Alfredo Otero, a carpenter with Home Restoration and Remediation, works on a house last month in St. Louis. Otero came to the area from Durango, Mexico, on a tourist visa when he was 17 and became a citizen in 1989. (Rick Mach/P-D)

Post-Dispatch reporter Karen Branch-Brioso was one of 17 Border Justice fellows named last fall by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. The institute sponsored an eight-day conference in November in towns along both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Post-Dispatch assumed the balance of the costs for this report, which looks at the impact of stepped-up border security on immigrants in the St. Louis area.

This series in one instance uses a pseudonym and in others uses real names but omits surnames to protect the identities of immigrants who are in the United States illegally. These were the only conditions under which these immigrants would interviewed. Actual names are used for immigrants here legally, and for family members in Mexico.



One night in March, Dolores parked on the shoulder of Interstate 70 just west of the Missouri River. A Ford pickup pulled over. She handed the driver $1,050, and her 15-year-old son emerged from the truck's camper shell.

He was a little boy the last time she saw him, six years ago. That's when she left Puebla, Mexico, in search of a better-paying job in the United States. Their reunion capped years of guilt, tearful phone calls and six failed border crossings by the boy.

"She didn't know who I was. She was expecting someone smaller," said Jose, recounting the night when his mother at first stared at him, without recognition, before embracing him.

Dolores, an illegal immigrant who has worked at restaurant and hotel jobs in St. Louis County, said, "He had changed so much, I thought they'd brought me someone else."

Jose's older brother made the same illegal trek across the U.S.-Mexico border in June 2002 to reunite with their mother. Just as Dolores had crossed. And her boyfriend before her.

Today, Dolores' household has grown to seven - including the nephews who sleep in the living room of her two-bedroom apartment in St. Ann, and her son, a toddler who is the only U.S. citizen in the house.

Such "chain migration" from one specific place to another has long been a staple of immigrants settling in places such as Los Angeles and Chicago. Now, it's boosting Hispanic populations in less likely destinations, such as Omaha, Neb., Racine, Wis., towns in Georgia and North Carolina - and enclaves across the St. Louis area. The number of migrant workers here legally on temporary work visas has also increased significantly in the past few years.

A succession of crackdowns on illegal border traffic over the past decade - especially since 9-11 - has made crossings for many migrants more of a one-way street. Once they arrive, they are more likely to stay. Rather than making return visits to Mexico and risking an uncertain and costlier border crossing to resume work in the United States, they are choosing to send for relatives.

Mexican migration to the St. Louis area used to be far more scattershot, according to Ann Rynearson of the International Institute.

"This new century is seeing dramatic changes with the role of Hispanics in St. Louis," said Rynearson, senior vice president for culture and community at the institute, as she addressed a statewide conference in March about the growth in Hispanic immigrants. "Not only are the numbers rapidly growing, but there also is relative concentration in economic sectors and residential areas."

The burgeoning undocumented population plays a large role in that growth. In 2002, the Census Bureau estimates, 37.4 million Hispanics lived in the United States, compared with 22.4 million in 1990. Demographer Jeffrey Passel of the Urban Institute estimates that 7.5 million were undocumented immigrants from Latin America. Close to 50,000 undocumented immigrants lived in Missouri in 2002, he says, and 400,000 in Illinois.

Passel, who has extensively researched the nation's undocumented population, noted a dramatic shift among newly arrived immigrants in the 1990s. While a third of the nation's new immigrants were making California their point of arrival in the early 1990s, California's share dropped to 22 percent in the latter part of the decade. The states that picked up the slack were surprising.

"Those missing 11 percent went to places like Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina and a whole host of other places," Passel said. "In the late '90s, we found there was a real spreading out of the Latino population, the Mexican population and the undocumented population. It started with people moving from California to other states. And then over the decade, as they moved into these new places, their friends or relatives, instead of going to California, went to these other places. (They) bypass California and go straight to these new areas - and it opens up a lot of economic niches for these immigrants to fill."

In some places, such as small towns across Nebraska and in southwestern Missouri where meat-processing plants have opened and hired hundreds of new arrivals, the change in the population has come virtually overnight. In the St. Louis area, the transformation is more gradual, happening neighborhood by neighborhood.

Hispanics represented 2.2 percent of Missouri's population in 2002, according to Census Bureau estimates. But neighborhoods across the St. Louis area have concentrations that far exceeded that in the 2000 census count: Edmundson at nearly 6 percent, St. Ann more than 4 percent. The same growth has hit a cluster of neighborhoods in south St. Louis - from Tower Grove, where the Hispanic population exceeds 4 percent, to Benton Park, Gravois Park and Carondelet, with a 5 percent Hispanic population, according to 2000 figures, the most recent available.

