Tighter borders --> more immigrants

[Michael Pollak <mpollak@xxxxxxxxx>]

[The law of unintended consequences]

October 10, 2003

PAGE ONE

Tighter Border
Yields Odd Result:
More Illegals Stay

Once-Migrant Mexican Workers
Settle in Stockton, Calif.;
A Burden for Schools, ER

By EDUARDO PORTER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

STOCKTON, Calif. -- Something unusual is happening among the illegal
immigrants who work in the lush fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Instead
of leaving after the harvest, as they did for years, they are staying
here, settling into lives of poverty and putting new strains on the city.

Through jobless winter months, immigrant farmworkers cluster in run-down
apartments, sleeping on mattresses, sofas and rugs. In one blue clapboard
house on a leafy street near downtown, about 30 immigrant farmworkers from
Oxtotitlan, Mexico, pack into three apartments.

Most of them aren't going anywhere. "Maybe I'll stay for 10 more years, or
15," says Cristobal Silverio, 42 years old, who lives in one of the
apartments with his wife, four young children and half a dozen recent
arrivals from his hometown.

Stockton's schools have become crowded with Spanish-speaking students. One
local charity reports that demand for Christmas food baskets has tripled
in the past two years, in large part because Mexican workers no longer go
home for the holidays. The county hospital faces a budget crunch as it
treats an exploding number of uninsured patients.

Stricter policing of the U.S. border -- begun in the 1990s and reinforced
in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001 -- was supposed to stem the
flood of illegal immigrants arriving in the U.S. Instead, in Stockton and
other places, it is having an entirely different effect.

Illegal immigrants are still willing to risk crossing the border between
the U.S. and Mexico, arriving at a rate of about 400,000 a year, by some
estimates. But as the number of border-patrol agents has doubled since
1995, the price of an illegal crossing has roughly tripled to about $1,500
for a three-day trek across the Arizona desert. As a result, many
immigrants have cut out much of the back-and-forth travel and decided to
stay put in the U.S.

The result is a more-permanent unauthorized population than ever before,
says Douglas Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at the
University of Pennsylvania, who studies surveys of communities in Mexico
and the U.S. In the early 1980s, the average stay of an undocumented
Mexican worker was three years, Mr. Massey says. By the late 1990s, it
climbed to nine years.

The California Public Policy Institute reports that only about 11% of the
illegal immigrants who arrived in 1998 returned home within a year, down
from roughly 30% in 1990. Meanwhile, the percentage of undocumented
immigrants who say they plan to stay in the U.S. "as long as possible"
jumped from 59% in the mid-1990s to 67% at the end of the decade,
according to surveys by the Mexican National Population Council.

"The militarization of the border hasn't stopped the people from coming.
It just drove up the cost and the risk," says Mr. Massey. "The response of
migrants was to stop going home, and the result was a big growth of the
Mexican population here."

Just as crossing the border has gotten tougher for illegal immigrants,
settling here has become easier.  Undocumented farmworkers used to exist
in a constant state of anxiety, alert for the first sign of an immigration
raid. But while security has tightened along the border, it has gone slack
in many of the communities where migrants work.

"We haven't done workplace enforcement for years," says Robert Logazino,
head of the Border Patrol's Northern California sector office in
Livermore. "We're in the process of being closed down here." Priorities
have shifted in law enforcement. Instead of raiding fields and factories,
agents for the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- now folded into
the Department of Homeland Security along with the Border Patrol -- are
mostly assigned to investigate smuggling rings and patrol high-profile
sites such as airports.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security's Immigration and
Customs Enforcement unit, says immigration authorities have no definitive
numbers on the settlement patterns of the illegal-immigrant population.
But she says the pattern of border apprehensions "suggests that [illegal
immigrants] are making the decision not to go back and forth as readily as
they once did."

As permanent populations of unauthorized laborers replace what was once a
temporary, mostly male work force, the immigrants are often trapped by
poverty. They are also transforming many U.S. communities that used to
enjoy the benefits of cheap labor without the problems associated with
entrenched communities of low-income workers and their families.

The changing migratory pattern is on clear display in Stockton, a city of
244,000. Checkered with sprawling farms that produce apples, pears,
tomatoes and more, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the nation's most
productive farming regions, accounting for about half of California's $27
billion in agricultural production.  The long growing season stretches
from early spring to autumn.

Mexican farmworkers have come here at least since the Bracero program of
the 1940s, when young men lived in labor camps by the edge of the fields
throughout the state. By the late 1990s, 91% of California's farmworkers
were born in Mexico, and 42% were illegal immigrants, according to a
Department of Labor survey.

