By Allison Busch

This is the first story of a series of Cat Scan articles about refugees relocating to the Southwest.

Rodolfo Real has always wanted more. First he wanted an education, so his parents spent their life savings to give it to him. Then he wanted a job, but there were none available. He wanted a future but when he couldn’t find any opportunities in his home of Empalme, Mexico, he made the hardest decision of his life. With tears in his eyes and a suitcase in his hand, he said goodbye to his family and boarded a bus to Tucson, Arizona.

Rodolfo got here in August, moved in with his aunt Irene, and became big brother to her five young boys in their three-bedroom Southside apartment. They call him Fido.

“He’s more like our dad than our cousin,” said 9-year-old Oscar. “He buys us candy and plays football with us.”

Fido is shorter than Irene’s oldest, 14-year-old Brian, and has a full mustache with big, white teeth. He likes rap music and wears silver hoops in both ears. He is soft spoken and polite, but a jokester when he’s with his family. Fido works a lot, but says he wants to have something to show for it. That’s why he’s here.

Rodolfo is one in an estimated 12 million Mexican-born people currently living in the United States, the vast majority of whom are lured by American wages. Even though he has a college education, Fido says he couldn’t make enough to survive in Empalme. Now he is making more money working at a McDonald’s than he ever hoped he could at home.

Fido was in his last year of college when he realized he wouldn’t have the opportunities he hoped his education would bring. The last semester of his technical program at Empalme’s Colegio Nacional de Educación Profesional Técnica included work at a factory that made electrical car parts. So with just a few months until graduation, Fido went for the first time to practice working with the parts he was trained to engineer. The factory was full of technical college graduates, but they weren’t designing the parts like Rodolfo was hoping he would soon do. They were working the factory lines, assembling the parts that someone in another country designed.

Fido’s hometown of Empalme is a few kilometers from the Gulf of California in Mexico’s northwestern state of Sonora. Maquilas Teta-Kawi, an industrial park that employs 10,000 Emplamans, more than half of the city’s working population, dominates the Empalme. Maquilas Teta-Kawi is Mexican run, but American owned as a part of The Offshore Group, an American outsourcing company that advertises to overseas companies its ability to “initiate operations in Mexico quickly and profitably without actually establishing a legal presence there.” Just like that, overseas companies have a cheap and easy way to manufacture goods in Empalme and then sell them in a foreign market, making a killing off of what they saved on labor costs.

Fido’s father is a laborer at a tuna-canning factory. His mother works at a daycare, providing childcare for parents who work at the factories. His 24-year-old sister Anna also works in a Teta-Kawi factory. Fido wanted more than to work in the factories, but he didn’t know anyone in the higher-ranks of the industry who could help him get a better job.

"I had to work to help my family," said Rodolfo. So he assembled car parts while he applied for specialty careers. He was at the factory Monday to Friday 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. earning $50 a week. The professional jobs he was pursuing at the same time would pay $200 a week at best. For two years, he tried to be an electric engineer, a factory manager, a technical specialist, anything that would give him more opportunities than he would have working the assembly lines.
“There just wasn’t anything. Nothing,” he said. “You don’t have a chance if you don’t know someone.”

In Mexico, working hard and getting a degree don’t always equal a good job. So in a place like Empalme, is it worth trying to get an education?

“If the industries aren’t there, but you invest in your education, then you might not do well in your home country but in some other part of the world,” said University of Arizona political science Professor John Garcia, an expert in American government specializing in Latino groups’ politics. “If you have a lot of assembly work, labor intensive work, then investment in education might have diminishing returns."

In Empalme, employers are not looking for managers or engineers; they needed hands to work factory lines. Fido learned that the hard way. If he couldn’t get a job, he felt like his education was a waste, his parents spent his college money for nothing and he would work the factories for the rest of his life. He felt terrible, he said, and wanted to show his parents that he could work. So what were his options?

Fido knew his chances of finding good-paying work were much better in the US. Since his aunt could give him a place to stay, he thought had a shot at getting ahead. It was wrenching for him to leave his family and friends in Empalme, he said, but he felt like he had to do it for his future.

Since August, Fido has been working five days a week at McDonalds, making more than five times the amount he made working longer hours at the factory, enough to help Aunt Irene with the bills and send $65 a week to his family in Empalme. Since the cost of living is much lower in Mexico, the money he saves will help him live well when he goes back to Mexico. His mother hopes he will go back soon.
“He’s my baby,” said Rodolfo’s mother Irma when she came to visit him in late February. “It’s his life and he can do what he wants, but I miss him,” she said with tears floating in her eyes. She spent five hours on a bus each way to be with him for a Saturday afternoon. It was the first time she had seen him since Christmas. It had been a too long, she said.

If Fido wants to pursue a career in technology in the US, as he hopes to do, he has to overcome more than just the pain of missing his family and friends.

Since he came into the country with a passport and doesn’t have a visa, he either has to get one or become a permanent resident to remain in the US legally. Having a degree will help Rodolfo apply for permanent residency offered only to skilled workers. But each step of the Citizenship and Immigration Service's application process takes time to process. If Rodolfo were to take this route instead of trying to get a temporary visa, his first step would be to complete a 12-page application for permanent residency, which requires a processing fee of $350 for some applicants. He must also include biographical and medical information on another set of forms. And since an application is given more weight if it includes an affidavit of support from a future employer,

Fido would have to be hired before he could apply for a green card. In the meantime, if he wanted to work while all this is being processed, Rodolfo can apply for a temporary work visa, which of course takes time to be approved. The Citizenship and Immigration Service warns that application processing can take between 12 months to two years.

For unskilled workers, the situation is even grimmer. There are a few types of visas for agricultural workers, but often a person who wants to work legally in the US must immigrate to become a permanent resident. A person could try immigrating through marriage. Hopefuls could also try for admittance through the "Registry” which requires the applicant to have been a resident since at least 1972. The Diversity Lottery admits 55,000 immigrants a year, but since the program is for countries with low levels of immigrants to the US, Mexicans are excluded. Regardless of the route the hopeful immigrant takes, he or she must undergo sometimes extensive physical examinations, fill out complicated paperwork, and often must hire Spanish-speaking American lawyers to help with the application process, an endeavor which can cost thousands.

It would be nice for Fido to be able to have a professional career in the US, but it is only a distant possibility, he said. First he is trying to learn English from his coworkers and little cousins. And the process to work in the US is overwhelming to him. More than anything, he misses his life in the Mexico. He likes the culture more there, he said. Everyone is friendlier and there aren't so many strangers. If it were up to his mother, he would be back in Empalme in the next week. But he wants more than his life in Mexico can give him.

“I like that he came here. He is such a good boy," said Aunt Irene over a pot of enough tortilla soup to feed seven. "He deserves to be happy and to try to find what he wants."