Economic aid to give Mexicans, Central Americans work at home

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SAN FRANCISCO -- From her office, Diana Campoamor was networking -- meeting for drinks with a banker, compiling a briefing book for a foundation trustee, exchanging phone calls with colleagues in Mexico City.She was putting all the pieces in place so her group, Hispanics in Philanthropy, could cut its first check this month for a three-year, $219,000 grant to expand a goat-cheese cooperative in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.More goats, corrals, pasteurizing equipment and refrigerators should allow the operation to grow from one village to four, providing work for hundreds of peasant farmers who might otherwise join their siblings and cousins as illegal immigrants harvesting peaches, slaughtering chickens, driving nails and scrubbing dishes across the United States.The group's decision to fund economic development projects in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, after almost 25 years working in U.S. Latino communities, is part of a movement taking hold in Northern California to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration."People don't leave their homes unless there's a hardship, economic or political," said Campoamor, president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. "Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries."Immigration is again moving front and center on the U.S. political stage. On the presidential campaign trail, Republicans are vying to be the toughest on sealing the border and enforcing immigration law, while Democrats temper the bad-cop rhetoric with talk of guest-worker programs and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here.But if there is to be a lasting solution to illegal immigration, experts say, it will involve changes not just on this side of the border but in Mexico and Central America, which together account for three-fourths of the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the United States."As far as what I've read about what the candidates are saying, I don't see much discussion. It's cheap rhetoric," said Luis Guarnizo, a professor in the school of agriculture at the University of California-Davis. "Everybody's looking for a quick fix, the right slogan. ... But we have to look at the larger picture. This is not just a law-and-order issue, it involves economic issues, social issues. Migration is a global process."In Northern California, some grass-roots-development and immigrant groups are trying a different approach. They reason that if people in Latin America had a way to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty, they wouldn't need to leave home, risk their lives crossing the border and live on the margins of U.S. society to earn a living and support their relatives back home.The projects range from small to large, and involve a variety of players -- major foundations, socially conscious consumers and migrant workers themselves -- in diverse approaches to improving life in some of the communities that are sending undocumented immigrants north. They're helping build lagging village infrastructure, incubating productive rural projects and giving farmers fair access to global markets.Luis Alberto Rivera is president of an association of Californians originally from his hometown, Coalcoman, in the central Mexican state of Michoacan. Seeing thousands of Coalcomanenses migrate to the United States, Rivera and his compatriots were determined to do something to help improve life back home."We decided to push the authorities to clean the rivers, because they're polluted," said Rivera, a U.S. citizen, from his home near Modesto. "The whole ecosystem, the ability of people to get food from the river is destroyed. People are migrating because their life is over when the rivers are polluted. But if we go back and restore them, I think that's part of the solution."Rivera and members of his hometown association offered to fund a sewage-treatment plant and talked the town government into installing a system of sewers to collect the wastewater. They've set a fund-raising goal of $100,000 and have already held a couple of benefit dinners.And the group plans to apply for matching funds under the Three for One program, whereby the Mexican federal, state and local governments each pitch in a dollar for every dollar contributed to a project by Mexican migrants outside the country.Rivera hopes his efforts will encourage more migrants to get involved with their hometowns in Mexico and work to fix the problems that forced them to leave home in the first place.But some observers criticize the matching-fund program, saying it's the responsibility of the Mexican government to build clean water systems and to provide schools, ambulances and other infrastructure, not the duty of Mexicans who left home due to a lack of opportunity.After years of being all but ignored by their government, however, "the Three for One begins to signal to remittance senders that they're going to get some respect," said Campoamor.She is an advocate of building links between immigrants in the United States and their home countries, in the way that hometown associations do. But her organization has opted to channel its funds specifically into initiatives that create jobs in Latin American countries.For more information:Hispanics in Philanthropy: www.hiponline.org, 415-837-0427TransFair USA: www.transfairusa.org, 510-663-5260Three for One Program: www.ime.gob.mx, 213-487-6577(E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks(at)sfchronicle.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)