Once here, they feel stuck. "People would like to return more often to
Mexico," says Luis Rivera, a community worker at California Rural Legal
Assistance. "But they are afraid because they see the stories on TV about
migrants dying in the desert" trying to come across.

As more settle for the long term, they are having a stark impact on
Stockton's inner city. In need of housing during the lean winter months,
when the labor camps that farmers maintain next to their fields are
closed, farmworkers pool their resources and pile into dilapidated
apartments in town.

"The houses violate the city code," says Gary Podesto, Stockton's mayor.
"But if we chase them out, they will only go live by the river."

About a third of Stockton's population is Hispanic, up from 25% a decade
ago. Roughly 6% of the city's residents speak little or no English.
Playgrounds and schools offer one clear sign that Mexican families are not
only arriving but staying: Almost 45% of children under 6 are Latino, up
from 30% 10 years earlier.  Hispanic children account for about 70% of the
2,300 annual births in San Joaquin General Hospital's maternity ward.

Schools such as Montezuma Elementary, an austere, low-slung set of
buildings on the east side of town, are bursting at the seams. The school
serves about 1,100 children, roughly four times its capacity. To keep
class sizes below the school district's 32-child limit, Montezuma operates
all year, staggering students in four academic cycles.

Mr. Silverio is one of the new settlers. He first crossed the border to
the U.S. in 1997, paying a smuggler $400 to guide him. Mr. Silverio
expected to stay a couple of years at most, hoping by then to earn enough
money to build a house back in Oxtotitlan, a dusty town of 1,200 people
and one telephone in the central Mexican state of Guerrero.

Mr. Silverio worked the strawberry fields upon arrival but was soon kicked
out by the INS. He returned to California the next year with his wife,
Felipa. They left their children -- 19-year-old Lourdes, 12-year-old
Fernando, and 8-year-old Angel -- at home in Oxtotitlan with their
grandparents.

Bringing his wife to California proved more expensive and more difficult
than Mr. Silverio anticipated. Caught twice trying to sneak in, they
needed a month to make it through. The smuggler, his fees high on account
of the added difficulty, charged them $1,200 each. They were robbed twice
on the way.

Once they made it to Stockton, they decided returning regularly to
Oxtotitlan was too risky. A year later, their daughter Lourdes arrived in
the U.S. with her husband. Then, Felipa Silverio gave birth to another
girl, Flor, who was born prematurely and with asthma, and had to remain
for three months in an incubator at San Joaquin General Hospital.

The Silverios don't know whether the life-saving care Flor received would
have been available anywhere near Oxtotitlan. They know with certainty
that they couldn't have afforded the treatment, which ran into the
hundreds of thousands of dollars, and for which they paid nothing at San
Joaquin General.

In 2000, eager to unite his family, Mr. Silverio returned to Oxtotitlan,
picked up Fernando and Angel, and paid smugglers $5,400 to bring them to
California. Two years ago, Felipa gave birth to another child, a boy named
Cristian.

Today, the Silverios' apartment has become a welcome station to recent
arrivals from Oxtotitlan. Many of them stay on his living-room sofa before
going off in search of their own apartments. Mr. Silverio estimates that
Stockton is home to about 150 adults from Oxtotitlan.

And the Oxtotecans don't plan to return to Mexico any time soon. Ignacio
Barro, Mr. Silverio's son-in-law, used to return to Mexico every
Christmas. But Mr. Barro hasn't made the trip at all since he and Lourdes
settled in Stockton three years ago. "I used to come and go all the time
but not anymore," he says. "These days crossing is too expensive. You end
up working just to pay the smuggler to come and go."

A neighbor upstairs, Domingo Chavelas, says commuting no longer makes
economic sense to many workers. For five years he spent summers in
California and winters in Mexico. But four years ago he returned to
Oxtotitlan to get married and brought his wife to Stockton to make their
home. Their daughter, Esmeralda, was born here last year. When he does
return to Mexico, Mr. Chavelas says, it will be for good.

In many cases, the settlers are settling into poverty. Weighed down by a
steady supply of immigrant labor, hourly wages in the fields fell from
$6.98 in 1989 to $6.18 in 1998, in constant 1998 dollars, according to the
Labor Department. In 1997, about three-quarters of illegal-immigrant
farmworkers earned less than $10,000 a year.

In Stockton, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city's poverty rate
climbed by nearly 30% during the 1990s. By 1999, almost a quarter of the
city's residents lived below the poverty line. Among noncitizens, the
poverty rate was 38% in 1999.

