[AP,LAT,PNS] IMMIGRATION REFORM HITS HOME
Mauricio Banda
Summary:
1. IMMIGRATION REFORM HITS HOME [AP]
2. Illegal Immigration Varies Widely, Study Finds [LAT]
3. L.A.'S IMMIGRANT STRIKERS TARGET MEXICO'S TORTILLA KING [Jinn/PNS]
4. Cardenas to U.S.: Help Mexico Instead of Bashing Immigrants [AP]
1. IMMIGRATION REFORM HITS HOME
By MITCHELL LANDSBERG
AP National Writer
Sunday, September 22, 1996 12:01 pm EDT
JACUMBA, Calif. (AP) -- The new border fence slices through the desert
hills like some rusting, corrugated version of the Great Wall of
China. It divides the United States from Mexico, most obviously, but
also puts a wall between the Severance family, Pete and Jeri, and the
Gallegos, Raul and Leandra.
For now, it's fine for all concerned. A couple of times a week,
Leandra Gallego, a trim, dignified woman of 66 whose home sits about
10 yards inside Mexico, hops the fence at its lowest point and goes to
work cleaning the home of the Severances, who sit about 10 yards
inside the United States.
But if the U.S. Border Patrol ever follows through with threats to
begin prohibiting such crossings -- well, the people of Jacumba,
Calif., population 400, and Jacume, Mexico, about the same size, will
have a big problem with that.
If it's true that all politics is local, Jacumba (pronounced
hah-coom'-bah) and Jacume (hah'-coo-may) provide an extreme example.
Here, the issue of illegal immigration, a vexing one for Americans
everywhere, is cast in decidedly personal terms.
So far, immigration has not emerged as a major issue in the
presidential campaign, perhaps because President Clinton is nearly as
conservative a guardian of the border as Republican Bob Dole would be.
Clinton has overseen a huge increase in the budget of the Border
Patrol, and has called for doubling its forces in the next four years.
Under his watch, the Border Patrol has launched Operation Gatekeeper
in San Diego -- and built the Jacumba fence.
For generations, the people of Jacumba and Jacume, on either side of
the border about 75 miles southeast of San Diego, have crossed back
and forth as if the two countries were, in fact, neighbors.
People in Jacume would cross each day to work and shop in the United
States. People in Jacumba would cross -- less often, to be sure -- to
visit friends and family in Mexico.
They still do, but now there is the fence. It runs about three miles
through dry, rugged hills and across the valley the two towns share.
In the hills, it stands 10 feet high and consists of solid sheets of
corrugated steel. In the valley, where floodwaters can surge, it
consists of steel fenceposts crossed by a single line of railroad
ties, set at about thigh level.
If there's a typical opinion of the fence, it might be the one
expressed by Jose Rangel, a Jacumba resident and U.S. citizen who
spent his early years in Jacume. His twin brother still lives there.
Rangel stands in the front yard of his new, double-wide mobile home,
watering a profusion of morning glories, roses, irises and zinnias. He
is a thick-set, slow-moving man whose broad, tanned face is shaded by
a baseball cap. He speaks with an air of disgust.
``They're not going to stop nobody, anyway,'' he says. He bends the
hose in half until the stream slows to a trickle. Squinting in the
afternoon sun, he asks: ``Why do they want to stop me, if I'm a U.S.
citizen and I want to go see my brother?''
Immigration is a gut-level issue for many Americans, but few regard it
quite so personally as the people of Jacumba. Still, a highly
unscientific sampling of local opinion suggests that people here agree
with Americans generally on immigration issues.
A national poll by The Associated Press found Americans almost evenly
divided over measures to crack down on illegal immigration. One in
three said they have a great deal of concern about illegal
immigration, but voters were more closely divided on proposals to deny
citizenship, health benefits and education to the children of
illegals. Overall, voters thought Clinton would do a better job than
Dole of dealing with immigration.
