LAS COLINAS, Texas _ On any given weekend, walk into the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Colinas and listen to the sound of Spanish spoken not by gardeners, or the wait staff, but by country club members.
"It's like I never left Monterrey," said David Benitez, president of Intelligent Mexican Marketing, a company responsible for popularizing products like Barcels, Takis snack food, Gamesa cookies and Topo Chico mineral water in the U.S. Pointing to familiar faces in the room, he adds, "Monterrey came to Dallas."
Benitez is one of hundreds of thousands of elite and upwardly mobile Mexicans who have moved to the U.S. and are reshaping the image of the Mexican immigrant from construction and farmworkers to high powered executives and job creators. Over the past decade, Dallas has become a magnet and harbinger of a new kind of Mexican migration _ one that is key in deepening economic integration between the two countries in uncertain times.
"We're in the midst of a turning point," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Institute and author of Vanishing Frontiers, a book that underscores the economic and cultural integration between the United States and Mexico. "We have more legal Mexican migration to the United States, which means higher educated individuals. Some of it is driven because of the economic integration going on between the United States and Mexico, but especially Mexico and Texas. And some of it driven by security concerns in Mexico. A lot of them are business owners, especially from Monterrey, hence the Monterrey _ North Texas connection."
The transformation comes at an unprecedented moment. Undocumented migration from Mexico is at an all-time low, with border apprehension of Mexicans falling from a peak of 1.6 million in 2000 to less than 175,000 this year. These newcomers fit a profile that belies that of their predecessors, whose labored to help build some of the most iconic landmarks in North Texas, from the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport to Cowboys Stadium.
These upwardly mobile Mexicans cross with legal documents, often through special investor visas, or some are binational citizens of two countries, more educated, with deeper pockets and a craving for fine things in life, from spending weekends at the country club, to museums and fine dining. And they're generating jobs.
In short, said Francisco de la Torre, Mexican Consul General in Dallas, "Mexican companies don't come to Texas to fill a job. They're here to create jobs."
The sea-change is underscored by a 2015 study by Mexico's Ministry of the Economy showing that Texas has the lion share of Mexican investment, with more than 1,100 Mexicans companies operating in the Lone Star State employing more than 2,200 people. The study, said Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, Mexico's Consul General in Austin, reflects deepening ties ushered in by the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA is currently being re-negotiated by the U.S., Mexico and Canada, making some companies nervous about future economic ties. Already tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are leading to rising prices on Mexican products and some, including Benitez, do not discount future jobs cuts.
Whatever the future holds, the ties between north and south are impossible to ignore.
"First came trade and now comes investment and 'boy is this true,"' said Gonzalez Gutierrez, describing the trend as a "silent economic integration. Perhaps no one has noticed, but suddenly you realize that there are 20,000 plus jobs depending on Mexican investment. The floodgates have opened. This is perhaps the most profound long-term economic impact between both countries."
Dozens of Mexican companies have set up shop in North Texas, according to Southern Methodist University's Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center. Jennifer Apperti, manager of the center, said the study is a work in progress and expects the number of companies to rise dramatically in the months to come as they continue compiling a full business profile of the region, firm by firm. She said the center is in the early stages of tracking specific economic ties between Dallas and Monterrey, both sister cities, and calls those links "critically important."
The Mexican Consulate in Dallas reports that in the past five years, more people from the Mexican state have been requesting documents like consular IDs and passports. Nuevo Leon ranked seventh five years ago in terms of total requests for documents from the consulate. It now ranks fifth behind Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas and Durango.
The North Texas-based companies include Lala, Mission Foods, Bimbo, and more recently, Cinepolis. In March, La Moderna, one of Mexico's largest pasta producers, opened a $50 million, 150,000-square foot state of the art production, manufacturing and distribution factory in Cleburne.
"North Texas just made the most sense for us," said Luis Miguel Monroy, chairman and chief executive of La Moderna, who was in Cleburne for the opening along with a list of dignitaries that included Gov. Greg Abbott. "Demographics, geography, and a touch of sophistication all come together nicely here."
Since 2000, almost 150,000 employment-based visas have been issued to educated, middle- and upper-class Mexicans moving to the U.S. for permanent jobs and investment opportunities, according to records released by the U.S. State Department.
These visas cover five categories and require most of their recipients to be high-level executives being transferred to manage a U.S. office, highly educated professionals who have demonstrated superior proficiency in their field or investors with enough capital to make a $500,000 investment.
Put simply, these exclusive visas are granted to the cream of the crop of foreign professionals looking to permanently reside in the U.S.
The biggest spike in the past 20 years of Mexicans receiving these visas came from 2005-2007, a period where former Mexico president Felipe Calderon put boots on the ground in a full offensive against the drug cartels.
Rodolfo Hernandez, International Partnership Development Director at the University of Texas at Dallas, said that while violence may have been a catalyst for migration then, the Texas business environment has only served strengthen ties between the two countries and continue attracting upwardly mobile Mexicans.
"Violence is a variable, but it's not the only variable," Hernandez said. "The movement of people is a much more complex phenomenon. And it makes perfect sense that people looking to invest would want to do so in places they know are safe."
