Sugar Cane Producers, confirm that they have been forced to hire foreign personnel to replace day laborers.
The Maya Train triggered foreign immigration in Quintana Roo, to the point that in the last year alone more than 13 thousand people from different countries, mainly Central America, have arrived to fill the deficit of day laborers in the fields and of workers in the construction sector.
Precisely that is a problem that Alerta Agenda Migrante, promoter of the “Safe, orderly, humane and productive migrant model”, highlighted in a report from last November that once these workers are no longer needed, the authorities will face a serious problem because they will not know what to do with them.
Marilyn Torres Leal, president of the CISVAC foundation for migrant support, said that, although the Federal Government only counts 1,943 migrants in a situation that arrived between August 2022 and November 2023 to Quintana Roo, the reality is that this number is six times higher.
“Until a few years ago, we only attended 10 or 15 people a week who only passed through the state on their way to cross to the United States, but today we support almost 70 a week who are in the Mexican Caribbean who came to work in the field or in the works, since most of them were hired by the deficit of workers faced by the agricultural and construction sector since their workers are now in the Maya Train,” he said.
He pointed out that most of them are Central Americans who saw the opportunity to earn money in the State, although he clarified that they do not consider that they are going to stay permanently, since their interest is to save enough to continue their way to the neighboring country of the north.
Evaristo Gómez, president of the local Union of Sugar Cane Producers in Quintana Roo, confirms that they have been forced to hire foreign personnel to replace the more than 1,500 day laborers they lost with the federal work.
However, he notes that this could be only temporary, since it is expected that once the Maya Train is completed, most of the workers will return to the field to work in the Zafra. It is then that they do not know what will happen to the immigrants.
Source: Novedades Quintana Roo