Few people here, on either side of the border, are happy about the
flood of illegal immigrants from central and southern Mexico who have
poured through this area since Operation Gatekeeper began pushing the
illegal tide further east.
There are grumblings about drug smugglers, and a general dismay about
strangers who have violated the cozy atmosphere of small-town life.
Few people believe the Border Patrol is effective; most see the border
fence here as a boondoggle. But nobody seems to think presidential
politics has much to do with it.
Jose Rangel says he'll probably vote for Clinton, but not necessarily
because of the president's position on immigration. Rangel, 45, born
in the United States to Mexican farmworkers, agrees with Dole that the
children of illegal immigrants don't belong in U.S. public schools.
``If they've got no papers, why should I pay taxes for somebody to go
to school?'' he asks.
This, the one immigration issue on which Clinton and Dole sharply
disagree, also divides the people of Jacumba.
Historically, the Jacumba Elementary School accepted children from
across the border -- children like the young Jose Rangel. But a few
years ago, school district administrators put a stop to the practice,
saying only residents of Jacumba -- of whatever citizenship -- could
attend the Jacumba school. At the time, there were 13 students from
Mexico attending the school.
Susan Barry, the principal, remembers the day the new policy was
announced. ``We all sat down on the playground and cried,'' she says.
Then she went to work finding homes in Jacumba for her Mexican
students. Ten of the 13 moved across the border and stayed in school.
Like Barry, many people here recoil at the thought of denying children
an education because their parents are illegal immigrants.
``This is as sick as the human animal gets,'' fumes Richard Spencer,
who ran a mental health center in the Los Angeles area before retiring
in 1985. He lived for eight years in Jacume before moving across the
border to a renovated home in Jacumba. His politics are certainly to
the left of Clinton's, and he said he will vote for the president only
reluctantly.
Dole has supporters here, too, among them Pete and Jeri Severance.
The Severances, like their neighbors, the Gallegos, seem to have found
paradise on earth here amid the clumps of cacti and roaming herds of
burros. They live in a sumptuous hilltop ranch house draped in
wisteria and shaded by sentries of cypress trees. While hummingbirds
flit about the patio, the Severances, who are retired, sit on easy
chairs and talk about the illegal immigrants who used to use their
garden hose for bathing, but don't anymore because the fence has
pushed their crossing a few dozen yards down the road.
``It sends the aliens that way and it sends them this way,'' Jeri
Severance says happily, criss-crossing her arms.
Her husband weighs in on the education issue. ``I don't think they're
entitled to a damn thing, not until they're legal,'' he says. But he
wonders what would happen to California farmers if they couldn't hire
illegal immigrants to pick their crops. And both he and his wife worry
that the Border Patrol will stop letting people -- people like Leandra
Gallego, their housekeeper -- cross the fence.
The Border Patrol is adamant: It will increase patrols in the Jacumba
area, and it will arrest anyone who crosses the fence, regardless of
citizenship. The nearest port of entry is Tecate, a 1 1/2-hour
round-trip from Jacume or Jacumba, and that is where people will have
to cross.
Raul and Leandra Gallego have been crossing the border here, off and
on, for 50 years. Like many people, they keep a car on either side of
the border fence, one for Mexico, one for the United States. Raul
Gallego believes the United States should control its border, and he
sides with the most conservative Americans when it comes to illegal
immigrants. They have no rights, he says, and should be sent home.
He wouldn't mind the fence, he says, except that it funnels illegal
immigrants -- and drug smugglers, and local hoodlums -- to the point
where the solid fence gives way to the low band of railroad ties,
which happens to be right near his house. Some days, 50 or more people
are huddled under the bushes in front of the Gallegos' house, waiting
for an immigrant-smuggler -- a ``coyote'' -- to take them across.
Then, too, Gallego worries about the prospect that this fence, and the
policies it represents, will divide these towns forever.
``I don't know, I don't know,'' he says, shaking his head. ``I don't
like this fence, but there's nothing I can do.''
