Immigrants - NJ - Mexican - NY Times - Way North of the Border

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The New York Times, Sunday, April 30, 2006
Our Towns

Way North of the Border

By SUSAN WARNER

BRIDGETON

NOE and his wife, Yolanda, crept over the border from Mexico through Texas in a car six years ago, bound for work in the tomato and blueberry fields of New Jersey. Noe would have liked to stay in Texas because it was closer to home, but the North beckoned.

"There's more money the more north you go," he said. "Mexicans will go to the farthest place in the world, if they can make more money."

Noe, 28, and Yolanda, 27, now have two small sons. Noe has worked his way up from the fields to factory jobs, including a stint in a turkey processing plant.

He learned English, and now works in construction. Someday, he hopes, he will own a construction company.

Noe also dreams of going back home to visit, but that is just a dream.

"I cannot go to Mexico, I would never be able to come back," he said over a Sunday dinner of tacos and beans at Tacos Bravos, a roadside restaurant in this Cumberland County city that is filled with Mexican songs on the jukebox. Noe and Yolanda, who would not give their last names, are among the surging population of Mexicans living and working in New Jersey illegally.

As Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, became bolder and more emphatic in their demands for inclusion in American society at rallies nationwide this spring, the current debate over a national immigration policy has increasing importance in New Jersey.

Mexicans now make up about 20 percent of the state's estimated population of 355,000 illegal aliens, up from about 10 percent in 2000, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington. In 1990, the number of Mexicans living illegally in the state was negligible, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a senior research associate at the center. Now New Jersey ranks eighth in the nation in the number of residents born in Mexico, he said, and about 75,000 are illegal immigrants.

"We have seen a huge increase," said Daniel Santo Pietro, executive director of the Hispanic Directors Association of New Jersey, a nonprofit umbrella organization of Latino social service groups. "New Jersey is now a magnet because it does offer some very good work opportunities."

For decades, New Jersey drew migrant farmworkers from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Central America. Many worked summers, illegally or in guest worker programs, then returned home in the winter after the crops were harvested.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, control over the border with Mexico was tightened, forcing Mexican workers to choose between the two countries. As a result, more Mexicans are making New Jersey a year-round home, working in a range of businesses that includes restaurants, hotels, food-processing factories and construction.

"What's happened with Mexicans, specifically, is they have diversified remarkably around the United States," Mr. Passel said. He said a recession in California in the early 1990's forced Mexican workers to look to other parts of the country for opportunity.

At the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment was growing in California, said Douglas S. Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton University. Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot proposal that would have denied social services and public education to illegal aliens, was approved by 59 percent of the voters, but was ultimately overturned in the courts.

"California has ceased to be the overwhelming destination," Professor Massey said. "Now Mexicans are going to places all over the country, and many of these places have never experienced Mexican immigrants before."

From 1985 to 1990, two-thirds of all Mexican immigrants settled in California, Professor Massey said, but from 1995 to 2005, that figure dropped to one-third.

Jose, another illegal Mexican immigrant in Bridgeton who would not give his last name, said he worked in California for five years before moving to New Jersey seven years ago to work in the produce business. "Not so many people are going to California," he said. "They are going to all places."

The New York Gateway

In New Jersey, the number of Mexican immigrants more than quadrupled in five counties during the 1990's, according to the State Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Cumberland had an increase of 560 percent, Ocean 474 percent, Atlantic 401 percent, Monmouth 363 percent and Middlesex 335 percent. Four counties — Passaic, Middlesex, Hudson and Monmouth — are home to a total of 53.6 percent of the Mexican immigrants in the state, according to the 2000 census.

New York City has increasingly become a gateway for Mexicans, creating an overflow into New Jersey, Professor Massey said.

New Jersey, in effect, has two distinct Mexican immigrant populations, he said. In the north, there is an urban group with ties to New York City, including a large number of Mexican natives in Paterson. More recently, Mexicans have arrived in the central and southern parts of the state, in rural and suburban areas where demand for low-wage workers is high.

In Ocean, Monmouth and Morris Counties, disputes have developed between Mexican immigrant day laborers and municipalities seeking to restrict people from gathering at street corners and parking lots to wait for employers to pick them up. Here in Cumberland County, second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans, whose predecessors initially came to work in the fields, have begun to put down roots and are attracting new immigrants to live and work in a community filled with Mexican culture.

At Casa Sosa, a variety store on Commerce Street in downtown Bridgeton, the owner, Praxedis Sosa, caters to the newcomers. He sells phone cards and money orders, hats with the insignias of Mexican soccer teams, Mexican DVD's, straw sombreros, blue jeans and cowboy boots.

Mr. Sosa arrived from Mexico 30 years ago, worked in warehouses in Brooklyn and eventually won United States citizenship in an amnesty program. Three years ago, he opened the store. "There are so many people coming, but there are problems with the government," he said. "I don't know why. Mexicans are doing the jobs in New Jersey that nobody wants to do."

A Source of Tension

But Frank Shallis, who owns a small elevator-repair and manufacturing firm in Bound Brook, sees New Jersey's rising Mexican population as a huge problem.

Mr. Shallis is state coordinator of the New Jersey chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which conducts volunteer patrols of the country's borders with Mexico and Canada. He has already done a stint on the Canadian border and is planning a trip to the Arizona border to try to keep Mexicans from entering the United States illegally. "In New Jersey there are Mexicans everywhere you look," Mr. Shallis said. "It's adding so much to the cost of everything — schooling, medical, social services. It's just unfair to law-abiding, tax-paying American citizens."

