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captioning sponsored annenbe/cpb narrator: in the region of latin america, a key geographical issue isopulation-- its distributionand rad. inub-region of mexico, welso oklationstributionand rad. movement, or migration both within mexico and north tohe u.s. we explore a major and unexpected source of migras caedw re bskf e usionofaquies can change the rate of flow, or if a new u.s. border policy is having an unintended consequence. ( helicopter whirring ) narrator: every day, thousands of mexicans cross the border illegally into the united states. ofte those hopes are arrested manyre at the border.

man: ahora lista pont la mano en frente... narrator: the u.s. i.n.s., or immigration and naturalization service, records each apprehension on standard forms, including one entry with hidden lue: it washe migrants' home towns inexico. that's whabringseograpr chard jones to the i.n. it washe migrants' home towns with a novel reseah plan. jones knows that ecomic conditions vary greatly om region to region in mexico. he suspects that some places drive ou- or "push"-- many more migrants to the u.s. than others. hehis investigation beginses drily90s- or "push"-- aris home inanoniotes. hehis ijones lieves beginses many secrets are stored in i.n.s. files like tse. can theyeveal where most migrants come from? can the answers help both countries

keep more people at home? cjones sampless every tenth record, writing down the area of origin within mexico. back in hioffice at the university of texas, he enters the values into a map of mexico. jones marks in blue the townships that senan above-arage number of migrantso e u.s. a pattern emerges that reveals much about thchanging econoc numbesocial condition u.s. of mexico's diverse geograic regions. on the west coast, townships marked in blue migrah. thgu swe boegionsare economically dic moste thcial agriculre migrah. a rong pum iyorousm

r sout isnor source. nes: weecand we did, because anrom e sthis is an area of close-knit indigenous communies, aneconomic and social barrie fothose people make it difficult for them to come here. narrator: heonfirms that a large number of migrants veome from the northern border region and from the metropolitan center, including mexico city. ar regio has, for almost a hundred years, been the west central region, that is, jalisco, michoacan. and we found that indeed, it was still t most important gion forendingignts. narrator: jones then sees a surprising cluster here, whe heecit. s:noceral mexico hascarcely been udd byociascntists. weererore suri s:noceral mexico hascarcely been udd heagni omigrat bfrom the nend a aso is was, weererore suri s:noceral mexico but to verify this, i needed to go into the field.

narrator: nes's research has brought him here, to the mesa dee, a high dry plateau beginning near mexico city and stretching to the u.s. border. and employment here:ditiaa gold andilver mining. but one look at the mines and a talk wh some remaining workers coirms the sad economic stistics. butchear mesutestand a drop ine talk wh some remaining workers haveut many bs here. jones: what we found in the north central region was a decline in proction and in employment in the mining sector, which corresponded, spatially, remarkably closely to the migration patterns. narrator: so mining incomeas lowered regional living standards. ( dog barking ) whatute cuural stor, where ma oers e oyed difficulties relso encouragtoigrate?

whatute cuural stor, where mait is 1994.d buenos días. narrator: nes arris at the farm of anastacio and ofelia near a municipio called cedral. their family sells goat meat in a local market. they also groworn, barley and a little wheat. but the climate makes farming a constant battle. its d soiluatys poor so when jones interviews anastacio, he is not surprised eau. translator: what kind of work did you do in the u.s.? cortaba los arbolitos... translator: i chopped christmas trees and picked apples. ( conversing ) narrator jones's findings challenge the widespread assumption that migra workers move permanently to the.s jones ( translated ): and you went how many times?

translator: six times. narrator: as hard as this land is, these people are attached to this place. many move noh to earn investment capital that they bring ord me anslor: many move ntoour fami investment cand your wife? aten pmegar. translator: most importantly, it was r e children'school, food and clothing. jones: the remittances which migrants bring back or send back are used by their families, first for food, then for educational health and small appliances, and then for larger investments such as improving a house or investments in agriculture. naator that is the nation's fouhn immi. largessource oincome, behind oil, manufacturing and tourism.

