Mexican migration follows jobs farther north

? Sunday morning in this small, Hudson Valley city: More than 1,000 parishioners, most from Mexico, pack Spanish-language Masses at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Afterward, many families flock to El Azteca for its authentic tacos. If somebody needs a ride home, there are at least a dozen local taxi companies catering to newcomers born in the Mexican states of Puebla and Jalisco.

New residents from Mexico have, in the last four years, opened dozens of businesses that have begun to reinvigorate the ailing downtown district; they are the region’s fastest growing community.

It’s the same story elsewhere in the Northeast. Like the other parts of the country before it, the region is finally starting to see the impact of Mexican migration.

New communities of Mexicans have arrived to fill farm, construction and domestic jobs, government data show. Population growth in states such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Connecticut would be considerably slower if not for the newcomers, who are steadily bringing about the region’s biggest demographic shift in generations. And while the change has brought new vitality to some places, it’s also created tension.

Sixty miles north of New York City, Newburgh has historically had a small Puerto Rican community. But these days Mexicans drawn to farm work in area apple orchards, dairy farms and factories far outnumber Puerto Ricans, demographers say.

In 2000, the city’s 4,500 Mexicans represented half of all its Latinos; today, Mexicans are two-thirds of that group, demographers estimate.

Moving north, east

Nationally, most Mexican-born residents have long been concentrated in California and Texas, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington D.C. “If you go back 15 or 20 years, there weren’t very many Mexicans outside of core settlement areas of the Southwestern states and the Chicago area,” he said.

A soccer team of Mexican immigrants change out of their uniforms representing the Mexican national team after a recent game in Newburgh, N.Y. The team, coached by Faustino Rosas, far right, is mostly made up of recent arrivals from Mexico, including Rosas, who is from the Mexican state of Puebla. From left are Joel Cuervo, Carlos Alberto Perez, Felix Cesaneto, Gustavo Velazquez, Salvador Perez and Edgardo Benavides.

In the early 1990s, he said, California’s ailing economy and rising anti-immigrant sentiments pushed some Mexican immigrants into new places with abundant jobs such as North Carolina, Georgia and New York City.

As new immigrants kept arriving – peaking at more than 600,000 a year around 1999 or 2000 – many joined friends or family resettled in the new areas. Tens of thousands went straight from the Mexican state of Michoacan to meatpacking jobs in Tar Heel, N.C., and from Puebla to work in restaurants and private homes in Manhattan.

Another factor fueling the influx was the nation’s widespread real-estate boom, which drove steady growth in construction jobs. Last year, nearly one in five foreign-born Hispanics was a construction worker, and only 38 percent of the nation’s Mexican immigrants lived in California, Pew data show. That’s down from 58 percent in 1990.

Some tension found

Some have felt a backlash. In Farmingville, on Long Island, residents have repeatedly complained about Central American day laborers, and there have been several attacks on Latinos in recent years. In a move that some residents cheered but immigration advocates condemned, local officials recently closed down three homes crowded with migrant renters.

Mexico’s consul general for the New York region said the town reflects national immigration tensions. Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said the Mexican government should re-examine why so many of its residents are leaving.

Meanwhile, in New York’s Finger Lakes region, “there are tensions between Mexican immigrants and the Puerto Ricans,” said Alejandra Molina, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva. “You go to (the Spanish-language) Mass and the Puerto Ricans will sit on one side and the Mexican families will sit on the other side.”

Longtime residents are generally welcoming in Newburgh, a city of about 28,000, but there remain challenges: a shortage of affordable housing, inadequate health care and nearly nonexistent public transportation. It is not unusual, said Carmen Vazqueztell, director of bilingual education in Newburgh schools, to see Mexican immigrants walking or riding bicycles along country roads at night.

Some see the lack of services as business opportunities to sell Oaxacan groceries, soccer supplies and airfare to Mexico City.

“You drive up and down Broadway and say, ‘Wow, look at this new business, and this one and this one and this one,'” Vazqueztell said. “They’ve really made a mark in this community.”