Alma Rosa Andrade left her infant daughter in Mexico to find work in Chicago, dreaming of saving enough money to return home and open a clothing store.
After more than a year of temporary jobs, she landed a waitressing job making $40 a day in tips–until Sept. 11.
Her tips dropped to about $12 daily. Disillusioned and unwilling to sacrifice more time away from her daughter for so little money, Andrade returned to Mexico.
“I missed my daughter. She walked her first steps; her first teeth came out,” Andrade said by phone from Mexico. “Now I feel so happy. I’m enjoying her and my family and my friends. With the economic aspect, it’s the same, but I can work selling clothes.”
Community advocates say more undocumented Hispanic workers are departing the Chicago area rather than struggling to find jobs in the service and manufacturing industries, which have been hurt by the stagnating economy and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
No one can quantify how many have left, but Ric Estrada of the Erie Neighborhood House in West Town, which serves thousands of Mexicans a year, estimates that immigrants are twice as likely now to make that choice because of the economy.
The more who leave, the longer it will take for those industries to rebound when the economy recovers, job specialists say.
“Foreign workers were critical in the past decade to the growth and success of our industry,” said John Gay, vice president of government affairs for the American Hotel and Lodging Association, representing 13,000 hotels nationwide. “Once the economy picks up again, they’ll be critical to the future success of the industry.”
Alicia Hernandez won’t be here when things turn around. She tried to return to the paint factory where her husband works and where she worked before she gave birth to a daughter more than two months ago, but the promise of a job had evaporated. With it went her will to stay in this country.
“What am I doing here, paying rent and bills? My family says it’s better I return to Mexico than be here spending all that I make on rent,” said Hernandez, who already has sent some of her belongings and plans to follow when her daughter is a little older. “Here from the beginning my goal was to make a house for my children, but if we can’t reach that dream, we’ll go back.”
Still, most Hispanics seem to be hanging on, unwilling to give up, especially in light of the sacrifices many of them made to get here, community leaders say. They hope to ride out unemployment or inconsistent work by moving in with relatives or acquaintances and not sending money to their families.
Silvia Nunez, 31, is supporting her child on the overtime she earned in the summer because the days she could find work dropped significantly after the terrorist attacks. But she isn’t going anywhere.
“I came with the illusion of a girl. I liked the clothes. I imagined what people here were like,” Nunez said. “I can’t explain it, but even though I see hard times I don’t want to leave. I don’t know what this country has, but I don’t want to leave it.”
The choice to stay or go is complicated by the perception of many immigrants that they could be under higher scrutiny given the war on terrorism.
“There’s a sense that `Do we stay here when there aren’t many jobs, or do we go back fearful of ever getting back here?'” said Michael McConnell, regional director for the American Friends Service Committee.
More and more of those remaining need help and are turning to food banks, to social service agencies for counseling, and to their churches for spiritual solace. Particularly vulnerable are newer immigrants, said Estrada, associate executive director of Erie Neighborhood House.
“The real underclass is the undocumented population that have been here from one day to two or three years. They have the fewest options in terms of jobs, mobility and housing,” he said.
Jim DuPont, staff director for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 1, said thousands of workers, mostly Hispanic, have been laid off by Chicago hotels and restaurants. Since the attacks, he estimates 1,000 jobs a day have been lost, half of them held by Hispanics. About 40 percent of the 7,000 jobs his union supplies on a daily basis are taken by Hispanics, DuPont said.
Even before Sept. 11, hotel occupancy in Chicago was lower than in 2000, resulting in 15 to 20 percent fewer jobs, he said.
“It was kind of slowing down,” DuPont said. “But now the bottom fell out here. We don’t expect any relief until the spring at best.”
The union also represents 2,000 workers who make food for airplanes flying out of O’Hare International Airport. There, 700 people have either been laid off or are about to be, DuPont said, with half being Hispanic.
“First they cut flights, now they are dropping food from their shorter flights, which has caused a second wave of layoffs,” he said.
Landscaping is another source of jobs for immigrants that has been hard hit in such suburbs as Hanover Park, Carpentersville and Elgin, said Audrey Reed, executive director of Centro de Informacion, a social service organization in Elgin. Work is lost as homeowners cut back on luxuries, she said.
Manufacturing jobs also are more scarce. Harvey Cole, president of Elite Staffing Inc., which supplies light industrial temporary workers to 600 clients in the Chicago area, has seen a decline in the number of jobs he can offer his predominantly Hispanic labor force.
Over the last decade, he had been able to count on work doubling in the early fall. This year, it dropped about 10 percent, he said.
The pain of lost wages is evident throughout Hispanic communities. Estrada’s agency had almost twice as many families visit its food and clothing banks in October as in August. Families, typically crowding together to live more cheaply, are squeezing even more people in, said Rey Flores, organizer for the Latino Task Force Against Homelessness.
Two weeks after the attacks, Maria Gutierrez, 42, of Pilsen, could only work one day a week as a housekeeper, compared with her usual five or six plus overtime. She had to rent out the other bedroom in the apartment she shares with her husband, Tino Chavez.
But recently, the other couple, who had been in Chicago for about five years, went back to Mexico, Gutierrez said.
Jose Bernal, 40, who has lived in Chicago for 20 years, feels as many immigrants do–he’ll stay put unless the economy really worsens. He shares the home he has owned for 11 years with two other families, and his mattress with his two youngest children. He boils water on the stove for heat now that he works in a factory for less than half the $11 an hour he used to earn.
“To die here of hunger, I’ll return to my land,” he said.
