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Anti-emigration strategy: Small Mexican towns try to create jobs at home

In rural Mexico, locals try to make a brighter prospect out of staying home.

By Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 29, 2007 edition

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Tamaula, Mexico - This town in the central state of Guanajuato is so isolated that its 50-some families just got electricity a year ago. There's still no running water. Most of the men migrate north, to work in US factories or tobacco fields.

But Adriana Cortes, who waves to everyone she sees on the rough, half-hour drive up here, believes they can help curb migration here and in rural towns like it throughout the country. Her plan: create small cooperative enterprises to make communities self-sustaining.

In Tamaula, she is helping residents turn a small cheesemaking outfit into a factory and supporting efforts to build a job-training center to keep teenagers from leaving and lure the men back home.

Nearly 500,000 Mexicans head to the US each year, and an estimated 7 million now live there illegally. As US and Mexican lawmakers butt heads over control measures, small communities in Mexico are looking at their own strategies of plugging the labor drain.

"Our politicians are always talking about how migrants are treated in the US, but no one focuses on how they live in their own communities," says Ms. Cortes, the director of the not-for-profit Bajio Community Foundation. "Something is missing in our country. We need people to say, 'This is my country, this is my home, this is my land.' Tamaula can be a model."After studying accounting in college, Cortes says she began working with drug addicts and the handicapped. She eventually opened 12 organizations in the city of Irapuato.

Through her work, Cortes says she realized how many social problems were the result of migration, and how little government policies were doing to reverse the migratory trend that has widened so considerably in the past decade.

"Officials always think the answer is to bring a new factory in, but that doesn't work," she says, explaining that weekly commutes to low-paid factory jobs here makes international migration – with its promises of higher pay – more attractive. "As long as they don't see anything in their community, they will think of the US."

Migration affects towns across Mexico, but those hit hardest are in the central, agricultural states, such as Guanajuato.

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