Hola Code Offers Tech Training to Mexican Returnees

Under the slogan ‘build code, not walls’, Mexican startup Hola Code is giving returning migrants and deportees the chance to train and find jobs in Mexico’s tech industry.

In addition to offering five-month courses in coding, the company, founded in 2017, provides meals, banking services, yoga classes and even mental health support to Mexicans who return to the country from the US in search of job opportunities, and who only pay for their course once they find a job.

The business is aimed at helping new arrivals in the country who have either returned voluntarily or been deported, some of whom are so-called DREAMers, young people who arrived in the US illegally as children. They were protected from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) that President Trump has sought to end.

Mexico needs these new arrivals, as thousands of tech jobs go unfilled because of a lack of qualified applicants, Hola Code’s founder Marcela Torres told National Public Radio.

Torres said she founded the company when she saw that the Mexican government is not doing enough to assist returnees, many of whom do not speak Spanish proficiently.