With long wait at border, migrants search for jobs
TIJUANA — Before dawn each morning, migrants slip away from a Tijuana shelter within sight of the U.S. border to head to jobs across the sprawling city. Moving alone or in pairs, they are easily recognized by their determined strides as people with someplace to be.
By sunrise, another crowd has gathered at a corner near the shelter to wait for job offers. On a recent morning, a dozen migrants scrambled into the bed of a pickup truck, their enthusiasm bringing a chuckle from the driver. The migrants didn’t even know where they were going or when they’d be back — some carried bedrolls — but said the work would be peeling tomatoes.
Facing a likely months-long wait in Tijuana before even getting the chance to request asylum in the United States, many migrants are looking for work. Others who have already decided to stay in Mexico have applied for, and in some cases received, permits to work in Mexico. It’s something the Mexican authorities have encouraged all the migrants to do in the hopes that jobs will help them put down roots in Tijuana rather than crossing into the U.S.
In most cases the migrants are relieved to have something that takes them away from the miserable conditions in the overcrowded shelter, where the hours pass slowly, and puts some money in their pockets.
“Here you make a little money,” said Nelson David Landaverde, a 21-year-old Honduran who was out looking for food for his 16-month old son when someone approached and asked if he wanted to work at a car wash. He didn’t think twice. He and his pregnant wife have put their names on an informal list of thousands of potential applicants for asylum in the U.S., but in the meantime he’s eager to earn money to make their lives a little easier in Tijuana.
The job pays about 75 cents per car, and by washing as many as 10 cars on a good day he hopes to take in more than Mexico’s minimum wage, which is less than $5 a day.
While authorities have closed the shelter near the border and relocated many of the migrants to another more distant shelter, hundreds have refused to leave the old one and are camped outside. The reason many give is that they have found jobs nearby.
Migrants gather at a downtown location to start the paperwork to apply for temporary visas in Mexico that allow them to work legally. Once they get their Mexican identification numbers they can meet with recruiters for assembly plants, where turnover is high and jobs are available.
Baja California state officials say they have identified thousands of jobs that the migrants could apply for.
Attendance at a job fair set up to help the migrants find work has surged since a Nov. 25 march on the U.S. border devolved into chaos when some migrants breached the border and U.S. agents responded by firing tear gas into Mexico. Before the march, only about 100 migrants were showing up each day, a number that has grown to 400-plus or more since.