Some Migrants Are Swapping Their American Dream for a Mexican One – By Laura Gottesdiener and Daina Beth Solomon (Reuters) / Nov 24, 2023
SALTILLO, Mexico (Reuters) – On a recent factory shift in the northern Mexican city of Saltillo, Honduran refugee Walter Banegas extracted a steaming-hot piece of molded metal destined for a street lamp from a die-casting machine.
Banegas, 28, said he first fled to the U.S. as a teenager to avoid being recruited by a powerful drug gang, only to be deported in 2014. He re-entered planning to seek asylum in 2020, and was deported again.
So when Banegas fled gang threats in Honduras once more in 2021, he set his sights not on the United States, but Mexico. He was granted refugee status in January and with assistance from a United Nations refugee program, relocated to Saltillo and was paired with a job at Pace Industries, a Michigan-based metal casting manufacturer with plants in the U.S. and Mexico.
Long known as a country of emigration and transit, Mexico in the last five years has become a destination for a small but growing number of refugees, attracted by a less restrictive asylum system than in the U.S. as well as plentiful jobs due to the country’s labor shortage.