(c) Copyright 1996 The Associated Press
2. Los Angeles Times
STATE & LOCAL
Tuesday, September 24, 1996
Illegal Immigration Varies Widely, Study Finds
Border: Influx more than doubled in late '80s, report
says. Shifting economies of Mexico, California are cited.
By PATRICK J. McDONNELL, Times Staff Writer
Illegal immigration, often pictured as an inexorable stream of
border-jumpers and visa-overstayers, is actually a fluctuating
phenomenon that responds sharply to economic shifts and other factors.
That is the central finding of a new study by the Public Policy
Institute of California, an independent, San Francisco-based research
organization that focuses on population issues and other concerns.
In fact, the study's author, Hans Johnson, found that the
movement of illegal immigrants to California has varied widely in
recent years--ranging from relatively low levels in the early 1980s to
a doubling later in the decade, before subsiding again in the early
1990s. The shifting economies of Mexico and California have a lot to
do with the variations, Johnson concluded.
"The changes in flows are quite dramatic over time," said
Johnson, who developed the estimates from a model based on U.S. Census
findings, birth and death records, motor vehicle information, tax
return data and other official figures.
The study period ended in 1993, before the collapse of the
Mexican peso in December 1994 triggered what many believe is an
ongoing surge in illegal immigration.
The new report adds to the growing body of research into illegal
immigration, a contentious topic that has risen to the top of national
policy debate. Demographers, social scientists and others are
increasingly focusing on this semi-clandestine movement, an arena of
study once largely confined to guesswork.
The study's conclusions are in line with other less precise
estimates, experts said. "The general pattern--a rise in the '80s
followed by a fall in the early '90s--is consistent with all the
evidence," said Dowell Myers, a demographer and urban planner at USC.
According to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization estimates, more
than 4 million illegal immigrants reside in the United States, about
half of them in California. Of the total undocumented population, the
INS says, about 50% arrived with valid visas, typically at airports,
and the rest entered the country without valid documents, usually via
the U.S.-Mexico border.
The influx has had a profound impact on the makeup of
California's population. It has contributed to a sharp rise in the
proportion of Latino residents--Latinos make up a quarter of the
state's population--while compensating for a net decline in domestic
migrants from other states. Between 1980 and 1993, the study found,
illegal immigration accounted for 22% to 31% of the state's population
growth.
The new report is billed as the first to measure annual flows of
illegal immigration. Earlier studies, such as an oft-quoted 1994
effort by the INS, usually lack year-to-year breakdowns.
Annual fluctuations are critical, experts agree, because changes
enable policymakers and others to pinpoint so-called "push" and "pull"
factors that drive the flow. While all acknowledge that economic
opportunity is a key consideration, there is great dispute as to
whether touted U.S. enforcement buildups--such as the current
Operation Gatekeeper along the U.S.-Mexico border in San
Diego--actually reduce the numbers by discouraging would-be crossers.
The study sheds no light on the effectiveness of Operation
Gatekeeper, which was launched in 1994.
The report estimates that net annual illegal immigration surged
from fewer than 100,000 in 1980 to more than 200,000 in the late
1980s, then dropped to about 125,000 a year in the early 1990s.
In analyzing his results, Johnson noted the strong correlation
to economic conditions. California experienced brisk job growth in the
mid-to-late 1980s, when the movement peaked, he said, while unlawful
immigration ebbed in the early 1990s, as a recession gripped the
state.
But Johnson also concluded that the more than doubling of
illegal immigration levels during the late 1980s may well have been
linked to another factor: The 1987-88 amnesty program that, he and
others have postulated, may have sent many illegal immigrants heading
north, hoping for a chance at a green card or seeking to be reunited
with newly legalized family members. Ironically, congressional
lawmakers who devised the amnesty program thought it would help reduce
illegal immigration.
