United States Expulsion Policy Toward Migrant Mexicans Carries a Big Human Cost The Economist
go to original February 10, 2014

The city of Mexicali is the main drop-off point for thousands of Mexicans deported from the US every year. But since most of them show up there broke with nowhere else to go, a local businessman decided to do something to help them. Al Jazeera's Adam Raney reports from Mexicali. (Al Jazeera English)

NUEVO LAREDO - They are flown down to the Mexican border by the planeload, and then released across the bridge at night. They shuffle into Mexico wearing the look of defeat. Their shoes are untied and their trousers hang down; their laces and belts are in a plastic bag. Often these are all they carry.

Many have no papers. Some have no money. A few have lived so many years in the United States that they cannot even speak Spanish. All have wives, children or friends that they have left behind, yet they have been thrown out without so much as a change of clothes.

A government agency from the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas, the Tamaulipas Migrant Institute, offers them free telephone calls when in Mexico. They are shown on a map exactly where they are and offered discounted bus tickets to their home towns — if, that is, they decide not to try to cross the border again. “I’m not going back,” one elderly man shouts out. “Better to go home. Up there, they don’t want us any more.”

Such comments may sound like vindication for the architects of the United States’ deportation policy; it is designed to deter. The vast majority of foreigners expelled last year were Mexicans — 322,900, according to Mexican government statistics. That is 11% below the year before, but it fails to capture the growing number of Central Americans also shipped back to Mexico — sometimes because they pretend to be Mexicans, in order not to be sent all the way home, and have no papers to prove otherwise.

Read the rest at The Economist

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