Immigrants from Mexico Help Sustain Two Economies - and Are Discarded Daniela Pastrana - Inter Press Service
go to original October 20, 2017

Ana Laura López, an activist for the rights of deportees, assists a group who have just landed at the Mexico City International Airport on one of three flights arriving each week with migrants deported from the United States (Julia Sclafani/IPS)

They work for years to bolster the economies of two countries. For one, the United States, they provide labor and taxes; for the other, Mexico, they send remittances that support tens of thousands of families and communities. Then they are deported, and neither government takes into account their special needs.

“These are the inconsistencies of the U.S system, which does not give you legal status, but it does give you a number to pay taxes every year,” migrant rights activist Ana Laura López told IPS.

She herself was deported in September 2016, after working for 16 years in Chicago, Illinois.

“Every two weeks they deducted retirement benefits, which remain in an account, on ‘stand by’, until you gain legal immigrant status – but that’s very hard to achieve,” she said.

“I was poor in Mexico, I did not have access to a visa, so I went illegally. I had just the first years of high school and I finished high school in the United States,” said 42-year-old López.

“I worked in the Mexican consulate, I was paid by a federal agency, and had a good income, I was living my ‘American dream’. I considered myself a citizen because I have a squeaky clean criminal record, but yet, I never achieved legal status. The worst crime is to be an immigrant.”

Lopez was deported on the same plane in which she was about to travel to Mexico, with a ticket she had bought. She intended to return temporarily and seek to regularize her immigration status. She believes she was deported because of her activism on behalf of migrants and workers in the United States.

In Mexico she has had to start from scratch, taking jobs where she earns eight times less than in the United States, with no social security, without a right to a pension,even though for 16 years she sent home to Mexico between 200 and 300 dollars a fortnight , as remittances to help support her family.

“Those resources that we sent to Mexico are lost because we do not have access to health or housing or to a retirement program, not even to credit. Immigration laws are terribly unjust and abusive of labor rights,” she maintains.

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