From 2000-2017, almost 550,000 nonimmigrant visas were issued to Mexican diplomats, small-scale investors, students and professional free-trade agreement workers. Interest in these visas has steadily been on the rise since 2000, while the issuance of permanent, employment-based visas has not matched the '05-'07 levels.
These categories of renewable visas do not allow their holders to reside in the U.S. indefinitely, but they do allow them to make investments, set up international business offices, study at U.S. universities and enter the country for work opportunities so long as they have a standing job offer from U.S. companies.
Sarah Carabias-Rush, senior vice president of international engagement at the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, said North Texas' geography is key. Texas is Mexico's largest trading partner and it makes sense that Mexican professionals and companies would want to establish themselves here to take advantage of Dallas' increasingly growing reputation of being able to reach all corners of the world.
"It's a really interesting time in the region because it is continually being seen as a global city and region," Carabias-Rush said. "These companies are more willing to talk about the positive business environment in their countries and that allows us to make connections that can attract business and investments to the area."
Jesus Canas, a senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said that Mexican entrepreneurs see Texas' business environment the same way as any U.S. companies looking to locate here. He added that simple geography could be playing heavily on how Mexican companies choose to do business.
"Texas borders with four Mexican states and those four Mexican states happen to be the most industrialized ones in the country," Canas said. "It's really easy to just cross the Rio Grande to do business in Texas."
Sure, every city in Texas touts is long ties to Mexico's diaspora, and every region has benefited economically, studies show. Houston has bragging rights as a mega wealthy oil town and reaching remarkable heights in health care. Austin is the state capital, and is seen as the most progressive, liberal Texas city, home to educated techies who have turned their city into their own brand of "Silicon Hills."
San Antonio, with its stunning Riverwalk, is a city dominated by families who have lived there for generations. The ties go back to the 1600s. Spanish explorers founded the city in 1718 and the city was a magnet for Mexican liberal revolutionaries dating back to the 1800s and 1900s.
But Dallas has emerged as an energy capital, mid-American banking center, a transportation hub and also a high-tech hub. Luisa del Rosal, a native of Chihuahua and executive director of the center, is the daughter of one of the early pioneers, an executive with the iconic Mexican bread company Bimbo.
"Unlike a Chicago, or a Los Angeles, or even Houston, Dallas just feels like a younger, unexplored city for the upper middle class Mexicans," she said. "We're not an anomaly, but part of a new robust Mexican diaspora that's excited about new opportunities and grateful to those who came before us. We owe a debt to them and a responsibility to make sure their sacrifice pays off. That we become part of one voice."
The transformation comes with some trepidations from some business leaders, like Victor Arias, a headhunter and managing director at RSR Partners in Dallas. He applauds the new arrivals and is friends with many wealthy newcomers who he sees on weekends at the country club in Las Colinas. A native El Pasoan from modest beginnings, he also cautions them not forget those who came before them.
"American society will default to looking at their success stories because they are bringing in capital, and are very different from those who come because of economic need," he tells them. "If our more successful brothers coming from Mexico ignore the plight of the immigrant that won't help the bigger picture."
Inside the country club at Las Colinas, some of the uneasiness resulting from Mexico's embedded class system is evident. Benitez sits in a corner, still in gym attire, a racket case near him. Busboys from Mexico rarely make eye-contact.
Over a cappuccino, Benitez said he could have moved to San Antonio, where many of his friends already lived. Or he could have settled down in Houston, a city with historic ties to Mexico. Instead he went with his gut feeling and decided on Dallas, a city that provided the old comforts of Monterrey and has proven to be pivotal for his business. His company is responsible for popularizing some 300 Mexican and Latin American brands into the American mainstream. In his search for the heart of American consumerism, Dallas, not Houston, or San Antonio, was key.
"If it's a Mexican brand that's relevant in Texas, it's pretty much us," said Benitez, who came to Texas on a visa for work and is now raising his family in Preston Hollow. He's poised to become a U.S. citizen and boasts that his young family feels very much at home in Dallas.
"Dallas is important because it provides a different perspective, a mix of everything and everyone," he said. "Here you have the most Americanized market within Texas."
Not far from Benitez is David Salazar, his wife Brenda and their two children, Alejandro, 2 and Santiago, 4. Salazar, a native of Monterrey and law graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, works in the legal counsel department for Mission Foods.
They live in Las Colinas and are regulars at the country club, filled on this Saturday with several other families from Monterrey. In typical Mexican fashion, they rise up in unison from their tables for long hugs, kisses on the cheek, and niceties. The restaurant staff includes a mix of Anglo waiters and Mexican immigrants. Some appear a bit uneasy.
"At first I thought they were a bit rude cause they don't even say hello, even if we speak the same language," said one busboy cleaning tables. "Some are nicer than others."
Brenda, 33, smiles politely at the waiters and busboys. She too is from Monterrey and said North Texas is ideal for raising her family.
"I never feel far away from home here," she said. "I have friends here I grew up with back in Monterrey, friends I didn't see until I moved here."
Her husband, David, 34, adds, "There are times when I don't even feel like I'm away from home because the people we meet, the restaurants we eat at, the language we hear, Spanish, is spoken here. This feels like home, and whether you're an immigrant, or someone with more privileges like me, we're learning that we're all in this together."