In formulating the estimates, the demographer devised a two-step
research method: first estimating total annual changes in the
California population during the 13-year period of review and then
subtracting legal factors, such as lawful immigration and domestic
migration from other states.
Copyright Los Angeles Times
3. Jinn: An online zine from Pacific News Service
THE AMERICAS
L.A.'S IMMIGRANT STRIKERS TARGET MEXICO'S TORTILLA KING
By David Bacon
<dba...@igc.org>
Date: 09-16-96
The U.S. plant moving production south has become the classic symbol
of the NAFTA era. But many Mexican plants are moving north, proving
cheap wages aren't only on the southern side of the border. Now
immigrant workers in Los Angeles have targeted the world's largest
tortilla producer -- Mexico's Mission Foods. PNS associate editor
David Bacon writes regularly on labor and immigration issues.
LOS ANGELES -- Some of the biggest Mexican businesses are moving north
in the new NAFTA era. As a result, many of their U.S. employees are
wondering which side of the border they're living on.
Ramon Alvarez drives a delivery truck in Los Angeles and even belongs
to a union. His family's standard of living, however, isn't much
better than if he were working the same job in his native Mexico. Now
Alvarez and 150 other drivers have gone on strike.
Ironically, they've made a Mexican monopoly the latest battlefront in
the ongoing labor upsurge among California's immigrant work force.
Mission Foods moved north and became the world's largest tortilla
producer. In the process, the Mexican firm has turned on its head the
classic NAFTA symbol of the U.S. plant moving south in search of low
wages.
Alvarez, like the company's other delivery drivers, routinely puts in
60 to 80 hours a week. Paid piece-rate with no overtime, he earns an
average of $180 per week -- sometimes as little as $108.
"My children are always asking for things I can't give them," he
explains. "Meanwhile, I'm working 12 to 15 hours a day, six days a
week. I don't even see my youngest son except on Sundays."
When Alvarez parked his truck on August 3 and picked up a picket sign,
he took on more than a local food processor. Mission Foods is the U.S.
arm of a deep-pocketed Mexican monopoly with extensive ties to that
country's ruling elite, including the current Mexican president and
his predecessor. Its largest and newest U.S. plant, in Rancho
Cucamonga, will have 50 assembly lines and 1,200 workers when it
reaches full production, and will supply tortillas to the U.S. Army,
as well as a number of fast-food chains, including Pollo Loco, Taco
Bell, Del Taco and Carl's Jr.
"The popular stereotype that tortillas are produced in small
storefronts is wrong," says Joel Ochoa, organizing director of the Los
Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, which is supporting the strike.
Over 25,000 workers nationwide produce $2.5 billion worth of tortillas
each year. They are almost all immigrant workers, in the same economic
situation as the drivers. About a quarter of that production is
concentrated in southern California, and most of that belongs to
Mission Foods.
Mission, a division of Grupo MASECA (or Gruma) belongs to Roberto
Gonzalez Barrera, the Mexican tortilla king who has amassed a fortune
in excess of $1.1 billion, including banks, brokerage houses and fast
food franchises. Gruma has 10 plants across the U.S., and $400 million
in total U.S. tortilla sales.
When it moved into the Los Angeles market, it was already one of the
largest food producers in Mexico. Gonzalez grew rich on government
tortilla subsidies, and the vast growth of his industrialized tortilla
production put thousands of small producers, the nixtamaleros, out of
business.
Grupo MASECA was rewarded with an illegal payment of $7 million from
the government enterprise CONASUPO, according to the New York Times,
at a time when Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo was its secretary of
budget and planning. Gonzalez loaned $50 million to Raul Salinas,
brother of ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Raul Salinas is now
in a Mexican prison, accused of masterminding the assassination of
Juan Francisco Ruiz Massieu, a government official who opposed
construction of a Gruma plant.
As the corruption of the Salinas administration began to unravel after
Zedillo took office, Carlos Salinas fled Mexico City aboard Gonzalez
Barrera's jet.