The area's public schools are seeing the change at a fast pace. Four years ago, 2,367 Hispanic students attended public schools in St. Louis and St. Louis County, and the counties of St. Charles, Warren, Franklin, Jefferson and Lincoln. Today, that number is almost 4,000. More than 1,400 are new arrivals who are in special courses to increase their English skills, and those new arrivals are concentrated in St. Louis city schools and the Ritenour, Hazelwood, Pattonville and St. Charles school districts.

Sister Concha de la Cruz, who has ministered to Hispanics at St. Cecilia Catholic Church for the past eight years, said the growth has been palpable in south St. Louis. When she arrived, about 50 parishioners would show up each week for the church's Spanish-language Mass. The number is now 350 - and they make up more than half of the parish.

"Every week, we're registering two to three families," said de la Cruz, who was awestruck with the even larger growth at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Ferguson. "Back in '96 or '97, we went to Guadalupe and there were only about 35 people (at Spanish Mass). It was hardly anybody, and a very low-key church, even smaller than we were. But, all of a sudden, it blossomed, and now over at Guadalupe they have two Masses in Spanish. After about '99, it was standing-room-only for the one Mass they had."

"It's easier just to stay"

It was a cold morning on Dec. 12, the day that honors Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Many Mexicans in St. Louis used to abandon the area at this time of year to visit family in Mexico.

But on this day, the parking lot at Our Lady of Guadalupe was packed long before the 6 a.m. Mass to honor the beloved dark-skinned virgin.

Inside, more than 600 people gathered for the service in Spanish. They filled the pews and stood in the aisles of the ample sanctuary. From there, others overflowed into the foyer, packing every inch of space all the way to the front door, the largest crowd yet for the special Mass.

The crowd included many men in their late teens and early 20s, the traditional age of those who leave their country to work in the United States. But lots of women were there, too, toting babies and chasing after gleeful youngsters who darted among the legs of the crowd.

Dolores was among them, with her boyfriend and their baby.

"It was so full this year," she said. "Before, a lot of people would be in Mexico, but it gets so much harder every year to get back that it's easier just to stay. So they don't go as much."

Dolores hadn't planned to stay when she came to St. Louis in 1998. She expected to return to her boys after a year with the savings from her restaurant job.

But the money kept her here - her job paid more in a day than she earned in a seven-day workweek in Puebla.

"I didn't go back, because I was working two jobs and had the opportunity to give more to my sons, and if I'd left, it would be worse for them," said Dolores, who feared the stepped-up border security might keep her from returning to St. Louis if she went back to Puebla. "I decided I couldn't do it."

She was right about the border.

"You have more Border Patrol agents, more sensors, more cameras, which increase the likelihood that you will get caught attempting to cross," says Richard Stana, Homeland Security and Justice Director for the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. He said tighter federal security along the Southwest border has actually decreased the number of apprehensions of illegal border-crossers.

"Fewer people are trying to cross," he said. "But that's partly because the people who crossed before didn't return. They stayed."

Francisco's story

Many stay in Fairmont City, a largely Hispanic town that includes plenty of legal residents who can come and go across the border as they please.

But other Fairmont City residents without legal documents no longer dare to make the trip.

Francisco, who asked that the pseudonym be used to conceal his identity, already took the risk and says he won't do it again. He is 27 and has lived and worked around Fairmont City since age 15, when he followed in the footsteps of cousins and made his first illegal crossing to work here. He started as a hired hand in local corn and tomato fields, $4.15 an hour. Today, he makes $13.28 an hour soldering pipes.

Since arriving in Fairmont City in 1991, Francisco has returned to Mexico three times: in 1993; in 1996, when he married Maria and ended their honeymoon by scaling a fence into California and sneaking past security points stuffed into the spare-wheel well of a white station wagon; and again last year, which he says will be his final visit home so long as he remains undocumented.

"There's a big difference now," he says. "I never battled so much to cross over."

His last trip to Mexico was prompted by his father's unexpected death in a car crash, which posed a dilemma for Francisco: Should he return to his grieving mother to pay his respects? Or was it too risky to leave behind his wife, son and newborn daughter?

It was the message relayed from a friend who had visited his father months before that haunted him most: "When will he come visit?" his father had asked after the son whom he hadn't seen in seven years. "When I'm dead?"

Francisco went home for his father's funeral in central western Mexico. But it took four tries over a month and a half to make it back to Fairmont City. Before he could return, his wife and their two young children ran out of money.

"I don't know how to drive. I wasn't working. I don't speak English," Maria says, recounting the desperation of those weeks. "Friends lent me money to help pay for the house. I kept wondering, 'What will happen to us?'"

