Just a few miles from where I live in San Diego, the city of Tijuana is booming, expanding ever eastward as more and more people arrive at the border. Some of them are on their way into the United States , many others never make it any farther than Tijuana . Why are these people flocking to this over-populated city? Because to them, Tijuana seems better than the place they left. These people leave their loved ones behind and risk death, arrest and deportation to look for work elsewhere.
This is one of the reasons that Floresta first began working in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca twelve years ago.
Looking for a way to make more of a local impact, we began investigating the root reason that these people were emigrating. We found that people came from all over Mexico and Central America, but that an inordinately large proportion was Mixtecos from the mountains of Oaxaca , Mexico . Most of them came from small mountain villages where firewood and charcoal were among the principle economic products. Deforestation and land degradation is so bad in this region that one United Nations report called Oaxaca ‘the most eroded spot on earth’. Indeed, this is no coincidence. Most of these people would prefer to stay at home, to keep their families intact, and to live within their own culture, but environmental issues – deforestation and soil erosion - had forced them to seek opportunities elsewhere.
What we have observed is just the tip of the iceberg. More and more this type of environmental migration is drawing the attention of scholars and even national security analysts. The term ‘environmental refugee’, originally coined by Lester Brown, is gaining currency. According to Norman Myers, as many as twenty-five million environmental refugees existed in 1995, and by 1999 there were more environmental refugees than traditional refugees fleeing oppression or persecution.
This is a phenomenon that we also see in our work on the Haitian-Dominican border. The relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is complex, but in terms of immigration, it can be understood as very roughly analogous to the US relationship with Mexico . There are perhaps as many as one million Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic . The Dominican economy depends on them, despite the fact that a large portion of them are in the country illegally and face a tremendous amount of prejudice and discrimination. Nonetheless, for the Haitians the opportunities available to them in the Dominican Republic exceed those on their own eroded and desiccated lands.
On the border, north of La Descubierta, we found a particularly unique interaction. The Haitian side of the border is badly degraded and densely populated. The steep hillsides are an eroded patchwork of subsistence farms. On the Dominican side, the population density is low, with the typical Dominican farmer owning much more land, although much of it is steep and only marginally suited to agriculture. Nonetheless, the land is better than the Haitians have available and the proximity to the border gives the Dominicans a ready source of virtually free labor. Hundreds of Haitians cross the border daily, parading past a Dominican army checkpoint and walking as much as three or four hours each way to sharecrop Dominican hillsides. As sharecroppers, they pay a portion of their crop for the privilege of farming the land, thus there is little incentive for either landlord or laborer to ensure that it is done efficiently or sustainably. As a result, one can see the land degradation that characterizes much of Haiti extending ever further east into the Dominican mountains.
As Joel Simon says, talking about immigration in the book Endangered Mexico , “time after time I heard the same refrain, ‘porque la tierra ya no da,’ because the earth no longer gives.” We can change this circumstance by realizing how damaging the environment can affect entire communities. By planting trees and using enhanced agro-forestry techniques, the land can be restored and this refrain can be transformed into a joyous tune.
