It was 2005 and Cesar Estelar was just 19 years old. Setting off from the border town of Tecate, he walked for hours in the rain, wanting nothing other than to run back to the familiarity of his Mexico City flat.

He kept trekking anyway, his 2-month-old son in the back of his mind.

Everyone told him he could make a lot of money in the states; he planned to send it back to his son’s mother, in hopes of building him a better life.

With the help of a “coyote,” eventually, he made it to Los Angeles. From there, he squished into a bus with 25 others and made the 20-hour journey north, eventually settling in Renton, Washington with his mother, who’d crossed the border herself years before.

Within five months, he had reliable job with a construction company, building houses in the rain and the cold. Sometimes he could barely move his hands, but the hours were reasonable, his boss was friendly and the job paid many times more than what he could make in Mexico.

He thought of that money while he sat, silent and alone, slurping bowls of his newfound favorite Vietnamese pho soup.

After four years in the states, he flew back to Mexico for the first time for his brother’s wedding.

His boss, James Watanabe, emailed him to tell him he could potentially get him the documents necessary to work legally in the U.S. and eventually pave his path to citizenship. Those golden papers would mean an end to sneaking, smuggling, breaking the law.

Again, he thought of the money he was making in Seattle.

He didn’t care.

Cesar Estelar never came back to the U.S.

Mexican immigrants, about half of whom are estimated to enter the country illegally, are returning to their home country at a staggering rate — and not just because they’re being deported.

Despite the stereotypical images the term “undocumented immigrant” might conjure up — of Mexican laborers sent back protesting, handcuffed — an estimated 90 percent of Mexican immigrants who return home do so on their own terms. Some find the U.S. job market to be less lucrative than they’d hoped. Others face crippling alienation, usually paired with a desperate longing for their own culture.

Most, like Cesar Estelar, simply miss home.

 “One can earn more money there, buy more things, but feel more alone,” Cesar Estelar, now 29, said of his brief time in the states.

Between 2005 and 2010, 1.4 million immigrants moved back to Mexico from the U.S. — about double the number who returned during the previous five-year period. During the same time period, Mexican immigration to the U.S. was at about the same level — roughly 1.4 million Mexican immigrants moved to the U.S.

Based on the data, experts surmise that net migration to and from Mexico is at zero, or even less.

“One can earn more money there, buy more things, but feel more alone.”

Pew Research Center senior demographer and U.S. immigration expert Jeffrey Passel says the rate stayed “pretty close to zero” from 2009 to 2012. He said the housing market and general economic decline led to the initial spike in Mexicans returning home. Although the data is the most recent available, he said the flow is believed to have remained relatively stagnant since, with fewer undocumented immigrants coming to the states than are returning to Mexico, while more legal immigrants with papers are coming than returning.

Other factors include stronger border enforcement and improved economic conditions in Mexico. As a result, fewer Mexicans want to immigrate to the U.S. Also, lower birth rates in Mexico have meant less fiscal demand to move.

 While emigration from Mexico appears to be dropping, emigration from Central American countries seems to be rising. There was an approximately 68 percent increase last year in border apprehensions from countries other than Mexico, mostly El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Meanwhile, there was a 14 percent drop in apprehensions of Mexicans over the same time period. Of course, estimates of undocumented immigration based on border apprehensions are flawed because they also reflect changing border enforcement efforts.

Watanabe, Cesar Estelar’s boss for the majority of his time in the states, says that based on his experience he expects about 80 percent of the migrant workforce at his construction company will return home permanently at some point. He says it’s never planned or discussed; most workers just generally return to Mexico eventually.

The phenomenon at Watanabe’s company stacks up with the general trend in Mexican migration. Mexican immigrants tend to arrive, and then go back home after a period as short as a few months or as long as several years, in a practice known as circular migration.

About 84 percent of Mexican migrants said they came to the U.S. with the intent to eventually leave again.

Still, Watanabe says he sticks to hiring Latin workers, even if it means constantly cycling through them.

 “Americans are lazy,” he complains. He says he has about 18 employees, all Hispanic, only one of whom entered the country legally.

He added that unlike other construction businesses in King County, who tend to have a “wage-scale for Americans, and a wage scale for Mexicans,” he pays his workers as much as he can afford.

While some Mexicans choose to go home because of poor economic opportunity, Cesar Estelar had found financial security at Watanabe’s business.

He also found comfort in living with his mother, who moved to the states soon after he was born to provide for him, just as he did for his son. He lived in her house with his stepfather and his three half-brothers.

“It took me eight months in Renton to meet my neighbor.”

In addition to family, he made friends. He played indoor club soccer with Tukwila’s Starfire team. Once, he says, they beat the Sounders team back before it entered the MLS.

Still, thoughts of the “compadre” nature of people back home — how they tend to be friendlier, closer and more open, pervaded his mind. “It took me eight months in Renton to meet my neighbor,” Cesar Estelar said incredulously. I finally saw him and asked, ‘are you my neighbor?’”

In Mexico City, he compared, the whole street piles into one house for dinner.

Miguel Diaz García made a similar, though longer trek at age 31, from Guadalajara, Mexico to the Seattle area. After a 15-day voyage, he arrived in Issaquah, where he lived with his sister, brother-in-law and his two nephews.

He quickly found a job at an Italian restaurant, where he found washing marinara-splattered dishes painfully mundane.

“Every day was the same,” Diaz García complained. “Everything was automatic.”

After work, he wrote pining letters to his wife, Luisa. “I’m still the same,” he would write. “Everything is still the same.”

After a year of repetition and longing, he asked himself why he was still here.

So he went home. He went back to his carpentry job and into the arms of his wife, and didn’t look back.

“One works here, and works there. You earn here, and you earn there,” Diaz García explained. “The difference is that here you earn 20 pesos, and there you earn 20 dollars.”

While he cherishes learning some English and the relationships he built, pain the separation caused him is visible in his eyes as he steals glances back at his wife.

“I don’t miss it,” he admits. “But life is an experience, the good and the bad.”

 Since he returned to Mexico six years ago, Cesar Estelar has managed to find a job as a police officer in Mexico City. He says he earns less than when he was in Renton, but he also works less.

He misses Japanese and Chinese food, especially Kung Pao shrimp.

“You can’t find that in Mexico City,” he says.

He misses his soccer buddies and the other life-long friendships he built.

But the day he returned home to Mexico City, he said he felt “like a kid on Christmas.

He’s getting married next year, and his fiancée is eager to visit his extended family in Seattle someday. Visions from “Grey’s Anatomy,” the setting of “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the hope of seeing snow for the first time fuel her desire.

Her eager eyes hint she feels the same allure of the U.S. that Cesar Estelar and so many Mexicans before him did.

Cesar Estelar, however, is content to stay home in Mexico City.

Source: The Seattle Globalist