so in interviewing townspeople, jones is not surprised to fi atany family members have left home to find work. s research shows e u.s. locations ere opm ceal gone. rcbetween ma mouninanges, e meelors from tore afuentoast, e u.s. locations jones calls reg vealed tsidents reas are not migrating only to the united states. many come theexican border states, ere a speciazone was creed wi.sagreemen u.s. companies could loca new plants wiin0 kimete of t border toake advantage of cheap mexican labor

plants like is o iciudad a "maquila" is a measure of co jor corn oil given a farmer but the maquiladora plantse had "give back"ice. all theifinished pcts to the u.s. nothing made here could be sold in mexico. get nothing b wagesfotheilabo that sheltered local industries, but there was a ice technological know-how.tle e nortamerican free trade agreement, onafta, was crafted to gradual end those protections.w-how.tle theso now, the maquiladorasend the locafrom the u.s.ctions. and manyigrants from the holw core move to find eacother in cits soutof theorde ke ts.

they are also migrating here to monterrey.ther located in the northern border region, monterrey is mexico's third largest city and the country's center of heavy industry. richard jones arrives at montoi, the monterrey location of american-owned mattel toys, to continue his research as he expected, many of these workers came from the hollow core region, lured north by the higher salaries in the maquiladoras. aquí en la fábrica, pues, como le dijo... translator: re ithe factory we work an eight-hour day. for an eight-houday in my me town, they'd paybout 8,000 pesos. heren the factory we earn twice as much. narrator: at grote industries, most workers are women,

who assemble reflectors and ilg. th a pai62 cts perour. wthat's less than the goiageilg. in the north along the bor but it is more than new plants would ha to pa grote manager jaime gomez. sorobly we're going tourn t inhe north part of mexico. they're going to start to develop a lot of maquiladora businesses and because we're going, to run out of labor. so they have to go farther south. jones agrees that the abundance of cheaper labor in the hollow core will draw already, ofelia has a new new employment option hereouthg is is one of twoewmaquiloras ia that makes women's underwear. they are typical of maquilas moving south.

textile workers require fewer skills, so employers can pay them less than workers along the border. jones: sinare decentralizing into the north central region,s into some of the smaller pces, and this is having e beneficial effects of increasing the job rate and decreasing the u.s. migration rate. narrator: eight years later, and the numbers confirm his theories. nationwi after 2 e mber of maquilorjobs dipp witthe u.s. recession, but then reboued again. and employers certainly moved south. in 1993, nonborder states employed ten percent of maquila workers. in998, that percentage increased by over 50%. but how much did maquiladoras actually spread into the hollow core? between 1993 and 1998, these six states almost triple

their maquila employees, adding 44,000 new jobs. they gained jobs almost twice as fast as the rest of mexico. but wiinhenorte, ere isreatspat san luis potosí, where jonese studied the town of cedral,ico. gained only 2,0 new jobs. that's less than the naonal growth ra. and even though the wages are below those near the border, there is aficant multiplier effect. families spend a very highs are percentage of their incomeder, close tobut richard jones employ twas not just interested to see if maquiladoras would spread south, but whether they could keep people home and stop them from migrating. and re, new enforcement policies at the u.s. border

may have negated any gains realized by maquiladora diffusion. before 1993 the border patrol more or less looked the other way, allowing people to cross freely. once inside, the migrants with limited results. now the u.s. has erected fences and placedgents right up on ths of the border. it forces migrants to cross in remote deserts. overalf a million a year, and . bustileyss-- the get-tough approach has had an ironic and unintended consequence. now instead of crossing temporarily and rerning home with money, men either stay longer or bringir whole families and move permanentlytohe . it's just too dangerous to cross only have toake it once.ienow ms

every year now, 50,000 people from just one hollow core state-- michoacan-- migrate to the u.s. about half of them movemanently. moreichoacanos cly live in california, tex abanilnolanme them movemanently. so witborders thaton't sp mexicans, let alone terrorts, many starting to ask "is ere betterolicy? in theatmecasuegioofentral amea inmethr populationeycles has coapseanthen boomeand re ry

without enough land for their rising numbers, sociphows, including -uan migratiooverioe. in the highlands of guatemala, weary maya indians welcome a truce, following the peace accords of 1996. a victim of the violence wa, who lives in this house compound with her surviving grandchildren and their families. the pipes that carry this wa to t village were an innovation brought by her son. helso efforts to bui aoad aspeakingocalanguageh) translator: wanting those kinds of thingss in the eyes of certaineople.

