ANAPRA, Mexico – Johan Juan Gonzalez and his wife, Olga Barroso, take a daily bus trip into central Juárez just down the road. They visit the outdoor market, where they compare food prices with those of their native Venezuela. They study transportation routes, visit schools for their two boys and check the local newspaper for jobs.
While hoping to seek asylum in the U.S. in the near future, the couple is exploring a Plan B to stay in Mexico for now. It’s a high-stakes decision that hinges on the Biden administration’s next move regarding a public health rule that has allowed border agents to expel migrants without giving them a chance to apply for asylum under the justification that it was for pandemic safety.
A federal judge set Dec. 21 as the date for the Biden administration to comply with his order to lift the order known as Title 42.
On Wednesday, the Biden administration says it will decide whether to appeal the ruling, according to a court filing by the Justice Department.
No time to wait
Barroso has no time to wait. She wants her boys, ages 4 and 6, to return to school. “There are possibilities here,” Barroso told her husband recently at their temporary shelter here in Anapra, one of the poorest subdivisions of Juárez. “Not what we dreamed about, but there is obviously job security.”
“No doubt,” said Gonzalez, as their sons played hide and seek, one of them in a Spiderman suit.
The couple’s words are music to the ears of business leaders in Ciudad Juarez, a bustling metropolis perpetually yearning for workers. Juárez – one of the world’s biggest manufacturing bases, a thriving service industry and giant trade Metroplex – can always use a few more workers. The Juárez Chamber of Commerce estimates more than 20,000 job openings in a city of about 1.5 million residents.
What’s seen by some as a problem for Texas and the U.S. is viewed in Mexico as a labor opportunity, said Isela Molina, president of the Industrial Women’s Chamber of Commerce and owner of ProAlim, a food provider for the hundreds of factories that dot the city.
“We want migrants to realize that we understand that staying in Juarez was not part of their original plans,” she said. “But as long as you’re here, make the best of it, because we need workers. There are plenty of jobs.”
A tight labor market
By contrast, across the border in El Paso, the “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere, as they are in Dallas, or just about anywhere in the U.S. A massive slowdown in immigration that began in recent years is taking a toll on an already aging country, according to multiple studies by non-partisan organizations, including the Brookings Institute, Migration Policy Institute and SMU’s Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center.
“In Texas [and] across the United States, there is a tight labor market,” said Jesus Cañas, senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He’s a specialist in analyzing regional economic growth, including at the border. “Our surveys consistently show employers are having a hard time finding workers. The challenge is finding legal workers.”
The number of unemployed people in the “accommodation and food services industry is 565,000, while the number of job openings totaled 1.4 million. Even if every worker in that industry were employed, there would still be 835,000 job openings,” according to a Brookings Institute study.
While the U.S. economy has largely regained the estimated 20 million jobs it lost during the pandemic, shortfalls remain in specific industries, especially in low-wage jobs that have lost workers to higher-paying opportunities in warehousing, construction and professional and business services, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The hospitality and leisure industry is still down 1.2 million jobs from February 2020, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis of U.S. Labor Department data. That’s a “national crisis,” according to the Chamber.
In the long-term, it is “imperative that we think about the future” and be strategic because “as the U.S. population continues to age and people continue to retire, it will become harder for Texas to attract domestic migrants, people from other states,” said Jennifer Apperti, deputy director of SMU’s Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center.
“When this happens,” she said, “international immigrants could help continue Texas’ growth.”
A tale of two cities
Back on the border, migrants and city leaders are on edge. Helicopters hover over El Paso in the evenings and early morning, an indication of migrants desperately making one more attempt to get across.
The El Paso sector is expected to register more than 50,000 encounters, or apprehensions of migrants, in the month of November, numbers comparable to record figures set in October, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Republican political leaders recently visited the area and criticized President Joe Biden’s so-called “open borders,” vowing to start hearings on border security and calling for the resignation of U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
And not everyone is so welcoming in Mexico. Across the border, “Little Venezuela,” a camp of more than 1,500 migrants living in tents along the Rio Grande, is gone. On Nov. 27, local, state and federal agents from Mexico moved in and pushed people away from makeshift tents across the river from a processing center run by the U.S. Border Patrol.
Authorities said they forced migrants away “for their own protection, as temperatures are falling,” said Enrique Valenzuela, head of the population council of the Chihuahua state government, which oversees migration issues on the border. He urged Venezuelans to “seek shelter, find jobs and stay safe.” Many of the mostly Venezuelan migrants fled to faith-based shelters and looked for jobs.
Job security
Molina, the business leader, began to recruit Venezuelans. She hired a family of three to help prepare packaged foods. They were Junior Gregorio Paz, an electrician and mechanic; his wife Lizmarie Pirela, a pharmacist and elder care worker; and their 17-year-old son, Emmanuel Ferrer, a student.
There’s “nothing like job security,” said Pirela. “Plus, it was getting too cold. But the way authorities forced us out, along with tiny children, was inhumane.” She’s thankful to have a job, and would like to stay in Juarez.
But “this is not just about us, but our families back in Venezuela,” Paz said. “I’m grateful to [Molina]. She’s been generous, and this city has been welcoming. But with our salaries, we can’t help our own families, who depend on our sacrifice, to move forward. They need remittances.”
Molina said the average wage is about 1,800 pesos per week, or about $95, which is about double the wages in Venezuela. “We’ll never compete with U.S. wages, but at least in the short-term, we can make this work,” she said. “We speak the same language, share cultural values. On the border, we are hardworking people who welcome one another.”
Molina is also pressing the Mexican government, with the assistance of U.S. authorities, to help the newcomers integrate into society by providing them with identification cards so they can be part of the banking system and other services, she said.
In Venezuela, Olga Barroso and Johan Juan Gonzalez opposed the current regime, and they said their family was blacklisted. So they fled, arriving at the Texas.-Mexico border in October. They crossed the Rio Grande, only to be returned to Mexico. A week ago, they waited inside a shelter run by a faith organization known as Pan De Vida. They stared at their two boys playing and a quiet fell upon them.
“If we leave here, we leave the dream behind,” Barroso finally said. “What will we tell our kids, Johan? That we gave up on their dream, and we were so, so close. No matter how hard this is, Juárez represents a new beginning, and we are just across the United States, so close. And we have jobs everywhere.”
Freelance journalist Luis Torres contributed to this report.
