Beyond the Border: Zacatecan villages

The series:
Part I: Trans-national Zacatecan families
Part II: Looks at the intensifying debate over U.S. border law
Part III: Documents some of the changes that continue across the Great Plains amid the nation's largest-ever wave of immigration.

Note to readers: Harris News Service reporter Sarah Kessinger and Salina Journal photographer Tom Dorsey traveled to the north-central Mexican state of Zacatecas in November, 2005, to revisit the villages profiled in a 2000 report on immigration to Kansas. This is the second of three stories updating the issue.

Move to reform U.S. law: A wall, a bridge or both?

By Sarah Kessinger
Harris News Service
 SALINA - Rafael Zavala can't figure whether or not Americans want him.

Carrizalillo resident Concha Perez, first interviewed by Harris News Service in 2000, obtained a tourist visa to spend a few weeks visiting family in Salina in 2004. Migration has benefitted her family, she said, pointing out new appliances and a truck outside her home. She has a son in Salina and another who just returned after living there undocumented for four years. "It's very dangerous to go as mojados (wetbacks)," she said of illegal border crossings. "So many are now staying here."<<Click here to view the entire photo gallery>>

  He snuck into the country three years ago and ever since has hired on with construction crews, first in Arizona and recently in the Salina area.
 "Some people here think we're bad, but we risk our lives to come here to work. We save money to send to the family so they can live better," said the young man from the Mexican state of Zacatecas.
 " If they don't want us, why do they hire us?"
 Zavala purchased identification cards on the street in Kansas City, he said. One just needs to check with friends and relatives for contacts to buy documents.
 " I paid $300 for a Social Security card and a 'mica'," he said of the term for visa.
  Similar stories are repeated frequently across the country today, as immigration laws fail to prevent illegal entries and foster a black market in identification documents.
 Critics claim the millions who come across the border pose a security threat and overwhelm health-care and education services in Kansas communities.
Immigrant advocates and, increasingly, business leaders, counter that the workers support U.S. economic growth and deserve legal status in a country short on a domestic labor supply.
  As for legal immigrants, frustration festers among thousands of Mexican families split for years between countries by a backlogged U.S. immigration system.
 "There's a profound drama these families are living," said Fernando Robledo, a former migrant who heads a state research institute in Zacatecas. "It's an issue that North Americans don't understand."

Strange bedfellows

  In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, congressional debate over immigration reform has made headlines in recent weeks as much for the policies proposed as for the unusual political alliances behind them.
  Grover Norquist of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform joined left-leaning immigrant advocacy groups last week in a press conference blasting a U.S. House bill to erect more walls along the southern U.S. border.
  All Kansas House members voted for the bill, which would also require U.S. employers to set up a new identification system for immigrant hires. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is fighting the measure, now headed to the Senate. That and other bills are expected to stew until sometime next year.
  Those who favor a new wall along the entire border aren't optimistic.

Residents in the city of Zacatecas visit candle-lit altars to honor the dead on Nov. 1 and 2. Such observances in Mexico increasingly include families whose relatives died while crossing into the United States. This past year, according to U.S. Border Patrol, a record 460 people died trying to pass the U.S.-Mexico divide. <<Click here to view the entire photo gallery>>

 " I don't think they have the backbone. Congress won't stand up to big business," said Susan Tully, Midwest representative for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "You can't just say illegal immigrants are the only ones breaking the law. Those giving them jobs are also breaking the law."
  But those who work closely with immigrants say a new policy to legalize workers is long overdue.
 If Mexican workers aren't allowed to cross back and forth, the economy will suffer as U.S. jobs go elsewhere, said Angela Ferguson, a Hutchinson native who now practices immigration law in Kansas City.
 " If we enforce the law and remove them, companies would have to outsource," Ferguson said. "I think they can build a wall as high as they want, but the enticements are here, the families are here. We need a workable system where employers are allowed to sponsor workers."
 Various guestworker proposals are floating in Congress. They would allow U.S. employers to hire immigrant workers for a varying number of years. Once that time is up, the worker must return to his home country.