Frank Argote-Freyre, a member of the Hispanic Directors Association from Monmouth County, who negotiated a dispute over where immigrants seeking day work could gather in Freehold, said the tensions were rooted in a failed national immigration policy that looks the other way when employers need workers, then denies immigrants legal protection.

"There is inertia in Congress, and cowardliness in Congress," he said. "The lack of responsibility in establishing an immigration policy has led us to these problems. Obviously, industry wants these workers. So to target them is just wrong. It's narrow-minded, and the reason a lot of local municipalities have injected themselves into these problems is a total lack of leadership in Washington."

Deborah Dowdell, president of the New Jersey Restaurant Association, a trade group, said its members rely on Mexican workers because the state's population of young people, a traditional source of restaurant workers, is not keeping pace with rising demand. The need for restaurant employees is growing one and a half times faster than the work force as a whole, she said.

"We're constantly battling these challenges," Ms. Dowdell said, "and immigration is one of the ways in which the industry hopes to have access to workers."

By law, employers are required to make a good-faith effort to document that workers have proper papers, said Keith Talbot, senior attorney here in Bridgeton with the Farmworker Project, a program run by Legal Services of New Jersey. But many illegal immigrants have fake documents, he said.

"We have created an off-the-books culture," Mr. Talbot said.

The growing number of illegal immigrants has also contributed to an increase in complaints that employers are refusing to pay workers, he said. Many employers are using subcontractors, particularly in the construction industry, to hire illegal workers, believing it will shield them from penalties for wage and hour regulations.

Some subcontractors, he said, withhold payment from illegal workers because they think the workers are afraid to challenge employers and risk deportation. "When workers don't get paid, that really riles them," Mr. Talbot said. "That's when they come forward and approach legal services, more than any other complaints, including housing or discrimination."

He cited the case of a Mexican immigrant, whose immigration case is pending, who won a $2,000 settlement for unpaid construction wages and has been waiting for more than a year to be paid.

Though some illegal immigrants from Mexico have been moving up the ladder from field work to landscaping to jobs in construction, they are generally not making the leap to home ownership or starting their own businesses as easily as immigrants who came to the United States legally. Their legal status keeps them from receiving bank loans and other government approvals for businesses, said Mr. Passel of the Pew Center.

"If you're undocumented, it's hard," he said. "There are some financial institutions that seem to be developing ways to make home loans to undocumented immigrants, but that's a new phenomenon."

He said that nearly all men who have come to the United States illegally from Mexico have jobs that withhold taxes and Social Security based on fake Social Security documents. An estimated $5 billion to $6 billion a year is being withheld from their wages, he said.

In New Jersey, Assemblyman Joseph Vas is trying to give illegal immigrants some status with a proposed Driving Privilege Card. The card would require applicants to pass a written exam and driving test, but could not be used as a form of primary identification.

Mr. Santo Pietro, of the Hispanic Directors Association of New Jersey, said that Latino advocates began calling for a driving card, like those available in 11 other states, to prevent accidents. A Mexican woman was killed in Freehold while walking to work along a busy highway because she could not get her driver's license renewed, he said.

Mr. Vas said the card could help prevent similar cases.

"There are increasing numbers of unlicensed drivers on the road, and it's a problem that is leading to unsafe conditions," he said. "In my opinion, this is the morally correct thing, in light of what these people are providing in contributions to our economy."

Living Here in Limbo

The rise in illegal immigrants is creating a new generation of New Jersey residents who came to the state from Mexico as children but turn into undocumented adults at age 21. Though they had no say in the decision to live in the United States, they are in a legal limbo.

Mr. Passel said that about two-thirds of the children of illegal immigrants from Mexico are born in the United States and are citizens. But they often fail to apply for services to which they may be entitled, for fear of drawing attention to their parents' status.

For many, it is easier to remain under the radar than to risk exposing family members to legal hassles and, possibly, deportation.

For the one in three children of illegal immigrants who were born in Mexico and then brought here, life is more complicated. They remain noncitizens, and although they can attend school and receive medical care at hospitals, when they reach 21 they run into the same problems that confront their parents.

"They've played by the rules, they've gone to school and grown up in the United States, but after they graduate they're still undocumented immigrants," said Mr. Passel, who estimated that 65,000 children of illegal Mexican immigrants to the United States become undocumented adults each year.'

Marisol Conde-Hernandez, 19, is among them. Her parents brought her to New Jersey when she was just 18 months old, and the family settled near Princeton. Her grandfather had come ahead and worked in the fields to raise money to bring her family to the United States. Later, her grandfather and father, and eventually Marisol, worked in restaurants owned by Greek immigrants.

"I knew I was undocumented, and my parents knew not to tell anybody," she said. "But I was always different. If I got sick I had to go to the emergency room. We didn't have a private doctor."

One year she was invited to attend a summer program at Princeton University, but she could not go because the application required her parents' Social Security numbers.

Now Ms. Conde-Hernandez is a student at Middlesex County College in Edison, where she is studying sociology with the hope of becoming a lawyer.

"All I want to do is go to school and pay taxes," Ms. Conde-Hernandez said. "I want to get a tax return. I want to be able to drive, and I want to work. I want to get everything straight. I'm so tired of living under the table."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/30njCOVER.html?pagewanted=print

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