Francisco wondered the same thing each time his attempt to cross failed. Twice, he was caught trying to cross the border through Arizona and again when he was scaling a fence on the outskirts of Nogales. He took a bus westward to Mexicali, where he tried crossing at the port of entry into California with a false ID. Immigration officials took one look at the photograph and tossed him into detention for 14 hours before sending him back to Mexicali.

He made the long trip back to his family ranch to regroup for another stab at the Arizona border. Security crackdowns in the urban border areas of California and Texas have made the remote desert of Arizona the preferred crossing point for much of the illegal border traffic in recent years.

A smuggler charged him $1,800 for what turned out to be a successful trip in January 2003 that began with a 32-hour bus ride from his hometown to Caborca, a city about 50 miles south of the Arizona border.

"It was in the middle of the desert. We crossed and walked seven or eight hours," said Francisco, who slept in dry creek beds to avoid detection. "We came in a group of 16 people. Then they put six of us in one small pickup truck. We rode three hours on top of each other before we arrived in Phoenix. From there, I went to Utah - 12 of us in a minivan for 14 hours. Some were going to Chicago. Some to Indianapolis. Some to Texas."

One full day longer in the minivan, and he was back in Fairmont City.

Hector is another illegal immigrant from Fairmont City who doesn't plan to go back to Mexico. "It's so much harder to get back now, especially in the last three to four years," said Hector, 34.

Better in St. Louis

Like so many others who have opted to settle permanently, even without work permits or legal status, Hector has children born here. They are something their parents cannot be, for now: U.S. citizens. Hector's wife came from the Mexican state of Michoacan. But they met in Fairmont City, because her brothers, like his brother, came here first and urged her to come and work here, too.

"It's like a funnel," jokes Hector's father, Guadalupe, back home in Zacatecas state in the town of El Salto, from where all three of his sons and scores of neighbors have poured, one after another, into Fairmont City and St. Louis. "It's cheap to live there. They'll always find a place to stay, because they know people there."

The first trickles of increasing immigration to the St. Louis area began more than two decades ago with families like that of Lola Marquez.

She came from a farm in El Jaral, Zacatecas, where there was no running water and no electricity to power a light bulb. There, she toted water from a well and washed clothes near a dam. She married in Mexico but spent her honeymoon running across the hills of Tijuana in an attempt to get to a better life in the United States.

Immigration authorities caught her several times. The first time, U.S. agents at a border station ordered her upstairs for processing. "I had to go up an escalator and it scared me. I'd never seen one before."

Nearly 30 years ago, she finally made it to Chicago with her husband, who worked in a junkyard. A few years later, he moved her and her two small children to Fairmont City, where his boss had opened another junkyard.

It wasn't Chicago, where there were neighbors who spoke her language.

"At first I didn't like it. I was so sad. But then my children were growing up and they were born here," Marquez said. "If I were to take them back to Mexico, they'd have to do work on the farm, and I didn't want them to do that. So even though I didn't want to, I stayed for them."

Marquez and her husband legalized their residency status under a 1986 law that provided amnesty for millions of undocumented workers.

Their experience and word-of-mouth descriptions from others like them prompted more to come here illegally, drawn from Mexican towns like hers by the promise of jobs in the junkyard, on farms, in nurseries, at produce-packing houses. The St. Louis area, including Fairmont City, was far better than Chicago or Los Angeles. The rent was cheap, half as much as Los Angeles. There were plenty of jobs and the pay was better, not driven down by the competition of so many other immigrants.

After following his cousins to Fairmont City, Francisco tried Chicago for a bit - working in a junkyard and a restaurant. But after he went back to Mexico to marry Maria, there was no question where he would return.

"It's just better in Fairmont City than in Chicago," he says. "There's more gangs and crime up there and the hectic pace. But here, the kids can play outside."

Jose's journey

Back in Puebla, Mexico, Dolores heard some of the same stories from her boyfriend as he encouraged her to follow him to St. Ann in 1998.

The salaries that were just above minimum wage sounded too good to be true for Dolores, whose husband had left when their boys were very small. She was already struggling to pay their expenses by working a 12-hour shift in a candy store, seven days a week. Her take-home pay: 250 pesos, now worth less than $25.

"I never got to see my kids, because I had to work seven days a week," Dolores said. She decided if she wasn't going to see her children, she would at least go get the dollars to make a better life for them.

She joined her boyfriend in St. Ann and took a minimum-wage job in a restaurant, working two full shifts every day, six days a week.

"They paid me $800 to $900 every two weeks," Dolores marveled. "And I began to build a house with what I sent back to Puebla. After a year here, I started building the house: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen. My son was living there next door to my parents. And I'd send my sons $150 every two weeks."

