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Arizona Immigration Law Spurs Fear and Racism, Mexicans Say

Posted June 2, 2010 by Leslie Josephs
Categories: Federal Immigration Policy

Georgina Jimenez owns a small marketplace restaurant in the city of Puebla, Mexico, which she bought with the help of remittances from her family in the US. But the family members whose work in the states once helped her establish her own hometown business may soon be heading back to Mexico unwillingly.

“They’re living in fear,” said Jimenez of her family — two siblings and their four children — who live in Queens. Her family members are so worried that New York will pass a law similar to Arizona’s contentious SB 1070 immigration law that her sister and brother are moving back to Mexico, she said.

Jimenez’s family migrated to the US five years ago and settled in New York, where her sister, brother, and eldest nephew work in several restaurants in the city. “I don’t know where. We get postcards that say ‘New York.’”

For her siblings, the journey to the United States was perilous: Her sister was sent home by US immigration agents after her first attempt of crossing the border into El Paso, Texas, where she was caught in the back of a truck after they had paid a “transporter,” likely a euphemism for a coyote.

But despite the risks that they took to reach the US, they would rather live in Mexico now.

“What could they do?” said Jimenez, 48, after serving two plates of rich mole poblano, the signature dish from her four-table restaurant in the cobblestoned historic district of Puebla. “They think they’re going to make the same law there. They’re so worried that they’ve made the decision to come back.”

The Puebla-to-NYC journey undertaken by Jimenez family isn’t unique: Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have migrated from the state of Puebla to the Greater New York area in recent decades.

Along with the basic fear instilled by SB 1070, many Mexicans are angered because they perceive the law to be overtly racist.

Juan Francisco Rosas García, a printer from Mexico City whose two brothers immigrated to the United States seven years ago and now live in Chicago, said the law singles out Latinos.

“They don’t have a law that goes against European immigrants,” García said. “It definitely is directed against Latinos.”

But he said President Felipe Calderón has to do much more than criticize the law, as he did during his trip to Washington last month.

“He can’t blame the United States,” he said. “He has to fix our problems. There are so many of us and the economy doesn’t support us.”

A group of Mexican senators in late May, led by Calderón’s party, said they would file a claim against the law with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the Organization of American States.

Through June, LIW news reporting fellow Leslie Josephs will be covering U.S. immigration issues from her temporary base in Mexico City.

Image courtesy of RussBowling via Flickr

Tags : arizona, arizona boycott, puebla, remittances, sb 1070

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