Health care and the new white flight

By Lisa Morgan Wallace
March 08, 2010

There is a new "white flight" happening. This time it is not Caucasians fleeing the city for the suburbs, but American citizens are leaving their home country. A complete displacement results, whereby Latinos are moving into formerly white neighborhoods and becoming the American majority.

"Foreign- and native-born Mexican Americans in the United States will amount to 49 percent of the total Mexican population by 2030," prize-winning Mexican demographer Roberto Ham-Chande said last month at a joint World Health Organization (WHO) and Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Conference. My jaw dropped. Granted, I shouldn't have been so surprised, considering that I was sitting as the ‘sola gringa’ in a room full of brilliant Latino academics.

Still, the forecast was a shocking one further exacerbated by the Texas state demographer's projection that Hispanics will be the majority of Texans by 2015.These statistics indicate that a mass migration across the southern United States border will continue for years to come.

Such patterns indicate that, not unlike water molecules across a membrane, people will flow continuously across political borders so long as there is an imbalance of opportunities on each side. Beyond employment, these also include quality of life and affordable health care, which are no longer ubiquitously available in the United States.

While Mexicans might travel to the United States in search of better economic opportunities, Americans are going to Mexico in search a better quality of life, lower costs of living and access to affordable, quality health care.

A 2002 U.S. Census Bureau report estimated that 9.9 million Americans were living in Mexico. The Mexico National Population Council's projects that 3.5 million to 5 million American immigrants move to Mexico each decade.

Many of these individuals settle in communities of American and Canadian émigrés in places such as Puerto Vallarta, Lake Chapala, Baja California Sur, Cuernavaca and San Miguel de Allende, which serve largely as refuges for the medically uninsured and retirees looking for a lower cost of living and health care.

While Mexico's physicians lure medical tourists and American migrants to their offices, our own hospital systems are following these individuals abroad to attempt to retain their patronage. Texas-based Christus Health System, for example, has established its Mexican arm named Christus Muguerza in Monterrey. Its growth outpaces that of its American counterpart with state-of-the-art facilities also operating in Reynosa, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Puebla and Saltillo. These facilities are, in fact, of such high quality that many of Christus' own American executives prefer to fly to Mexico to receive their routine and acute health care services.

We do, indeed, suffer from a plight of white flight. Mexico offers Americans benefits and services no longer available to them in their native country. This, in combination with the influx of foreign-born Mexican Americans into U.S. cities, is what is causing the Latino populations to overwhelm formerly white ones.

After the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States vowed to work hand-in-hand with Mexico and Canada to create purchasing power parity between nations as well as to use a multi-party approach to managing a three-player economy. Policies that influence the movement and treatment of immigrants in Mexico and the United States are an unacknowledged piece of this puzzle, and while the United States has signed agreements on such matters with Canada, it has not deigned to do so with Mexico.

The dangerous results of ignoring Mexico and failing to fix our own health care system include the massive movement of workers in both directions without their previously earned health care benefits and the southward migration of health care-related business to the more welcoming player.

As we struggle to develop a strong and realistic immigration policy, we have failed to clearly see the great irony of Americans flooding across the Mexican border as well. Perhaps we should turn our gaze internally to the domestic issue most effecting Americans today: health care reform. Until we increase access to high-quality affordable health care for Americans, our own citizens will continue to defect to other nations while being displaced by the immigrants we so irrationally fear.

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Wallace is a master's student at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. She is researching cross-border health care issues, including a policy research project on extending Medicare to eligible beneficiaries in Mexico. For more information on this research or to participate in related surveys, go to http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~healthp/index.html.

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