PROTESTERS NEAR THE US-MEXICO BORDER
As dozens of major American corporations continue to move their manufacturing operations to Mexico, waves of job-seeking Mexican immigrants to the United States have begun making the deadly journey back across the border in search of better-paying Mexican-based American jobs.
“I came to this country seeking the job I sought when I first left this country,” said Anuncio Reyes, 22, an undocumented worker who recrossed the U.S. border into Mexico last month, three years after leaving Mexico for the United States to work as an agricultural day laborer. Reyes now works as a spot-welder on the assembly line of a Maytag large-appliance plant and earns $22 a day, most of which he sends back to his family in the U.S., who in turn send a portion of that back to the original family they left in Mexico.
Like many former Mexican-Americans forced by circumstance to become American-Mexicans, Reyes dreams of one day bringing his relatives to Mexico so that they, too, may secure high-paying American jobs there.
Despite the considerable risk illegal immigrants face in returning across the border, many find the lure of large U.S. factory salaries hard to resist – these positions pay three times what Mexican jobs do.
There is an increasing motivation to return before the Trump administration constructs the proposed border wall. “When the wall is built, we will then be trapped in the United States, and have no way to get back into Mexico,” said Carla Benitez, an undocumented worker in Laredo; “So now the ‘coyotes’ who get paid to smuggle people across the border are making money both ways.”
The danger is very real. When 31-year-old illegal Texas resident Ignacio Jimenez sought employment at an American plant in Mexico, he was shot at by Mexican border guards as he attempted to illegally enter the country of his citizenship, pursued by U.S. immigration officials who thought he might be entering the country illegally, and he was also fired upon again by a citizens volunteer group called the Minutemen.
They eventually fished him out of the river and sent him back to his job washing dishes at TGI Friday’s in McAllen.
Strangely, the trend of illegal re-emigration is causing great resentment among the local Mexican population, and tension between Mexicans and illegally re-entered Mexicans – called “repatriados” – continues to build.
“I hate these Mexicans, always coming back here to Mexico from America and taking American jobs from the Mexicans who stayed in Mexico,” said 55-year-old former Goodyear factory manager Miguel Diaz, who says he lost his management job to a better-trained repatriado last March.
“Why don’t they go back to where they went to and leave our jobs alone?”
