Border crime drives many to Texas, boosts local economies

08:07 AM CDT on Wednesday, May 3, 2006

By ALFREDO CORCHADO and LAURENCE ILIFF / The Dallas Morning News

EL PASO – The border crime wave that has taken hundreds of lives in the past year is pushing a new group of immigrants into the United States – once-content middle-class Mexicans who never thought they would seek the American dream.

ERICH SCHLEGEL/DMN

From right: Rosa Maria Molinar teaches guitar to her son, Carlos, and Melissa Barrera. Ms. Molinar and her husband came to El Paso five years ago to provide Carlos a better education.

These border-crossers are fleeing drug cartel turf wars, property crimes, police misconduct, kidnapping gangs and sagging economies. They join more traditional immigrant groups – poor workers who scatter from Texas across the U.S. and rich Mexicans who snap up homes in Houston and Dallas.

"For the middle class, the issue of security and crime may be the straw that broke the camel's back," said Jon Amastae, director of the Borderlands Program at the University of Texas-El Paso. "No country likes to lose its middle class. It's not a good sign for Mexico."

As the U.S. debates the future of immigration and Mexico readies to choose its next president July 2, the flight and discontent of the middle class – accountants, doctors, lawyers, businessmen – is affecting both sides of the border.

While Mexico feels the loss from its brain drain, the U.S. sees new economic growth in its border communities, particularly in El Paso, Laredo and Brownsville. There, Mexican restaurants, bars and commercial centers are popping up. Nightlife once centered overwhelmingly on the Mexican side is reviving downtown areas and beyond on the U.S. side.

El Paso real estate agent Juan Uribe says Mexicans increasingly are leaving their mark on the city's economy, which is already on the upswing as the area prepares for an infusion of thousands of soldiers and their families in coming months. U.S. military base consolidations last year mean more personnel are being assigned to Fort Bliss, just outside El Paso.

Having worked on a deal establishing a 60-acre shopping center on behalf of a wealthy Mexican businessman, Mr. Uribe is now working on a similar 40-acre project for another family from Ciudad Juárez. Thanks in part to such projects, the price of commercial real estate has doubled to $14 a square foot, and residential real estate prices are up 15 percent and beyond, he said.

"Most of the upper class and some of the middle class of Juárez have moved to El Paso in the last 10 years, and I'm not exaggerating," said Mr. Uribe, who says that more than 50 percent of his clientele is from south of the border.

"The reason? We don't have people kidnapping you and asking for ransom. They feel a lot safer on the U.S. side of the border."

Some of the new arrivals are legal border crossers who nonetheless are not supposed to stay on the U.S. side, making their residency illegal. Others have specialized visas that give them legal status.

Specific numbers are hard to come by because land titles are often in the names of banks or corporations, making the nationality of the true owners difficult to determine, say academics such as Michael Yoder, professor of geography and urban studies at Texas A&M International University in Laredo.

"To pinpoint it exactly, numerically, is hard to do, but it has picked up," Dr. Yoder said of the movement of middle-class Mexicans across the border.

UTEP's Dr. Amastae agreed.

"Border communities have their own dynamics of transnationalism, where people really live and work in two countries," he said. "It's all done under the radar."

Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, represent an example of this reality.

In the last five years, 78 companies moved to Laredo, adding 13,653 jobs and making the city No. 1 in growth in Texas, according to a ranking by the Milken Institute, a California economic think tank.

But foot traffic across the international bridges linking the two cities has dropped substantially. Officials attribute the decline to concerns about the escalating violence in Nuevo Laredo, where rival drug cartels have been waging a bloody war for supremacy.

The uncertainty and the exodus of middle-class Mexicans go against one of the main rationales for pushing Mexico to become a more democratic nation with a free-trade agreement with the U.S. – namely, that the country would develop a stable economy and lower inflation, which in turn would persuade its people to stay home.

While Mexico has had a stronger economy and less inflation under President Vicente Fox, rising crime, especially related to drug trafficking, has done what economic crises used to do in the past – push new groups of Mexicans north of the border.

The newcomers include the Almazar family. They packed their bags three months ago after the head of the family, Sergio Dante Almazar, a criminal lawyer, was gunned down in broad daylight in downtown Ciudad Juárez. Some family members have since asked for political asylum. They live with relatives in El Paso.

Other Mexicans may not have been so directly touched by crime but still share a deep belief that their government is losing the struggle against organized crime.

"Whenever I'm in Juárez, I have this sense of danger that follows me all the way to the international bridge," said José Nino, who uprooted his wife and four children six years ago and moved into a middle-class neighborhood in El Paso.

Others maintain their investments and jobs in Mexico while trying to blend into U.S. society. Rosa Maria Molinar and her husband moved to El Paso five years ago to provide their only child, Carlos, a better education.

"This was a very hard decision, but when we looked at the future of our son, given the limited economic opportunities in Mexico and high crime rate, we decided to make the move," she said.

Ms. Molinar enrolled at El Paso Community College, where she's studying political science and teaching guitar classes to youngsters in the afternoons. Her husband works as an attorney in Juárez and crosses the border daily. Recently, the family returned to Juárez to sell their home out of fear that it "could be used by drug traffickers as a safe house."

In some ways, these newcomers are bringing Mexico with them. Mexican newspapers vie for readers on U.S. soil, while border restaurants – among them Juarez's Shangri La Chinese restaurant – cater to a long-standing and loyal clientele that has sought refuge in El Paso.

Radio station EXA (98.3 FM), based in Mexico City, is experimenting with second- and third-generation Hispanic listeners and U.S. advertisers out of its El Paso office, the first one on U.S. soil. Business is up 300 percent, said Jose Antonio Ontiveros, station manager.

"We discovered that many of our listeners already knew our call letters from having once lived in Mexico. Our listeners had already moved here," said Perla Barraza, the program director.

And increasingly, Mexican-owned clubs are turning sleepy U.S. border towns into vibrant nightspots as Mexico's yuppies flee to the U.S. side seeking a safe place to party.

Many newcomers are recent university graduates who say that far from burdening the U.S., they are doing jobs that Americans can't do. Their visas depend on their special skills.

Roberto Coronado, 29, a native of Juárez, and Jesús Canas, 32, of Parral, Chihuahua, graduated in 2002 from UTEP with master's degrees. They work as currency policy analysts in the El Paso branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Although neither had planned to stay in El Paso, both are now homeowners.

"The more I live here and hear about kidnappings and [police] impunity across the border, the more I realize that I'm not ever exposing my daughter to that life," said Mr. Canas, referring to his 3-year-old.

Mr. Coronado said: "When you hear that your own brother was a victim of crime, as mine was, you begin to feel the pinch, you begin to worry and feel a sense of fear. And you feel relieved to be living here instead."

The issue has attracted the attention of Mexico's presidential candidates. It will be one of the main topics in the next presidential debate, on June 6.

Staff writer David McLemore in San Antonio contributed to this report.

E-mail acorchado@dallasnews.com and liliff@dallasnews.com