Migrant smuggling’s toll strikes central Mexico towns
PALO ALTO EL LLANO, Mexico — Adán Lara Vega’s work as a master bricklayer netted him a better salary than the farmhands in this rural town, but he struggled to put food on the table for his wife and two children.
Work was intermittent, family members said as they stood outside his one-room house facing the pigsty, chicken coops and small fruit trees behind his parents’ house. When he could find jobs, the pay was meager.
Lara Vega enjoyed playing volleyball in the citywide tournaments, but he was consumed with worry about his children’s future, his family said.
“He wanted to eat better, to buy a better house,” said his aunt, Rosalva Vega Tiscareño, “There are days we don’t eat.”
This month, Lara Vega boarded a bus and began what is a rite of passage for many young men in this region of central Mexico: The trip to the United States.
Illegal immigration from Mexico has plummeted in recent years, driven by a variety of factors, but that didn’t stop Lara Vega and at least 13 other men from the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes from taking buses to the border and crossing the Rio Grande, where they boarded a tractortrailer that would take them to San Antonio.
Smugglers there were supposed to take them to other destinations, in his case Florida.
Instead, Lara Vega and 28 others ended up in San Antonio hospitals. Ten others died in the oppressive, suffocating heat in the unventilated trailer, which was stuffed with as many as 100 immigrants.
The smugglers picked up some of them before police arrived at the Walmart parking lot on the southwest side where the truck parked.
The truck driver, James Matthew Bradley Jr., 60, was charged with smuggling immigrants and faces up to life in prison or the death penalty.
Origins in the 1940s
Aguascalientes, population 1.3 million, is disproportionately represented in the number of people who leave Mexico for the U.S. each year, driven in part by the poverty here and in part by the state’s history of exporting labor abroad, going back to a World War II program that legally imported labor.
In the towns surrounding the state capital, also called Aguascalientes, the impact of this decades-long chain of migration are easy to see. In Palo Alto el Llano, population about 5,000, nicer homes of those with family members in the U.S. rise above the squat concrete and adobe houses lining the mostly dirt roads.
In Calvillo, a historic city of 60,000 about 50 miles west where the center is crowded with tourists even on a weekday, the legacy of family members in the U.S. can be seen every Monday, when families line up at the bank for remittances, or during the December guava festival, when the large, American-made trucks of the norteños home for the holidays can be seen on the city streets, officials said.
News of what happened after Lara Vega and the 13 others from Aguascalientes crossed the border sent a shock through this region because of how many here were affected.
Maria Guadalupe Rodríuez Macias, 42, said her husband has been in Florida for 13 years. Her sons, who are 18 and 24 years old, want to join him.
“They want to go look for their father,” she said. “I’m afraid because of what happened” in San Antonio.
But stories of tragic deaths on the trip to the U.S., whether while crossing the cartel-controlled territory near the border, swimming the Rio Grande or hiking through the inhospitable landscape in the American Southwest, are commonplace.
“If we don’t create opportunities, people will continue risking their lives to get a life of dignity they are looking for,” said Gabriel Hernández, Palo Alto el Llano’s city manager who himself crossed to the U.S. illegally, became a legal resident, lived there 20 years and graduated college before returning to his home town last year. “There have been so many tragedies in the past, and people keep doing it.”
Border crossings down
Border Patrol agents caught fewer than 200,000 people from Mexico crossing illegally into the U.S. last year, down from nearly 1 million in 2006. In that time, the U.S. housing market collapsed, the Border Patrol doubled, 650 miles of border fencing were constructed, Mexico’s birth rate continued a decadeslong decline, and economic opportunity increased in Mexico.
Yet Aguascalientes is in the midst of a region, including the states of Michoacán, Guanajuato, Jalisco and Zacatecas, that has a long history of sending young men abroad to work. Many here go to the U.S. and Canada on temporary visas that allow them to work seasonal jobs. Many more take the dangerous journey to the U.S. illegally.
