The Deported Mexican Workers: Life back home can be hell

Since ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in masks, most with heavy tats and a propensity for profanity — “Get out of the (expletive) car” — began taking workers from across the RGV, the state, the entire U.S. into custody and deporting them, people have often asked, how does it work out for these people once they return home?

Adios?

Let’s say a guy has been working as a plumber for 20 years, an electrician, carpenter, mechanic, starting out as an apprentice for a local company fresh out of high school.

As a backstory, his parents brought him to the U.S. illegally when he was just a kid. Along the way, even though he might have been a high school football star, class valedictorian, he never had an outright path to obtain legal residency papers, since even Obama’s DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was never an outright, guaranteed path to citizenship.

No matter, he/she has been an earner, hard worker, his/her whole life. Married a native Texan, have four kids. Never got into trouble with the law, his kids are in the honors programs, but because the Trump administration has a deportation quota, which can’t be solely met by deporting paroled felons convicted of a violent crime, ICE has now come for him, and he’s gone.

Vanished. In a flash. How do these deported people cope south of the border?

Last week, the LA Times did a story about that very issue, written by Andrew J. Campa, which carried this headline:

“Mexicans deported from the U.S. return to find hometowns controlled by narcos.”

The story tells the tale, and it’s anything but pleasant for those living through it.

For starters, once people from the U.S. get dropped off in Mexico, the way they often act, the clothes they wear, the “Spanglish” they speak when they converse, makes them an easy target for the criminals, whether it’s a major cartel or any one of the smaller criminal organizations now operating south of the border with seeming impunity in many parts of the country.

The Red-Tape Hell

Then there is the red tape they must contend with.

For example, in Mexico, if you don't have an INE (voter ID), you basically don't exist. Getting one for a kid, now an adult, who illegally crossed the border 20 years ago with his parents is a bureaucratic nightmare that leaves people without bank accounts or legal jobs, pushing them toward the informal economy that the cartels control. They are effectively “foreigners” in their own birthplace, but without the protection of a foreign embassy.

To get that plastic INE card, you need a birth certificate and a proof of address. But if you’ve been gone 20 years, your birth records might be in a dusty ledger in a village three states away, and you can't get a proof of address (like a utility bill) because you can’t rent a place without... an INE.

In states like Michoacán or Guerrero, the cartels often run “cobro de piso”—an extortion tax. A returnee trying to open a small shop with their U.S. savings is often seen as a “fat prize” by local gangs.

An individual from South Texas who looks out of place – nothing more than someone to kidnap and ransom.

When someone has been in the U.S. for 20 or 30 years, the Mexico they left — often a place of rural villages or tight-knit neighborhoods where most people didn’t have to worry about getting shot — has been paved over by a different kind of reality.

Two decades ago, for example, drug cartels were largely smuggling operations at the border. Today, they function more like shadow governments in many states, running local businesses, extorting farmers, and controlling entire towns.

Ironic since it was December 2006, almost two decades ago, that Mexico’s then-president Felipe Calderon took office and immediately launched “Operacion Michoacan,” which marked the official beginning of “Mexico’s War on Drugs.”

Like the war on drugs in the U.S., or the alcohol prohibition period from the 1920s, which only made the mob richer, things only got worse over time south of the border, no matter how much the government tried to combat the narco trade.

As one anonymous (the fear factor) man said in the Los Angeles Times story, not long after he was deported:

“It is no longer the same Mexico of my childhood. There was more joy, more freedom. But that’s not the case anymore.”

Sad in more ways than one. For the decent people who got deported, are getting deported, and for those who will be deported this year, this isn’t the way life is supposed to work. Not for those who assimilated and followed the American Dream.

And, too, as the South Texas Builders Association recently mentioned, we’re now missing much of our work force.

If indeed there are documented workers willing and able to fill the void, they aren’t showing up to fill out the job apps.

Not to worry. “Fake news.”