycles, or buses pa.s.sing through. A disproportionate number of the 36,000 gangsters in Honduras come from families in which the mother has migrated north, says Zamora. Grandparents, guided by guilt that the child they are raising isn't with his mother, go light on discipline. They also worry that if the child complains and gets moved to another relative, the money the mother sends may go elsewhere as well.

A public advertising campaign launched in 2002 is one sign Honduras is facing damage caused by family separations. The advertis.e.m.e.nts run on television and radio, and are plastered on billboards at the Tegucigalpa bus station, where Hondurans head north. "Father, mother," reads an advertis.e.m.e.nt with a young girl on a swing. "Your children need you. Stay here. In Honduras there are opportunities to get ahead. Discover them!"

"We are seeing a disintegration of the family," warns Norberto Giron, the Honduran migration official. "Keeping the family together-even if they are poor-is more important than leaving and improving their economic conditions."

IMMIGRANT NATION.

Each year, the United States legally admits nearly a million people, more than twice as many as in the 1970s. Another 700,000 arrive illegally, up from 200,000 to 300,000 a year in the 1980s and early 1990s. Today, 36 million residents of the United States were born in another country; nearly a third of those live in the United States illegally. The number of immigrants coming into the country in recent years is the highest ever recorded. And while the proportion of the population that is foreign-born, at 12 percent, is still lower than the all-time high of 15 percent in 1890, it has risen from 5 percent in 1970.

More than six in ten residents of Miami and four in ten of Los Angeles are from another country. Some Mexicans and Mexican Americans have jokingly dubbed the influx la reconquista-the reconquest of lands once held by Mexico.

Enrique and Lourdes disagree about the impact of this on the United States. Enrique says that were he an American citizen, he would want to curtail illegal immigration. Like most on his paint crew, he explains, he gets paid cash under the table and contributes no taxes on what he earns. He uses publicly provided services, including emergency medical care. And he sends a portion of his income to Honduras, rather than spending it in his community.

Lourdes disagrees. Yes, she says, her daughter was born at a public hospital, and she received welfare for a time. Still, she pays taxes and is ent.i.tled to those services. To her, immigrant labor is the engine that helps drive the American economy. Immigrants like herself, she says, work hard at jobs no American wants to do, at least not for minimum wage with no health benefits or paid vacation time. Immigrants' willingness to do certain backbreaking jobs at low wages provides goods and services to all Americans at reasonable prices, she says.

Many Americans understand that being born in the United States, with all the opportunities that entails, is a matter of sheer serendipity. They are happy to share a bounty few countries possess. They want the United States to provide desperate people a shot at a better life.

Others believe that the wave of immigrants from Latin America is blowback, of sorts, for U.S. policies. In recent decades, the United States has supported, and sometimes even helped install, repressive regimes in Latin America. These regimes, they note, propped up economic elites who resisted reforms and perpetuated unequal political and economic systems. This fueled poverty, civil wars, and the resulting economic crisis that is now pushing so many to migrate to the United States.

Employers in the United States see other benefits. Enrique's former boss in North Carolina argues that he must pay native-born workers more than immigrants-yet they work slower, balk at putting in overtime, and don't want to do the hardest jobs. Enrique says native-born painters take a lot of breaks and demand to be paid extra for overtime hours. One of Enrique's co-workers in North Carolina agrees, adding, "Americans say: If they fire me, I can get a better job." The co-worker says that being in the country illegally motivates him to do good work and keep his employment stable. His family in Honduras, he knows, depends on the money he sends. It would be tough to get another job because he is in the country illegally and doesn't speak English.

Many experts say immigrants help the economy grow and prevent businesses that rely on cheap labor from being forced to close or go abroad. In some low-education occupations, according to a 1997 study by the National Research Council that is considered among the most comprehensive a.s.sessments of the effects of immigration, a quarter to a half of all hours nationwide are worked by immigrant women. Immigrant production of goods and services, the NRC found, added a modest but significant $1.1 billion to $9.5 billion to the nation's $7 trillion economy.

American households benefit, too. Immigrants lower the cost of nearly 5 percent of all goods and services that people in U.S. households buy, according to the NRC. That means cheaper food and clothing. Because of immigrants, certain services-child care, gardening, car washing-are within reach of more Americans. Immigrant women who work as nannies and caregivers provide something invaluable: kindness and nurturing, often at the expense of their own children, says Kristine M. Zentgraf, a sociology professor at California State University at Long Beach.

Immigrants' biggest contribution, others say, is how their presence brings new blood, new ideas, and new ways of looking at things that drive creativity and spur advances. A disproportionate number of the nation's high achievers, the NRC study noted, such as n.o.bel laureates, are immigrants. Indeed, it is often the most motivated people who are immigrants. Who else would leave everything they know, cross Mexico on top of freight trains, and come to a place where they have to start from scratch?

