CUAUTLA, MORELOS (MX) — I am looking at a dozen or more women dressed in rags, sitting in crude tentlike shelters along a roadside on the edge of this small city two mountain ranges South of Mexico City, all selling charcoal-barbequed corn at prices that are insanely low by American standards. The rest of this informal shopping strip is filled with tiny (and not very clean) open-air restaurants, car repair shops and junkyards, and miscellaneous grocery, hardware, and other stores. This is not an area frequented by American tourists. Hardly anyone my wife and I have met here or in nearby towns speaks English. Not many miles away, on the outskirts of the city of Cuernavaca there is a glistening Wal~Mart, but hardly anyone who lives in Cuautla can afford to shop there. Hardly anyone in Cuautla can afford anything beyond corn, rice, beans, beer, and the simplest possible clothing. If you lived here and had any way to get to the U.S. and get a job as a gardener for the princely sum of six dollars — per hour, not per day — you would undoubtedly head for the border.

This is the problem with illegal immigration: Any American who respects initiative ought to be totally in favor of anyone who faces no opportunity in Cuautla coming to the U.S., legally or illegally. Like it or not, Mexican class strictures give most Cuautla residents little chance to better themselves at home. For most, working in the surrounding fields or in the little local businesses is the best they will ever do if they stay home, and those jobs are not only hard to get and keep, but typically pay minimum wage — about $4.50 U.S. per day.

I repeat: $4.50 per day. Not per hour.

Some things are a lot cheaper in Mexico than in the U.S., including food, and booze, but a lot of things aren’t. There are shacky little places all over Cuautla and the surrounding countryside that lack American-style amenities like electricity, indoor plumbing and, in many cases, glass windows or a floor made out of anything besides dirt. You can live in one of these shacks for next to nothing. But a decent place — one with electricity and plumbing (and more than two rooms), can easily cost $200 per month, which means a Mexican who earns minimum wage would need to work 44 days each month.to afford it.

It’s hard to remember that what we call “poverty” in the U.S. is called “pretty good living” in the rest of the world. In Mexico, someone who can afford a car — even a ratty one — and electricity and a TV is not poor. Go to Mexico City and you’ll see millions of people living in precarious little huts they’ve made out of cast-off galvanized metal, bits of wood, even cardboard. The people living in those hovels came to Mexico City from places like Cuautla because even minimum wage jobs are hard to find in the hinterlands, and there are so many people in smaller Mexican towns trying to sell things like grilled corn and small handicrafts, and so few people with money to buy them, that $1 or $2 per day is all that a lot of peasants manage to scrounge up. In Mexico City you have a better chance of getting hold of $3, $4, or $5 per day one way or another, whether it’s in an actual job or by washing cars, selling some little whatever while you sit on a blanket on the sidewalk, juggling or playing music with a “donation” box in front of you, or even by flat-out begging.

(Note that a “Will work for food” sign held by a healthy-looking adult in Mexico will not get anyone to cough up cash. The whole country is full of people willing to work for food. To beg successfully there you need to be truly pitiful, like missing limbs or surrounded by a flock of big-eyed children with their ribs sticking out. U.S. “homeless” have shelters and soup kitchens they can go to. Mexican homeless don’t have these luxuries.)

The poorest of the poor aren’t coming to the U.S. from Mexico. They can’t afford to pay coyotes (human smugglers) to bring them here. The Mexicans working in our restaurants and on our constructions sites are the ones who worked two jobs or drove a cab 120 hours a week and saved hard to get here. They are the strivers. They are the kind of people who would save up and open their own businesses if they were U.S. citizens. In fact, a rather high percentage of illegal Mexican immigrants do eventually open their own businesses here, even if those businesses are nothing but one-man gardening services or two-man construction cleanup companies, often registered in the name of a friend or relative who is here legally.

Getting to the U.S. Legally

Not even the most motivated, hardest-working person in Cuautla or any of the other limpoverished Mexican places like it has a prayer of emigrating to the U.S. legally. The process takes years, even decades, and the quotas are so low compared to to the number of potential immigrants that buying lottery tickets is a better bet — and a lot cheaper.

If there was an exam Mexicans could take to get into the land of $6 per hour (and up) jobs, the motivated ones would study like mad. You’d have newly-trained English speakers lined up to cross the border, all showing off their knowledge of Abraham Lincoln, Father Junipero Serra, and other figures prominent in American history. Ask potential immigrants to learn about our system of government, and top exam-takers would be able to tell you the names of every Member of Congress — something hardly any American citizen-by-birth can do — and tell you which Cabinet departments dispense the most pork to which Republican Senators’ home states.

It would be like American Idol or The Apprentice or any other multi-segment show where contestants go through layers of competition before one finally wins the Big Prize.

