According to Census, Poverty Continues its Migration to Baja California Ivan Pedraza - Mexidata.info
go to original January 7, 2013

Baja California has more than 320,000 people living in poverty and of these about 100,000 live in extreme poverty, which means they cannot meet basic needs for food, water, shelter and hygiene.

According to the state government, most of them are not Baja Californians but migrants who come from entities with high levels of poverty, like Chiapas, but they come to Baja California without jobs. Of the five municipalities in Baja California, Tijuana has the highest percentage rate of poverty.

According to the last census conducted in the state by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), Baja California has 2,844,469 inhabitants.

This shows that 13% of Baja California's population lives in some level of poverty, and most of the people in this situation do not have a home of their own or money in order to eat properly.

These figures were confirmed by the Ministry of Social Development in the State (SEDESOE), headed by Pablo Alejo López Núñez.

Poverty is (rated) as the situation facing most that live in precarious conditions, followed by those with limited abilities on their income, and those who do not even have the resources to eat.

Of those in the state who are poor, 72% come under the heading of hereditary poverty, that is they do not have their own home; or they (are living as squatters); or they live in overcrowded, that is to say limited, space.

About 18% of Baja California's poor are people with limited capacities who, although they have an income, it is not enough to sustain the basic needs of their families.

Approximately 10% of the remaining poor live in food poverty, which means those people cannot even afford to buy food worthy of contributing to their good nutrition or that of their families.

Most of those living in some degree of poverty live in rural communities, but cases have also been detected in urban and suburban areas of the five municipalities of Baja California.

The data are based on statistics of the National Evaluation of Social Development Policy Council (Coneval), an agency of the federal Social Development Secretariat.

Yet it should be noted that the lack of employment in the region is not a direct and determining factor in the levels of poverty that exist in the state, as there are many people who even with a job face some kind of a precarious situation, either with respect to food (or housing).

The most frequent cause of migration in the country, and the world, is a situation in which poverty has gone beyond the possibilities of tolerance and resistance in the migrant's place of origin, and people have to resort to migration to survive in other regions or states.

Dr. Alejandro Diaz Bautista, an economist and professor at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Colef), said that poverty and social exclusion are two of the main reasons for both internal migration between states and within a single country, when a person or family decides to move from a state with a high poverty level to another state with a better level of human development, just like migration from one country to another.

This is a serious social and economic phenomenon, as there are millions of people in the country, and in the world, who today move for economic reasons, Diaz said Bautista.

This has consequences for the entities that are receptors of migrants from other states, he added.  The dynamic population growth of Baja California is not only due to a high birth rate, but too due to migration flows from the south to north, said the academic.

The results of the 2010 Population and Housing Census recorded a migratory flow of 443,533 people who came to Mexican states on the northern border with the United States, and 35% of those people came to Baja California.

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El Universal (Mexico City), Dec. 31, 2013, Mexicali, B. Cfa., "La pobreza migra hacia Baja California," by Ivan Pedraza; edited translation by MexiData.info

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