The migration began in the 1940s with the Bracero Program that was enacted by the U.S. government to replace the millions of workers who left their jobs to serve in the military during World War II.
Arnulfo Silva Rodríguez, 79, said he went to the U.S. nearly a dozen times as a bracero, or manual laborer, starting in 1958.
After the program was canceled in the 1960s, he came as many times illegally.
Back then, he could cross the river unmolested and walk until he could catch a ride to whatever city needed willing hands.
“Now there’s a lot of crime,” he said. “There weren’t cholos (gang members), there weren’t sicarios (hit men). Now they charge you for crossing the river.”
Those who can’t afford the fee are often kidnapped and sometimes tortured until their families pay ransom.
What started with the bracero program morphed into a codependence between the two countries. Families in Mexico relied on jobs north of the border, and U.S. employers became accustomed to the steady supply of cheap labor, said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the nowdefunct U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and a senior fellow with the
“If we don’t create opportunities, people will continue risking their lives to get a life of dignity they are looking for.” Gabriel Hernández, Palo Alto el Llano’s city manager
Migration Policy Institute. When the bracero program ended, the relationship continued illegally.
Meanwhile, the opportunities to come to the U.S. legally are limited. The wait times for some family visas stretch back decades — in June the State Department was issuing visas for the Mexican citizen children and siblings of U.S. citizens who had applied in the 1990s — and employers complain of an onerous process to bring in legal laborers when they can’t find U.S. citizens and legal residents willing to do the work.
“Today’s historically low levels of illegal border crossings are a significant accomplishment,” Meissner wrote in an email. “But it is unrealistic to expect zero illegal crossings. Enforcement must be combined with a modernized immigration system that makes legal entry more widely available to meet legitimate labor market demands.”
Perilous journey
In Calvillo’s quiet outskirts, just a few minutes’ drive from the hubbub of the city center where tourists from around Mexico eat guava ice cream and pose for pictures in a wellkept plaza, Mario Ramírez Mendez, 24, took the same path as the men from Palo Alto el Llano, ending up on the same tractor-trailer to San Antonio.
Like Lara Vega, Ramírez was hospitalized after police were called to the Walmart parking lot early on the morning of July 23, then held in a detention facility by U.S. marshals as a material witness against Bradley.
Tears streamed down the face of Jesús Ramírez Gutiérrez, Ramírez Méndez’s father, as he explained that he’d had no word from his son for days and knew only that he’d been released from the hospital.
His son worked in bricklaying. Other young men who work in the surrounding ranches, dairy farms and terraced guava orchards are called peónes, a term with feudal connotations.
“Here, they have very little, so they go looking for a better life,” Ramírez Gutiérrez, 74, said.
Closer to the central square, José Antonio González de Loera, 44, made a decent life for his three children with a family-run business that buys milk from nearby farms and produces cheese they sell wholesale. He has a two-story house with a carport for his Ford pickup. That didn’t stop his son Antonio, whom he wanted only identified by first name because the 20-yearold was not detained by immigration authorities, from leaving for the U.S.
On the night of July 22, Antonio called his family frantically from inside the trailer, describing the heat and the lack of air. He later told his mother that he lost consciousness, woke up in a stranger’s house in San Antonio and made it to Colorado with another man who had been in the trailer with him.
Antonio had enjoyed working with cattle since he was a young man, and his family was better off than most, but he was frustrated with the lack of opportunity in Calvillo.
“He didn’t want to do any more than work and have a house here,” González said. “But all he could find was work in the countryside.”
Calvillo city officials noted that with the money immigrants raise and borrow to be smuggled into the country, as much as $7,000, they could open a business and take on something more than farm labor.
Rural areas suffer
Aguascalientes, one of the safest states in the country, doesn’t have the same security problems as some of those nearby, and the capital is home to new manufacturing jobs, including two Nissan plants. But investment in the city has passed over rural areas suffering from agricultural reforms in the latter part of the 20th century and industrialized farming brought on by NAFTA, said María Eugenia Perea Velázquez, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes who has studied migration in the region, including in Calvillo.