Maybe, in this case, the top 1000 contestants would win. Or the top 10,000….

But wait! We don’t want or need well-educated Mexicans. We “need” Mexicans to do the jobs Americans supposedly won’t do, except that somehow or other these jobs still get done in parts of the U.S. where there are hardly any illegal Mexican immigrants. So do we really need illegal Mexican immigrants, or do some of our nation’s nastier employers want to have a permanent underclass to hold wages down?

A properly-handled guest worker program, where selected Mexican citizens came to the U.S. for limited periods of time to work, then went home again, would maintain this underclass. On the other hand, it could lead to more dignity for the Mexicans who took part in it. Yes, they’d be low-wage workers when they were in the U.S., but at home they’d be more prosperous than most of their countrymen.

The Bracero program I remember from my childhood in Southern California worked like this. Often the same workers would come to the same orange groves or strawberry fields year after year. Farm owners who treated their Braceros well got a steady, reliable labor force. Those who didn’t got the leavings. Braceros usually lived in tents or rough cabins while they were in the U.S., but many proudly showed pictures of the nice houses (by Mexican standards) they built “back home” with their U.S. earnings.

Bracero camps — at least the ones near us — always had a few people in them who could play guitar or other instruments, so there was often music evenings and weekends. And at least a few of the farm owners we knew not only went to Mexico on annual recruiting trips, but visited “their” Braceros’ homes and met their wives and children.

Braceros had dignity. They had homes. They were not illegal immigrants, skulking in the shadows.

Perhaps a “guest worker” program can regain some of the old Bracero dignity, but I wonder if it can totally replace a system where whole families are in the U.S. illegally, often working as migrant laborers, with no secure homes in Mexico to go back to. We now have an illegal immigrant underclass that is expensive to maintain (because of schooling, medical care, and other government services) but is highly valued by many employers and slumlords because members of that underclass are afraid to complain about poor working or living conditions.

I suspect that once the speechifying in Congress settles down, we’ll find that the corporate owners of the Republican Party would just as soon keep things the way they are now, with illegal Mexicans still illegal — and still afraid to stick up for themselve.

Real-world solutions to the Mexican emigration problem

Mexico will hold a general election on July 2, 2006. The two leading presidential candidates, Felipe Calderón and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, both say they are going to create millions of new jobs for Mexicans — in Mexico.

A strong Mexican economy is the best permanent solution to the problem of so many Mexicans wanting to come to the United States.

Under the current president, Vicente Fox (who cannot legally run for re-election), many middle-class Mexicans have become more prosperous, but peasants and working people in towns like Cuautla have not. If anything, they are poorer than they were when Fox took office in 2000. But then, Mexico City’s already-awful crime rate got much worse while López Obrador was mayor.And Calderón, closely identified with Fox and religious (Catholic) conservatives, may end up as just another drone who helps the prosperous and does little to help the poor.

Whichever one wins, budget realities may make it hard to produce many of the promised jobs. Mexico collects even less taxes from its richest citizens than the U.S. since Bush got elected, and the rest of the population doesn’t have much money to pay in taxes, period. Corruption levels make American heads spin. Starting a legitimate business in Mexico takes endless paperwork and often a string of bribes. Management jobs in both government and private industry go as often to family and cronies as to people chosen for their competence. So even though — as López Obrador is fond of reminding everyone — Mexico is a rich country because of its natural resources and hard-working people, it looks like most of the country’s treasure will remain in the hands of a small group of wealthy families for the forseeable future unless the Mexican government take an awful lot of actions the current U.S. administration will call “socialist” and work hard to prevent.

Of course, another way to prevent Mexican emigration to the U.S. would be to concentrate this country’s wealth into a few hands and impoverish working Americans so that no sane Mexican would want to come here. We could do this by cutting taxes on the rich, removing most inheritance taxes so that we can build multi-generational dynasties similar to the ones that own most of Mexico’s assets, and by running up government debts so huge that the only way we’ll be able to get rid of them is either through repudiation or massive inflation.

I would personally like to see both countries have strong economies, not just for those at the top but for all citizens. Failing that, I’d rather see the U.S. keep standards of living high enough for workers that Mexicans will still want to come here instead of watching our country become more like Mexico.

I worry that current Republican tax and social policies are removing the implied “(for all)” from the end of the “land of opportunity” tagline that has long been used to describe our country to the rest of the world. Moving toward a Mexican-style, dynasty-controlled economy would no doubt keep Mexicans from wanting to live in the U.S., legally or illegally, but I would rather come up with a less-damaging way to handle our immigration problem, even if best we can do in the current political climate is a merit-based guest worker system that would make it possible for even the poorest person in Cuautla to work in the U.S. six months out of the year.

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