The southern view

'   Temporary "guestworker" visa programs will fail, said Robledo, an expert in U.S.-Mexico migration policy.
 "Why would anyone sign up to work three years and then be deported?"
Undocumented workers, many who have lived in the United States for years, won't risk what they now have, he said.
 "They have cars, houses, friends, a social life in their American communities. I don't think they'll exchange that for a three-year visa."
 The government in Robledo's home state of Zacatecas supports a bill proposed by Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy, which offers a guestworker program that gives foreign workers an eventual opportunity to seek U.S. citizenship.
 "But I don't think that's the entire answer either," Robledo said. "We should approach it bilaterally."

"We are a bi-national community," said Fernando Robledo Martinez, director of the Zacatecas Migration Institute. For 130 years his state has seen residents migrate to the fields, feedlots and factories of Kansas and other states. "It's a loss for us not only in terms of workforce," Robledo said, "but also in terms of our educated public."<<Click here to view the entire photo gallery>>

 If the United States is willing to grant legal status to Mexican workers who help fill jobs, he said, then Mexico should offer the United States more help with border security.
 "We have to put something on the table."
  Ultimately, however, Mexico's economy will have to improve to prevent today's northward flow of migrants and the tragic consequences, he said.
 The border now sees 400 annual drownings in the Rio Grande and deaths in the desert. Since 1996, more than 4,000 people have died while crossing.
 " That should not happen between these two nations. We are friends, neighbors," Robledo said. "That's more than the U.S. has lost in the Iraq war."

Roberts, Moran: It's complex

  While Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback has signed on to the McCain-Kennedy bill, Sen. Pat Roberts has taken no position on the issue so far.
 In the past, Roberts has backed President Bush's guestworker plan. But security must be the priority, he said recently.
 "Number one, you need much better border control. Number two, you need more agents. And number three, you need some kind of a comprehensive policy to let ... people come in to do the jobs Americans apparently don't want to do, but without amnesty."
  Roberts said he hears the complaints.
 " There are those saying, 'We have to do something immediately and stop folks from coming across our borders.'"
 " But that's only one half of the challenge," he said. "Because immediately you will hear from business enterprises and industries in Kansas that they rely on these folks and if, in fact, they don't have that kind of work effort, they will go out of business."
  In the House, Jerry Moran's Big First district has the largest portion (11 percent) of Hispanics among Kansas congressional districts. Overall, the state's Hispanic population is estimated by the Census Bureau at 220,000, considered conservative due to continued illegal immigration.
 "It's a quiet population," said Moran, who has taken Spanish lessons in response to demographic changes. "There are two segments - those that have been here a long period, who are very involved in politics, and those recently here, who are much less so."
 This year as Moran crisscrossed his district on his annual listening tour, the top concern raised by constituents was immigration - both concerns about illegal immigration and concerns with the federal government's slow processing of immigration documents.
  The lawmaker opposes amnesty for Kansas' undocumented population, estimated at 150,000 by the Pew Hispanic Center.
 Instead, the congressman said, the country needs both manageable enforcement and streamlined documentation.
 "We ought to have a border agency that functions for national security but also functions in a way that is humane, that treats people right - people who are trying to immigrate to the United States who get caught in our system and get stuck there for a decade," Moran said.
 " It's a bureaucratic mess," he added. "No family should have to go through this long, drawn-out process."
  Last year he learned of the case of Maria Torres, a Salina woman who has waited more than two decades to be legalized. He called her to offer help.
 But Torres, who assists immigrants through her job at Catholic Charities, said she didn't think it fair to be moved up in line.
 She agrees with Moran that the federal system is broken.
 " If he's going to help someone, he's got to help the others who have waited longer than I have," Torres said. "I told him, when he's up there voting, just remember that girl from Kansas who's been waiting 25 years for legal status."
 As for Zavala, the Salina construction worker said he hopes to gain some kind of legal status. He disagrees with Moran's view that the undocumented shouldn't be rewarded with amnesty.
 " One walks through the mountains to work," Zavala said before criticizing the U.S. view that Mexicans are disposable laborers. "We hope they help us here. We feel like we're helping them."