By Margie Fishman
It has been 11 years since Cristobal Quintanar left Tijuana on a Wednesday night, scaling a gas pipe and hopping an inflatable raft. By Thursday morning, he was sunning himself in Los Angeles.
Four menial jobs, one wife and a toddler later, Quintanar’s income neatly matched his expenses. Then the recession hit, compounded by Georgia’s illegal immigrant crackdown, House Bill 87, which took effect in July. The new measures included making it a felony to use false information when applying for a job, along with establishing a review board to investigate and punish government officials who violate the immigration reforms.
Living and working in the Atlanta area, Quintanar, a 25-year-old groundskeeper, struggled to save $3,000 as a cushion. That evaporated earlier this year when immigration authorities detained his cousin in Lumpkin, and Quintanar had to pitch in for legal fees. In September, Quintanar received his own $800 citation for driving without a license in Gwinnett County.
“I am a fighter,” he boasted recently, shrugging off the implications of his Nov. 21 court date. Sporting a sparse goatee and ratty Nautica sweatshirt, he resembled a defiant teenager. Meanwhile, his leathery fingers trembled.
An emergency fund is one of those fundamental elements in a personal finance strategy, helping individuals weather the unpredictable. For the estimated 425,000 undocumented immigrants in Georgia, the majority of them Mexicans, this is their rainy day — mounting job losses, traffic ticket fines, immigration bonds and a political majority intent on showing them the door. Yet the money is not there.
“They stretch the dollar to the max,” explained Rep. Pedro Marin, D-Duluth, an outspoken critic of HB 87. “And it is still not enough.”
Scrambling for a lifeline
The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, one of the groups supporting a pending lawsuit against HB 87, is advising undocumented immigrants to set aside $25,000 to cover the cost of moving — voluntarily or not — at a moment’s notice.
Teodoro Maus, the organization’s president, recognizes that level of safety net is unfathomable to most undocumented immigrants. But he also understands the stiff penalties for driving without a license in Georgia, a misdemeanor punishable by fines of $500 to $5,000, depending on previous convictions, and mandated jail time. Immigration bonds, used for detainees held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, can cost upwards of $10,000.
Situated in an unmarked office where a two-way mirror functions as a front door, the Latino alliance fields phone calls daily from immigrants caught in police checkpoints, the first step in a downward spiral.
Among the stack of complaints, one U.S. citizen born in Puerto Rico said her husband, who entered the U.S. illegally, was detained after being cited for driving without a license. The incident occurred in Cobb County, where Sheriff Neil Warren touts his ranking as the “top ten toughest immigration sheriffs” on his department’s website.
All told, the man’s fines and bonds amounted to more than $8,500. His wife had saved less than half that amount. Alliance staffers encouraged her to set up a ChipIn account to collect donations on Facebook and, if necessary, stop paying rent.
“We’re not advising immigrants to leave if they can survive here,” Maus said.
To make ends meet, he added, the undocumented are resorting to predatory lending, pawning their car titles or using their homes as collateral for bonding companies, which charge exorbitant fees. During a recent visit, Maus pointed to the Spanish-language newspaper, El Nuevo Georgia, littered with ads from immigration attorneys, not all of them above bar.
Other immigrants try to pool their money with family and friends.
“It’s truly a remarkable display of community,” said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-area immigration attorney who is fighting Georgia’s law in court. “These immigrants lead extraordinarily frugal lives. I don’t know how they stretch $20 as far as they do.”
In June, a federal judge temporarily struck down the two most controversial measures of HB 87, pending an outcome in the lawsuit. These measures involved punishing people who transport and harbor illegal immigrants while in the process of committing another crime, and authorizing police to investigate the immigration status of suspects without proper identification.
The courts have blocked parts of similar laws in Arizona, Utah and Indiana.
Saving for today
Exacerbating the savings gap for illegal immigrants is the reality that foreign-born residents of the U.S. are much less likely than their native-born counterparts to use financial services, including savings and checking accounts, business loans and home mortgages. Immigrant access is further impeded by low income, language barriers, residential segregation, legal identification issues, a culture of familial interdependence, and general mistrust of financial institutions.
Two-thirds of Mexican immigrants — legal and illegal — remain unbanked, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., making them more vulnerable to economic fluctuations and unforeseen expenses. Latino advocates acknowledge that immigrants are more likely to squirrel away their cash under a mattress or in a cubbyhole, increasing the chances of theft. More than half of Hispanic households have no accumulated assets in a 401(k) or IRA, according to the National Council of La Raza, an organization promoting Hispanic civil rights.
Many immigrants also rely on check cashers, whose fees can add up to $40,000 over a customer’s working life, a recent Brookings Institution study found. A payday loan is even more costly — about 30 times the annualized interest rate of an average credit card.
In response, major banks have experimented with offering more tailored, bilingual services, recognizing that Hispanics represent an untapped market.
El Banco de Neustra Comunidad, a division of Community & Southern Bank with seven branches in Georgia catering to immigrants, experienced a surge in customers closing accounts immediately before HB 87 took effect.
To boost confidence, the bank offered customers the option to sign over power of attorney, allowing the bank to wire funds to their home countries if they had to leave unexpectedly, said El Banco president Luz Urrutia.
Before the recession, El Banco’s deposit volume had been growing 10% a year. Today, it is flat.
“It started with the economic downturn,” Urrutia explained. “The immigration policy was the icing on the cake.”
National surveys show that Hispanics were hit hardest by the housing market crisis, because they derived more of their net worth from home equity, and a disproportionate number resided in states at ground zero of the housing meltdown.
