As a girl, Marisol Inesta-Miro heard stories about her aunt Julia and uncle Hipolito who migrated from the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico to the boroughs of New York. He found a job at an automobile plant. She toiled at a sewing machine.
They were part of a wave of Puerto Rican migrants that surged in the 1950s, reaching other cities across the country, including Chicago.
Nearly 50 years later, Inesta-Miro is part of a new wave of Puerto Rican immigrants to the U.S. who are better educated and enticed to the mainland by professional jobs paying good wages.
Last summer, Inesta-Miro and her husband, John Lopez-Haage, settled with their three children in a town home in suburban Warrenville after the couple were recruited for jobs by Lucent Technologies Inc. in Naperville.
The new migration is welcomed by local firms, which gain qualified, bilingual workers and diversity in their workforces. The force behind the new wave is economic turmoil on the island that has created a scarcity of jobs for the large supply of college graduates.
“There were not too many opportunities back in Puerto Rico,” said Lopez-Haage, who has an engineering degree from Inter American University at San German. “A lot of our friends–doctors and artists–also have moved to the states.”
Said Aida Giachello, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “You can get a master’s degree and wind up working (as a clerk) in Plaza las Americas mall (in Puerto Rico).”
Since the days of early migration, in the 1940s, about 40 percent of the Puerto Rican population has left the island. Today, there are 3 million Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. mainland, while 4 million inhabit the island.
About 5,000 Puerto Ricans migrate to Chicago annually, according to the latest data from the Puerto Rican Planning Board in San Juan, and nearly half said in surveys that they were coming to accept jobs or look for work.
Since Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, the only barriers to living in the U.S. are opportunity and money. In addition to finding jobs in high-tech fields, many recent immigrants have landed in the banking industry, education and health-care fields, said Vicky Grundler, a Puerto Rican immigrant completing a doctorate in clinical psychology.
“It’s not about sewing or working in a factory,” said Grundler, who migrated nine years ago. “It’s about better job opportunities and education and the feeling that living in Puerto Rico is not enough.”
On the island, about half the inhabitants live in poverty, even though 14 percent of all residents are college graduates. In the U.S., 9 percent of Hispanics have a college degree, compared with 24 percent of whites and 13 percent of African-Americans, according to census figures.
Unemployment in Puerto Rico reached 15 percent in 1997, according to commonwealth figures. The high rate is due in part to scalebacks by U.S. companies that are losing longtime tax incentives. A 1976 provision in the Federal Internal Revenue Code gave companies full tax exemptions on profits for a limited time, but that was cut to 40 percent in 1993, and now the tax breaks are being phased out completely.
Inesta-Miro said that her family encouraged her to seek a job with a U.S. company near her hometown on the island. But she said that company recently closed its manufacturing plant, cutting 1,500 jobs.
“So many people there are struggling,” said Inesta-Miro, 31, who works as a software tester for Lucent.
The U.S. claim on the island dates to the end of the Spanish-American War, in 1898, when Spain lost Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico’s residents gained U.S. citizenship in 1917, and the island became a commonwealth in 1952.
The decades-old debate over whether Puerto Rico should remain a commonwealth, seek independence or become a state is being discussed again this year by the U.S. Congress and the Puerto Rican government.
But the political debate has not stemmed the migration. Puerto Ricans first came to Chicago in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s, according to census figures. Many of them found jobs as contract laborers in domestic and foundry work. Relatives and friends also spread the word that there were ample jobs in Chicago, compared to cities such as New York that had larger Puerto Rican communities.
In 1960, there were more than 32,000 Puerto Ricans living in Chicago. By 1990 that number had grown to about 121,000, according to census figures, making Puerto Ricans the second-largest Latino group in the city after Mexicans.
Local companies have begun recruiting in Puerto Rico in recent years because of the abundance of qualified, skilled, bilingual applicants.
“Not only are their GPAs great, but their educational background is excellent,” said Nellie Gonzalez, a recruiting director with Andersen Consulting LLP.
In the past year, Andersen has recruited 43 students from Puerto Rico for full-time jobs in the U.S., said Gonzalez, also of Puerto Rican descent.
Three years ago, William Velez left his home in Carolina, Puerto Rico, for an internship at Motorola Inc. in Schaumburg. In January, he moved to the New York area, where he is a global technology integration services analyst for Andersen.
“It was tough to leave everything over there and come here by yourself,” said Velez, 25.
Lopez-Haage paraphrased the words of a Puerto Rican writer in explaining how many Puerto Rican migrants feel.
“You leave your heart back there,” said the 34-year-old systems engineer, “but your brains are here.”