The return on the investment can be much greater for those who make it to the U.S. She called the decadeslong history of migration in the area “cultural,” and said few here want to open a small store or work six-day weeks of 12-hour shifts at the local factories to make in a week what they could make in a day north of the border.
As Hernández, the city manager in Palo Alto el Llano put it: “Companies from other countries move into our territories because the payment they offer our workers is low. That’s the reason they move into Mexico.”
A good-paying factory job offers 1,500 pesos, a little less than $85, a week, he said.
“I love my country,” Hernández said. “If I could make the same amount of money here, I wouldn’t have to move to the U.S.”
He said it doesn’t make sense for the U.S. to spend so much money enforcing its borders when its farms and factories are encouraging foreign labor to enter the country illegally.
“The U.S. and Canada, they need people to work in their fields,” he said. “Why not do it legally?”
The cycle of migration has its negative impacts, Perea said.
Areas with high emigration to the U.S. are reliant on remittances and lack young adults who would contribute to the economy. Many children grow up in single-parent homes, and as soon as young men come of age they follow their fathers to the U.S. She said two-thirds of the population in Calvillo lives in poverty, but emigration to the U.S. isn’t limited to the poor.
“There are middle-class families in Calvillo that have a tradition of emigrating to the United States,” Perea said. “For them, the dream is to go to the United States, buy a truck, send back dollars, meet a girl and marry her.”
Part of the blame, she said, goes to Mexico’s government, which tolerates human smuggling and trafficking, and does little to help communities stuck in the cycle of migration. In some states, nongovernmental organizations have found success creating cooperatives, often involving the women who are left behind, to create economies not reliant on emigration to the U.S., Perea said.
But new government administrations are too quick to throw out their predecessors’ programs and start anew.
Outdated visa quotas
For groups that advocate for allowing more legal immigration, the answer is expanding visas to address what they say is a humanitarian issue of those in nearby countries and an economic issue in the U.S., where labor is needed. Today’s visa quotas were set in 1990, and both immigration patterns and the economy have changed immensely since then, said Michelle Mittelstadt, the Migration Policy Institute’s director of communications.
“MPI has long been on the record that there must be flexibility in the system that allows for the upward or downward adjustment of visas based on actual labor market needs,” Mittelstadt wrote in an email. The institute advocates “creating a permanent, nonpartisan commission staffed with labor market and immigration experts, economists, and other specialists that would advise Congress and the administration annually on what employmentbased immigration needs are, based on deep review of labor market sectors at U.S. and local levels.”
Congress hasn’t reformed immigration for nearly two decades, and President Donald Trump used immigration enforcement as a major campaign platform, allying himself with organizations that want to decrease all immigration to the U.S., legal and illegal.
“Even if we doubled or tripled or quadrupled legal immigration or guestworker programs, which is a highly unlikely change to the law, still we would not be able to accommodate all the people in the world who would want to come here,” Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, one such restrictionist groups, wrote in an email. “The demand would not be satisfied, so people would still pay smugglers.
“Illegal immigration is not a force of nature that cannot be controlled.
“We will never stop it completely, but we can reduce it dramatically by forcing more employers to stop hiring illegal workers, by investigating and prosecuting the smugglers, by controlling the physical border and doing a better job screening people coming through the ports of entry, by having robust interior enforcement, by denying access to benefits like driver’s licenses and welfare programs.”
For Lara Vega in Palo Alto el Llano, the nuances of Mexico’s struggles to address poverty in rural areas and the failure of the U.S. immigration system boiled down to something more basic.
“They want dollars,” Vega Tiscareño, the aunt of Lara Vega, said of the young men who leave for the U.S. “There’s plenty of work. It’s the American dream. To improve your life. To eat.”
“They want dollars. There’s plenty of work. It’s the American dream. To improve your life. To eat.” Rosalva Vega Tiscareño, aunt of Adan Lara Vega, who survived a smuggling attempt across the border in an unventilated trailer