Working last spring at the Macklin vineyards in nearby Linden, Mr. and
Mrs. Silverio earned $100 each on good days. Often, they made less than
half of that. In all, they say, they earned about $18,000 last year, well
under the poverty line of $24,260 for a family of six.

U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants have access to the country's
social safety net. The Silverios get $650 a month in welfare on behalf of
Flor and another $319 on behalf of Cristian. But illegal immigrants
themselves are ineligible for welfare and can't get unemployment benefits
or Social Security.

Immigrants who stay in town through the winter -- when demand for farm
hands drops by nearly 40% and Stockton's unemployment rate surges to 13%
-- are showing up in growing numbers at the doors of local charities. The
nonprofit Council for Spanish speakers, known as El Concilio, says the
number of baskets with food distributed at Christmas jumped three-fold in
the last two years, to about 1,500. "After Sept. 11, even more people are
staying over the winter because they're afraid of crossing," says José
Rodríguez, executive director of El Concilio.

The longer the workers stay, the more their families grow. During the peak
working months of the summer, El Concilio's child-care center has been
forced to turn away working mothers seeking a place to leave their babies.
And requests for medical attention have also surged. El Concilio, which
offers farmworkers transportation to and from area hospitals and health
clinics, has seen demand for these services triple in the past decade, Mr.
Rodríguez says.

The Channel Medical Center, a local clinic for low-income patients, used
to offer ob-gyn clinics two days a week. Now it's up to five days a week.
Four out of every five patients seen at the clinic are Latinos, and most
of those are farmworkers, says Lourdes Gomez, a patient-flow coordinator
at the clinic.

Unauthorized immigrants tend to avoid hospitals, where they fear they
might be arrested or deported. They tend to visit only when their
illnesses become emergencies. At San Joaquin General Hospital, women often
wait until they're eight or nine months pregnant to seek prenatal care.
Men show up almost exclusively in the emergency room. Often, as in the
recent case of a migrant worker with advanced testicular cancer, they come
too late.

Three years ago, San Joaquin General started an annual health fair for
farmworkers at a local church. "We were surprised when we saw the families
-- the women and children," says Jeffrey Thompson, deputy director of
ambulatory services. "We expected only men."

Even as California has been slashing social services in response to its
budget crisis, the growing population of impoverished farmworkers has
exacted a cost. Medi-Cal, the state and federal health-insurance program,
covers illegal immigrants only for emergency treatment, prenatal care and
some cases of long-term care in nursing homes. The number of
illegal-immigrant patients covered by Medi-Cal increased to 760,000 in
fiscal year 2003, up from 470,000 in the previous year. The cost to the
program rose to $1.15 billion from $817 million.

Moreover, when Medi-Cal won't pay, the burden often falls to local
health-care systems. San Joaquin General, which faces a $9 million overall
deficit this year, last year lost an average of more than $75 for each
patient who visited its emergency room. The ER lost $3.7 million.

Other costs associated with the workers' long-term stays are less obvious.
Next year, California could begin permitting undocumented immigrants to
receive driver's licenses. But countless thousands have been driving for
years. When stopped for violations, their cars were often impounded.
Police say this could explain why Hispanics - - afraid of coming in
contact with the law -- account for 44% of hit-and-run arrests in San
Joaquin County.

Last year, driving without a license or insurance cost Mr. Silverio his
van. Driving home after drinking a few beers with friends, he says, Mr.
Silverio ran a stop sign and hit another car. He was fined and still owes
thousands of dollars to the other driver's insurance company. But before
paying his debt, he went to a used-car lot and bought another vehicle, a
1994 Nissan.

"In this country a car is not a luxury," he says.

As the workers have begun staying longer, many have sought year-round jobs
in other fields, including construction. Many illegal immigrants have
opened bank accounts and joined unions. Last year Mr. Silverio filed
income-tax returns, partly in order to establish a pattern of legal
conduct should the government ever decide to offer amnesty to illegal
immigrants.

Like most immigrant farmworkers, the Silverios often miss their home. But
they say it won't be easy to move back to Oxtotitlan. Their older
children, Fernando and Angel, having attended school here and learned
English, are unlikely to want to return to a town in Mexico where three
out of four houses have dirt floors. Flor and Cristian have never even
been to Mexico.

Sometimes Mr. and Ms. Silverio talk of retiring to Mexico. But that would
happen only after their children are grown. At the moment, Stockton seems
to be their future. Ms. Silverio, not sure when she'll see her home again,
says she hopes the family will have enough money to "send our bodies back
if we die here."

Write to Eduardo Porter at eduardo.porter@xxxxxxx