BENEFIT AND BURDEN.

Some opposition to immigration is racism, a resistance to change, a discomfort with having people around who don't speak the same language or have similar customs. Yet some of the negative consequences of immigration are real, and are becoming increasingly evident as more women and children arrive.

Overall, the NRC said, immigrants use more government services than the native-born. They have more children, and therefore more youngsters in public schools. This is especially true for immigrants from Latin America, whose households are nearly twice as large as those of the native-born. It will cost the government two and a half times as much per household to educate their children, the study found.

Immigrants are poorer, have lower incomes, and qualify for more state and local services and a.s.sistance. Immigrant women receive publicly funded prenatal and obstetric care. Their U.S.-born children are ent.i.tled to welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. Compared to native households, immigrant families from Latin America are nearly three times as likely to receive government welfare payments.

Because immigrants earn less money and are less likely to own property, they pay lower taxes. Some immigrants receive their salaries in cash and pay no taxes at all. In all, immigrants and their native-born children pay a third less tax per capita than others in the United States, the NRC study found. Households headed by immigrants from Latin America pay half of what natives pay in state and federal taxes.

The fiscal burden to taxpayers is greatest in immigrant-heavy states such as California, where an estimated one in four illegal immigrants live, and where half of all children have immigrant parents. Local and state governments shoulder the biggest cost generated by immigrants: public education. An average nonimmigrant household in California paid $1,178 more in state and local taxes than the value of the services they received. Conversely, immigrant households paid $3,463 less than the value of the services they received, the NRC found.

The crush of immigrants has hastened the deterioration of many public services, namely schools, hospitals, and state jails and prisons. Cla.s.srooms are crowded. Hospital emergency rooms have been forced to close, in part because so many poor, uninsured, nonpaying patients, including immigrants, are provided with free mandated care. In Los Angeles County, jails have had to release prisoners early because of overcrowding caused, in part, by criminal immigrants. A 2001 University of Arizona study found that in the twenty-eight southwestern border counties of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, the cost of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing illegal immigrants who commit crimes amounted to as much as $125 million per year. The Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks reduced immigration levels, found that in 2002, nationwide, households headed by illegal immigrants used $26.3 billion in government services and paid $16 billion in taxes.

Those hardest hit by the influx of immigrants are disadvantaged native-born minorities who don't have a high school degree-namely, African Americans and previous waves of Latino immigrants. They must compete for the same low-end jobs immigrants take.

Wages for high school dropouts, who make up one in fourteen native workers, have dropped in recent years. Between 1980 and 2000, a Harvard University study found, the influx of immigrant workers to the United States cut wages for native workers with no high school diploma by 7.4 percent, or $1,800 on an average salary of $25,000.

Sometimes, whole industries switch from native to immigrant workers. In 1993, I looked at efforts to unionize Latino janitors in Los Angeles. Previously, the jobs had been largely held by African Americans, who had succeeded in obtaining increased wages and health benefits. Cleaning companies busted their union, then brought in Latino immigrant workers at half the wages and no benefits.

In 1996, I went to an ordinary block of two-bedroom homes in East Los Angeles to understand why nearly a third of California Latinos had supported Proposition 187, a voter initiative to bar illegal immigrants from schools, hospitals, and most public a.s.sistance. The measure pa.s.sed and was later struck down by the courts.

For residents of the block, support for Prop 187 wasn't a nativist reaction or scapegoating in tight economic times. They said ill feelings toward illegal immigrants were grounded in how the newcomers had affected their neighborhood and their lives. For them, the influx had meant not cut-rate nannies and gardeners, but heightened job compet.i.tion, depressed wages, overcrowded government services, and a reduced quality of life.

The newcomers who moved into the neighborhood were poor. Residents estimated that the block's population had tripled since 1970; up to seventeen immigrants were jammed into one small stucco house. Some lived in garages without plumbing, using lawns to relieve themselves. The second- and third-generation Latinos on the block felt it was their working-cla.s.s neighborhoods that bore the brunt of a wave of impoverished, unskilled workers. Immigrants were arriving at an unsettling pace, crowding them out of jobs and lowering wages. Immigrants weren't just taking jobs natives didn't covet; they competed for work as painters, mechanics, and construction workers.

In the 1980s, the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica think tank, found that the benefits of immigration outweighed the costs. By 1997, they had reversed course. The economy wasn't producing new jobs for high school dropouts, an increasing proportion of whom-roughly half-were unemployed. RAND said some native adults had become unemployed because of immigrant compet.i.tion. They recommended the country slash legal immigration to 1970s levels.

Some immigration experts question whether it makes sense to allow so many immigrants with low levels of education from poor, underdeveloped countries when the United States needs to compete globally in industries requiring high levels of education, creativity, and know-how. Mexican immigrants arrive with an average of five to nine years of education.