In Georgia, 40 percent of Hispanics younger than 18 were living at or below the poverty line in 2009, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Nearly half of the state’s more than 800,000 Hispanics lacked health insurance.
Meanwhile, Hispanics continue to send a significant portion of their salaries back to their home countries. In 2008, Georgia’s migrants transferred more than $1.4 billion in remittances to Latin America, the seventh-highest of all the states, according to the most recent survey for the Inter-American Development Bank. The average payment was $370, sent 16 times a year.
Worldwide, remittances from migrants represent Mexico’s second-largest source of foreign income after oil exports. Following a steep decline in 2009, money transfers to Mexico bounced back during the first six months of this year, totaling more than $11 billion.
Over the years, Quintanar, who has a Bank of America account that he opened with his Mexican passport, has used a portion of his U.S. income to put his two brothers and one sister through secondary school in Mexico, along with sending one to a local university.
“In Mexico, I wouldn’t even earn enough money to feed my family,” he said.
States take hard line
Georgia is among a string of states to clamp down on illegal immigration this year. Following Arizona’s lead, five states have attempted to address the ripple effects from porous borders. Supporters of such legislation argue that illegal immigrants take jobs from unemployed U.S. citizens, contribute disproportionately to crime, urban sprawl and environmental degradation, and burden schools and hospitals.
“An illegal immigrant who makes less money has less to save, and is going to be a greater economic burden on state and local coffers,” said Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tighter immigration controls. “We can offer a warmer welcome to those who play by the rules.”
The U.S. has experienced an explosive rise in anti-immigrant sentiment since the late 1990s, fueled by major demographic shifts and projections that whites will constitute less than half of the U.S. population by 2042. The rhetoric intensified in 2005, when the first Minutemen volunteers began monitoring a stretch of Arizona’s border.
The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. has tripled over the last two decades, even as their population declined for two straight years during the recession. In 2010, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that there were more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., virtually unchanged from a year earlier.
Home to the fastest growing population of Latinos in the country, the South offered plentiful construction and manufacturing jobs throughout the 1990s, luring immigrants away from crushing poverty in their home countries. Nationally, migrants earned an average of $160 a month in their last job in Latin America, while they averaged $900 a month in their first job in the U.S., according to the Inter-American Development Bank survey.
Today, Georgia’s unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent, worse than the national average. The unemployment rate for Hispanics in Georgia stood at 11.5 percent last year, but advocates believe that is a gross underestimate given the number of undocumented workers who are not being tracked.
In August, following a record year of deportations, the Obama administration announced that it would concentrate its deportation efforts on violent criminals who pose a threat to national security.
Since the federal pronouncement, two individuals have been released from Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, according to Georgia Detention Watch, a coalition of immigrant advocates who monitor detainees in Georgia. Opened in 2006, Stewart is one of the largest federal immigration centers in the U.S, with 20,000 immigrants passing through each year.
“The federal government has made a statement but it has not followed through,” said Anton Flores-Maisonet, one of Georgia Detention Watch’s founding members. “Every weekend, we’re seeing families lose their primary wage earner.”
Even with HB 87 on the books, Gwinnett and Cobb, the two counties with the largest Hispanic populations in the state, have detained fewer immigrants this year compared to last year, according to county records. Both counties participate in the controversial 287(g) program, under which state and local police are empowered to enforce federal immigration laws.
Latino advocates are quick to dismiss those statistics, noting that it is difficult to quantify the large number of illegal immigrants who left Georgia for “friendlier” states like Illinois and California, or returned to their home countries in the months leading up to HB 87’s adoption. Other immigrants are behaving cautiously, riding their bikes to work, hitching a ride with friends or avoiding Gwinnett and Cobb altogether, Maus said.
Hometown pride
Jessica Colotl, brought to this country illegally 13 years ago, became a symbol for the immigration divide when she was nearly deported last year, after being stopped for a minor traffic violation at her school. Colotl was charged with driving without a license and spent more than a month in an Alabama detention center before the federal government granted her a yearlong deferment to complete her studies at Kennesaw State University. That deferment was extended by another year in May.
Now working as a legal assistant for the law firm that took on her case for free, Colotl is pursuing law school to become an immigration attorney. Still, she struggles to build a nest egg, budgeting 50 percent for needs, 30 percent for wants and 20 percent for savings.
The needs column is replete with government fines, work permit application fees and payments to family members who loaned Colotl money for her schooling. In early October, she appeared before a Superior Court judge on felony charges that she lied to deputies about her address. The case is ongoing.
Still, Colotl insists, “there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
“I still think of Georgia as my hometown,” she said.
Quintanar is similarly optimistic, confident that he will keep his longtime job earning $10 an hour at a sprawling private estate in Atlanta. He started working in the U.S. at age 14, busing tables at a Buckhead bar.
His current employer knows he is undocumented, he said, adding that he pays taxes through a tax identification number. Currently, HB 87 only requires companies with more than 10 employees to use the federal E-verify system to check applicants’ immigration status.
The more nagging concern for Quintanar is possible jail time, which could lead to deportation. His wife, also an illegal immigrant, cares full-time for their four-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen.
Three days before Thanksgiving, Quintanar will have his day in court.
Asked if it was all worth it, he told the following anecdote: The other day, his mother watched a stranger get shot seven times in front of her house in Mexico. It took an hour for the police to arrive.
So, yes, he says without hesitation, “it’s all worth it.”
Sidebar: Where the money goes
Cristobal Quintanar earns approximately $368 a week after taxes working as a groundskeeper in Atlanta. This is how he spends his income, leaving him with about $32 in savings each month.