it caused mo to go aroun that he's onlyoing in the ethat good woineople. because he's a member of the gueilla organization. naor:the organizaon was caolicction. his son, diego, was too young to remember his faer and grandfather when paramilitaries entered his compound in 1982. they beat, bound and took away first his grandfather, and then his father. ( speaking local language ) translator: i heard a shot, and i knew my son was dead. narrator: ten years later, a humaamong them,oup exhumed 1doña maglena's son., magd) ( wailing )

rrator: ego,n the center, watc as scientists revealed the crusng blow isatr'd now,0 yes afe muers, diego has grown and movedc s farmca longesuorhim. he now sells fit for five dolla day. te of thousas of otheraya haveigrated here, too. rural--urban migraon is a key regional feature in latin america. diego's siblings face the same problems. poquito nos tocó a cada uno y por eso que cada uno... naatorsince we eacht very little land, each one has to move to suprt one's family. that is why we are scaeredaloe narrator: the same forces at push indians out of tighlanalso le.

what a those forces, aha are the prospects for change? e orse will grow out for a historical geographer, the past is fertile ground. george lovell is researching patterns in both time and space explain t collapse-- and now the explosion-- of maya population aftethe conquest in the6th ceury, the spaniards had little interest in highland resources. they saw something in the hills more valuable than land. as labor the spaniards saved mayas' souls and forced their bodies to work silver mines

and lowland plantations. lovell: to supply them with ready pools of labor, ator: anis... and toive forced in compact tow like is.uild the w settlements, called congregaciones, were laid out in classic spanish-american grids and located in valleys. the dense urban settlement pattern helped decimate maya population. the conquistadors ought fromurope st of exotic diseases, likellpox. the close ling quarters andpod the vastating illness. lovell estimates that the guatemala maya numbered two million before the conquest,

and fell to 128,000 by 1625. it was part of the largest population collapse inuman history. but when the spanish empire itself collapsed here, many indianseft the conggaciones to return to their age-old pattern gradually otheir numbers, too, rebounded the pointhere many now fear a daerous polation explosion. georgeovelwants to know why. narrator: the year 2000, and doña magdalena is now 92. with diego now working in guatemala city, she relies on one of her oer grandso, paulino, george lovell visits still the gonzales farmd. to see if growth otheir familyps into t larger maya society.

whdid diego ha to leave? why cae upe whole mi haests of corn have sustained life here for ousands of yea the size of maya population was limited rgely e of the corn harvest. the land has been good to the gonzales family. doña magdalena now has 24 great-grandchildren. she has just divided the land into separate plots for her six grandchildren. t are e plots big enougheach fa?

lovell ( translating ): this is the boundary marker el betweemy land,iel... which lies behind me here, you casee just how narrow isy brthe strip of land is. rrator: paulino aws a simpleap whicto sw the layout.here, uh-huh. ah. narrator: doña magdalena's husba once farmed five acres en it suor11 peoe. now aso su? más que nos aguan es has. anslator we harvest ouro can last all of thfamily-- l nine ous-- until august. ifhe corn runs out before august, what that means is we'll just have to start working get money to buy the corn earlier.

paulino has to find other work for a good part of the year. that's wis brotherdiego, now lives in the city. he mrates seasonalfor mporary y o many maya for the land? maybe the problem is the way the land is used. george lovell heads off to study the dominant industry of the highlands. traditionally it is marked by tall trees g low shike is. this is a co fia. eh, r... pors o toaganquets poro trslatoronig quetzales . narrator: eight quetzales-- 0 a day-- iseager wage by a standar

it is commoncross guatemala. onoffee pofhe violenceke this,vt and grion. just three perce of guamalas by the m960s controedwo-thisofhe ae la. atel gw co perce of guamalas by the m960s he h cal,dwo-thisofhe ae la. most are cash crops for export. verywho pportoy rerns on the small remaining land. squalid using, impoverishing wages and and ofir own led many indians and with that desirehr si, came conflict.

in new milnnium but the underlying the gureproblems remain. maya't have enough lan who will soon reach to childbearing age. ere in willir culture and economy change to encourage family planning? aturrent rates will they ha access to birth control? the countrs population willow double in just 24 yea, compared with 120 years for the u.s. economics, religion and the ck of birth control mean that fertility rates remain economics, religion as high as they have been for centuries. at the other end of life, however, something has changed thsalu-aspanish foal. local clinics likeshave gre and keptopulatiohigh. for geographers like george lovell e goodews is tempe byace ground.

sos he ponde outlook for doña magdalena's he can only hope for a change in the balance of people to the land that supports them. the inequitiesesult from three cycles of conquest, lasting over 500 years. as maya population continues to grow, a ck of nd reforjust sures greasoci ueaval lasting over 500 years.

in guatemala. captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org