Undocumented Immigrants Spend Holidays in U.S.

USA (AP) December 24, 2004 - An increasing number of migrant workers and other undocumented immigrants from Mexico who used to go home for the holidays are spending Christmas in the United States, largely because of tighter security along the border.

Many of them could cross into Mexico easily enough if they wanted to. But they are afraid they would not be able to get back into the United States.

It is a sea change in the once-predictable flow of migrant workers and other mostly unskilled, seasonal laborers.

The effect is clear in Northern California's Napa Valley, where farmhands once packed for Mexico after harvesting prized wine grapes. The vines are now bare, but many workers are still hanging around, looking for odd jobs and finding refuge at the Rev. John Brenkle's St. Helena Roman Catholic Church.

"It's supposed to keep people out,'' Brenkle said of the more muscular border security, "but it's locking people in, no question about it.''

In Northern California, it was once hard to find Mexican workers in December. Now, sign-up lists for odd jobs are twice as long as usual. This year, for the first time, the church let eight men take shelter in a donated trailer.

From Nebraska to Alabama and across the West -- in states where Mexicans have come as cheap labor -- the word is the same: This year, Christmas will be spent in the United States.

Experts say the phenomenon was taking shape before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks prompted a heavy crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The tighter security led has undocumented immigrants to try to sneak into the United States at more remote points along the border, making the crossing more difficult, more expensive and more dangerous. undocumented immigrants became easier prey to bandits and the elements.

Deaths among Mexicans undocumented crossing into the United States are three to four times higher than they were when the crackdown accelerated six years ago. The death toll for 2004 stood at 392 as of the end of October, according to Mexican consulates.

A 41-year-old Mexican-born worker who gave his name only as Roberto has been living in his van around San Francisco and waiting on corners to score $8-an-hour jobs, mostly in construction. Before the crackdown, he returned to Mexico regularly. Now he speaks of the border with despair.

"You feel it,'' he said. "People are afraid.''

In Nebraska, the Rev. Damian Zuerlein ministers to Omaha's Mexicans, many of them employed in meatpacking. A few years ago, midnight Mass on Christmas attracted about 100 parishioners. Last year, more like 500 people came.

"I hear it over and over again. They're telling me they're not going home,'' Zuerlein said. "There is a little sadness, and you can kind of see that at the midnight Mass.''

In Alabama, the story is the same.

"They say, `No, now it's more dangerous. I don't want to leave my kids here,''' said Hernan Prado, head of the Alabama Latin American Association.

Those who stay in this country will be missing a lot of excitement at home. In heavily Roman Catholic Mexico, towns that are all but abandoned during the American growing and construction seasons come to life during Christmas as workers return from the United States with gifts and money.

The U.S. government budgeted $9 billion for border protection in the current fiscal year, up $400 million from last year. The number of Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexican line rose from 8,500 in 2000 to at least 9,500 today.

In the year leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, undocumented migrant workers stayed just under a year on average, according to a survey by a Mexican think tank. The most recent figures, from 2002, show the average stay surpassed 70 weeks -- the longest since the Tijuana-based Colegio de la Frontera Norte began keeping track in 1993.

The reasons for the shift go beyond the border crackdown, according to American and Mexican researchers.

Among them: a wobbly U.S. economy means Mexican workers might be staying longer to reach their savings target; the deterioration of subsistence farming in rural Mexico weakens the pull home; Mexican workers have fanned out to states thousands of miles from the Southwest border, making a trip home a more arduous journey; and Mexicans now work in factories and construction, jobs that are less tied to the seasons.

In the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta, Miguel Garcia Romero sat in a park and wished he could return to the sheepherding job in Ogden, Utah, that paid him $900 a month.

He went home to see his family in Mexico and then tried for two weeks to cross back into the United States, only to get caught by the Border Patrol.

Garcia, 43, said that if he could make it back to Utah he would stay as long as he could and send money back every month to his wife and three children in his state of Chihuahua.