Two years ago, when he was 15, her older son decided to follow his mother's footsteps.

He went to work right away. "He didn't want to study. He didn't do very well in school in Mexico because I was gone," Dolores said. "He can barely read Spanish. So he told me, 'Mommy, I want to earn money.'"

Her son, now 17, works six nights a week, preparing appetizers in a restaurant. During the day, when Dolores is at work cleaning hotel rooms for $7.50 an hour, he takes care of his 18-month-old half brother.

Their brother Jose joined the family in March. Less than three weeks after he arrived, Jose was in middle school, one of the latest in a growing number of local schoolchildren in classes designed to boost their English skills.

Jose's journey from Puebla to St. Ann took far more time than his older brother's. Last November, another family member made the trek with him to the Arizona border. Four times they crossed it: A nine-hour walk through the desert the first time. A four-hour walk the second. Hidden in a train car the third and fourth. Each time, they were caught. After the fourth time, they went back home to Puebla.

Undeterred, Jose returned a fifth time and was caught again.

This time, they held him 24 hours before handing him over to Mexico's Department of Children and Families. Dolores wired them $50, and they put him on a plane back to his grandparents.

A tearful Dolores urged her son to be patient, and stay put.

But Jose was desperate to see his mother. In a phone interview with a reporter in January, he explained that the loneliness since his brother had left was too much:

"I want to be with my mother, because I'm here alone now," Jose said from an aunt's home in Puebla. "I still want to go back."

So on Feb. 20, he arrived at the border again. He was caught and released again. And he started over again at the New Mexico border.

Bundled in four sweatshirts and three pairs of pants to protect against the nighttime desert chill, Jose walked for two nights toward the town of Deming, N.M., as part of a group of 20 led by a smuggler. This time, they made it to the rendezvous point, where they were driven to a Phoenix drop house.


Dolores wired $1,050 to Phoenix - the first half of the smuggler's fee. Jose left in the back of a Ford pickup jammed with 15 people.

"Everyone was on top of each other for one day and one night," Jose said.

Finally, they reached Missouri and pulled over in St. Charles County. That's where Dolores handed the last $1,050 to the driver. Jose got out and the truck pulled away, headed toward Pennsylvania, where other families waited to add links to their own chains of migration.

Seeking legal status

Many migrants living illegally in the United States have been here for many years, yet still have no legal status. Here are the ways to seek permanent legal status - the so-called "green card" that is the first steppingstone to citizenship - and why it's so difficult to achieve:

Family. Legal U.S. residents or citizens can petition for a green card on behalf of family members who are citizens of foreign countries. The government limits the number of these green cards, and the wait can be from two years to two decades. U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are automatically American citizens; those children are not eligible to petition on behalf of their parents until they are 21 years old.

Job. Permanent visas can be awarded to those who come to work in permanent, year-round jobs that cannot be filled by U.S. citizens or residents. Employers must prove that no one else is qualified or available for that work. An example: sushi chefs.

Diversity. Each year, the government holds a "lottery" from millions of applicants to award green cards to 55,000 people from countries that provide the fewest immigrants to the United States (e.g., Ireland). Mexicans do not qualify.

Investment. These visas go to foreigners who agree to invest at least $1 million in the United States in a business that creates at least 10 jobs here for people other than their family members.

Asylum/refugee. Permanent resident status can be awarded to those who can prove they face persecution in their home country.

Domestic abuse. The illegal spouse of an abusive spouse who is a legal U.S. resident or citizen can apply for permanent legal residence.

Hardship. Illegal residents living continuously in the United States for 10 years can apply for permanent legal status if they are of "good moral character" and can prove their deportation would create an "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship" for their legal-resident spouse or children. The claim is difficult to prove and can result in deportation if the claim is refused. Limited to 4,000 people a year.

Source: Daniel Kowalski, editor of Bender's Immigration Bulletin

The series:

Day 1: Separation/Survival. The St. Louis area is becoming more attractive for illegal immigrants and their families, who are finding work here and putting down more permanent roots.

Day 2: El Salto/St. Louis. A village in Mexico benefits from the many residents who move to St. Louis for work and send back money- but suffers from the family separations that result.

Day 3: Crossing/Conflict. Volunteers and vigilantes patrol the Arizona border in an attempt to keep illegal immigrants out of the U.S.

Day 4: Solutions/Politics. Missouri and Illinois employers are hiring thousands of legal foreign workers for low-wage temporary jobs, but here and nationwide the demand has far outstripped the legal limits. A look at the controversy over proposals to legalize more workers.



Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso
E-mail: kbranch@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 202-298-6880