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Mexico-USA Migration
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- 1What is Tlaxiaco like?Tlaxiaco is a small town with very few jobs and more and more of the younger people have been migrating away from the town. Virtually every family Christina knows has two or more relatives living and working in Mexico City or the United States. Mexicans make up the largest group of foreign born immigrants in the US. There are about ten million of them.
- 2Push Factors• 10,000 people cross the Mexican border every week
• Many people find living in rural Mexico a struggle because they have to survive with very little money, 40% of the population is under the poverty line.
• The lack of resources makes life harder to gain money too; the land is in little quantity and of poor quality. This is because as the land gets passed down in the family, it gets distributed equally amongst all the offspring, fragmenting it.
• There is also the growing population that is putting pressure on the land to produce more, this leads to the land being exhausted and it loses all its nutrients making it useless.
• The rural communities cant support the growing population and the population can’t support their families so they try to go to America where there is minimum wage laws that will ensure they will make, relatively, a lot of money to bring home: what they make in a whole day at home would be an hours work in the USA.
• It is often the fathers of big families that have to cross the border, then send home bundles of money or return to their homes. - 3What dangers are there in the crossing?• The desert that separates the USA and Mexico can reach 46°C, many people suffer dehydration when they are crossing as water would weigh them down and the border patrol may catch them.
• In the past 3 years 851immigrants have died and 4,000 have been rescued from the verge of death (BBC news 2001). Many of these deaths are blamed on the “coyotes” people that charge around $2,000 to smuggle immigrants across the border, but then leave them In the American desert under the sun.
• An estimated 10,000 people try to smuggle over the border every week, 1 in 3 get caught and those that do try at least twice a year. The runners face other dangers than being caught and sent back though, some people choose to take the 15-hour hike through the night, and they leave masses of litter and abandoned belongings across the desert. Some try to cross the Rio Grande but it has claimed the lives of many people that have gone through it.
• In some places the border is marked by a 5m wall, this wall goes for 3000km, other places just have a few stands of barbed wire that have been bent out of shape to fit people through. - 4Effects on America?• There are many reasons for The USA not wanting all these illegal immigrants; recently it has been a concern that there may be terrorists crossing the border, since there is no customs it would be easy to smuggle dangerous weapons, chemicals and epidemics in. There is also the fact that the immigrants do not demand so much money for work so the employer chooses them because it adds to their profits, this stops the locals getting jobs and increases unemployment rates. It also causes resentment that leads to violence and crime. In march 2004 President Bush met with President Fox of Mexico and agreed to ease off the immigration controls, he said that it was to reduce the number of deaths caused and to become closer with Mexico but was said to have been trying to claim the Hispanic vote before election. There is the environmental perspective too; the rubbish left in the desert destroys ecosystems
• Adults’ moving out of the rural communities all over Latin America also causes problems, knowledge about farming and living off the land does not get passed down, this terminates the methods of generations of experience. This makes the people left behind more deprived because they find it hard to sustain them.
• An estimated 30% of Mexico’s population are said to rely on money sent from the US. If this continues, illegal immigrants will play a key part in their home countries economy and politics. - 5Pull FactorsSince she migrated illegally to San Diego Christina has been cleaning houses. Now she has a better job as a live-in housekeeper cum nanny, earning $45 a day. This is better than the average pay for migrants, who can earn as little as $3 an hour. (The official Californian minimum wage is $6.75 an hour). She's earning much more than she would have as a teacher in Mexico. Her employer is an executive in an electronics factory and his wife works as a personal assistant to the head of a recruitment agency. Christina looks after the two children and, once she's taken them to school, has to do cleaning and laundry before she gets a couple of hours to herself. In the afternoon she has to prepare the evening meal. Most evenings she has free.
Christina says she'll never move back to Mexico. She'd like to be able to visit her sisters but makes do with keeping in touch by phone. She has no intention of trying to contact her brother.
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- GCSE (Know) Geography Fichas sobre Mexico-USA Migration, creado por Molly Atkinson el 28/05/2013.
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- Molly Atkinson
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