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 Business News | February 2007 
'River of Gold' Swells to a Flood
 S. Lynne Walker - Copley News
| | In San Ysidro yesterday, Diana Trejo (left) helped Rosa Colin Flores transfer money to a Mexican airline to buy a ticket to visit her mother in Mexico City. (Peggy Peattie/Union-Tribune) |
Mexicans living abroad sent home a record $23 billion last year, raising new questions about whether the government of President Felipe Calderón can afford to slow migration.
In just one year, the amount of money migrants wired their families jumped 15 percent, according to Mexico's central bank, overtaking tourism to become the nation's second-biggest source of foreign income after oil.
“This is a river of gold that flows into Latin America and Mexico. Daily. Weekly. Monthly. It never stops,” said Sergio Bendixen, president of Bendixen & Associates, a public opinion research firm in Coral Gables, Fla., that surveyed Mexicans on both sides of the border for the Inter-American Development Bank.
Bendixen's study highlights a basic fact about immigration: Mexicans who migrate to the United States are key to the economies of both countries.
When his firm interviewed 1,700 Mexicans living in the United States in May, 55 percent said they were unemployed in Mexico. Thirty-nine percent said they earned no more than $400 a month in Mexico.
 Once they crossed the border, 51 percent found jobs within a month of their arrival in the United States. Thirty-eight percent were working in less than two weeks. Their average pay was $900 a month.
“Mexico is getting addicted to the money, and the U.S. is getting addicted to the labor,” said Bendixen, who presented his findings last week in Mexico City. “As Europe and the United States and Japan and the industrialized world get older – who's going to do the work? In the United States, you don't raise your kid to be a hotel maid, or pick tomatoes or to be a construction worker. That's not what we aspire to anymore.”
Mark Krikorian, who heads a Washington, D.C., research group that supports tighter immigration controls, blames U.S. immigration policy for encouraging the flow of money and labor. An estimated 12 million Mexicans live in the United States and account for nearly all of the remittances sent to Mexico.
“The politicians try to square the circle by telling their corporate contributors, 'We're going to make sure you get all the docile, servile labor you need,' but telling the public, 'Don't worry. They're all going to go home because we're going to throw them out when we're done with them,' ” said Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“We have permitted illegal immigration. It is not a phenomenon we were powerless to control. We have actively permitted it.”
A labor factory
In Zacatecas, a northern farming state plagued by droughts, half the population has migrated to the United States – many of them to Orange County and Los Angeles County. They send home $2 million a day.
Mexico has become “a factory that produces labor for the United States,”
said Miguel Moctezuma, a professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas who specializes in immigration. He said people on both sides of the border take advantage of the migrants.
“In the United States, there is a mentality of extracting the most work possible from the labor force: 'Come, but come with the fewest rights and at the lowest cost possible.'
“In Mexico, there is also a mentality of extracting from migrants: 'Go, take care of your family, send more money and also be responsible for Mexico's development.'
“It is like a cow that is being milked from both sides,” Moctezuma said.
Calderón touched on the migration issue in December when he traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border to greet his countrymen as they returned home for Christmas.
“When Mexicans cross the border to go north, our country loses valuable people and our economy loses what is most important: human worth,” he said. “We need to see to it that what crosses the border is more investment in Mexico and not labor to the United States.”
At the same time, Calderón called migration a “worldwide phenomenon” pushed by “the aspirations of men and women” seeking a better life, of assuring “a dignified present and a better future for their families. There is no crime in that.”
That mixed message has long characterized the Mexican government's attitude toward migrants, Moctezuma said.
“Government officials know perfectly well that it's not feasible for them to come back,” he said. “Mexico does not have the luxury of designing policies to slow immigration.”
Mexicans in the United States send money home an average of 10 times a year, up from seven times a year in 2003. The amount they send each time has also increased, from $190 to $225, Bendixen said.
More than 10 million of Mexico's 107 million residents receive money from relatives in the United States, and much of that money reaches impoverished communities. Of the 4 million families who receive the money, at least one-third would be at or below the poverty level without the remittances.
Mexicans are not only spending that money on essentials, but are also investing in their communities – fixing up parks, putting up fences around cemeteries, building clinics.
Some use the money to open savings accounts, to buy health insurance and to put their children through college, according to a survey that Bendixen's company conducted last fall of 2,400 people living in Mexico.
Krikorian complains that by sending so much money home, Mexican immigrants are draining themselves – and the poor U.S. neighborhoods where many of them live – of much-needed capital.
“Although immigrants very often imagine they're going home and send money as part of a strategy to earn money to buy a house or a cab or a hot-dog stand (back in Mexico), often events intercede,” Krikorian said. “They fall in love. They get married. They have kids. And they end up not wanting to move back. It's a normal part of the immigration story.
“What these people will just have done is spend 10 years sending the capital home that they should have been saving for their kid's college education, to buy a home, to buy their own hot-dog stand in the United States.”
Opening doors
Just as the Mexican government has tapped into the migrants' money, the Inter-American Development Bank is pushing Mexican businesses to overcome longtime social and economic prejudices and offer bank accounts, mortgages and short-term credit to the migrants' families.
“In the past, these were not people the banks were interested in,” said Bendixen. “If you owned a bank in Latin America, you dealt with the aristocracy. You dealt with the government and you dealt with a few businesses that had capital. But the rest were never going to have any money, so why bother? Now, these people have money.
“There are some wonderful opportunities here. Think about a process that gets a lot more young people into universities, that gets the housing industry going because now there are more mortgages available. Let's think of ways to maximize the impact of this money.”
As Mexican government and business leaders contemplate ways to deal with migrants' increasing economic power, the United States may face an entirely different immigration challenge in the next few decades: a decreasing supply of unskilled labor from Mexico.
“The rate of growth in Mexico's population is headed downward” at an unprecedented rate, said Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., research group, and the author of a book on shifting demographics titled, “The Empty Cradle.”
“From the mid-'70s until now, Mexico has gone from an average of six children per woman to two,” he said. “That's going to lead to much less pressure to immigrate to the United States.”
Eventually, Longman said, “we may actually find ourselves competing to attract workers.”
S. Lynne Walker: slwalker@prodigy.net.mx |
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