Tijuana's call centers offer a lifeline to deportees struggling to live in Mexico

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Call centers in Tijuana are booming and deportees who spent most of their lives living in the United States are a large part of that growth.

Richard Avila was 56 when he was deported to Mexico eight years ago. He had lived in East Los Angeles since he was 2 and the idea of living in Tijuana felt to him as if he were being sent to the moon.Like thousands of deportees who have spent most of their lives in the United States, Avila didn’t know where he fit in. He wasn’t American, but he also wasn’t Mexican. He lived in a sort of bicultural limbo where something as small as the way he spoke put a target on his back.

Historically, India has been the call center capital of the world. But Tijuana has been able to lure call centers away from India because of the city’s availability of accent-neutral English speakers and Mexico’s low wages relative to those of the United States.Apart from bringing companies from India or the Philippines, Tijuana’s call center boom has also caught the attention of California-based companies that cannot afford to keep up with the rising minimum wage.

For example, Heil points out, deportees know to ask about last Sunday’s Dallas Cowboys game if they are speaking on the phone with someone from Texas.Redial, which was founded by twin brothers who grew up in San Diego and often travel to Baja, embraced their new home south of the border. To set itself apart from the competition, Redial has imported some American business culture to Tijuana. For instance, each agent has a wide desk with two monitors. Other call centers are known for squeezing in as many agents to white plastic tables that college students use to play beer pong.

 

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They should offer this to people so they don’t have to risk everything to enter the US in the first place.

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