Gruma has received subsidies in the U.S. as well. Rancho Cucamonga's
redevelopment agency gave it over $400,000 to build a plant in the
city. Governor Pete Wilson's administration assembled a team of
corporate officials to provide assistance.
But despite its wealth and influence, Mission has good reason to fear
the labor action in Los Angeles. "Their prime concern obviously is not
money," says Hector Fernandez, business agent of the drivers' union,
Teamsters Local 63. "It's about breaking the union before it spreads
to the workers on the production lines in the plants themselves." Over
1100 workers walk through the gates of Mission's two local tortilla
plants every day.
The tortilla walkout extends a key battlefront in Southern California,
where factories and workplaces have become pressure cookers for
immigrant workers. NAFTA-induced poverty pushes more and more people
north across the border. Proposition 187 and similar anti-immigrant
measures make them more vulnerable and their labor cheaper. It's a
recipe for a labor war.
Mission Foods drivers like Alvarez are doing what over 20,000
immigrant workers have done in southern California over the last
decade -- organizing a union and going on strike. The Los Angeles
Manufacturing Action Project was set up to coordinate these efforts
among the city's 700,000 industrial workers.
"We can all see that the stakes are very high in this strike for the
strikers themselves -- and for the right of all immigrant workers to
organize and live a decent life," says Ochoa. "If this strike is won,
it will make that right real, and easier to achieve, for thousands of
others."
* * *
Pacific News Service, 450 Mission Street, Room 204, San Francisco, CA
94105, tel: (415) 243-4364.
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Copyright © 1996 Pacific News Service. All Rights Reserved.
Please do not reprint our stories without our permission.
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4. Cardenas to U.S.: Help Mexico Instead of Bashing Immigrants
Sept. 20, 1996 04:26 EDT
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Instead of bashing immigrants who seek to better
themselves, the United States should be bolstering Mexico's economy so
its citizens can stay home and make a living, a major Mexican
politician says.
``The gap between us has grown, not diminished, and it's getting
worse,'' former Mexico presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas said
Thursday.
``Many Mexicans come to the U.S. to find a livelihood they can't find
in their own country,'' said Cardenas, who sought the presidency in
1988 and 1994 as the left-centrist Democratic Revolutionary Party or
PRD candidate.
Cardenas said such legal and illegal immigration will continue until
Mexico's economic problems are resolved. Meanwhile, he said, ``rights
should be respected, no matter (what one's) immigrant status.''
With the North American Free Trade Agreement in place, he said,
``Mexico needs to change its economic model to include even more trade
to the exterior.''
Additionally, he said, ``the Mexican worker is being left out (of
international trade), and that needs to change.''
His comments came as Congress sought compromises that would allow
passage of a major immigration bill before adjournment, expected near
the end of the month. A key issue is a proposal to allow states to bar
illegal alien children from public schools.
In a move that California Gov. Pete Wilson calls blackmail, President
Clinton has threatened to veto the measure if it gives states that
authority.
Cardenas, whose father, Lazaros, was Mexico's president from 1934
until 1940, reportedly received the majority of votes in 1988 but was
declared the loser by the ruling Institutionalized Revolutionary Party
or PRI.
As founder and president of a nonpartisan think tank, the Foundation
for Democracy, Cardenas has been instrumental in proposing
alternatives to Mexico's political, economic and social problems.
Cardenas denied reports that he will run for mayor of Mexico City and
said he no longer plans to seek any political post.
``There are many more people in the PRD with much better
qualifications than me,'' he said. ``My role is behind the scenes now
helping to find those people and put them in office.''
Prior to his 1988 presidential bid, Cardenas was governor of the state
of Michoaca and a member of the PRI.
He was in Tucson as part of the University of Arizona's Latin American
Studies lecture series and is to speak tonight at Pima Community
College's western campus.
Copyright 1996 Associated Press. All rights reserved.