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 Editorials | January 2008 
Making a Magnet
 Houston Chronicle
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 |  | Channeling remittances into investment in Mexico chips away at the cause of illegal immigration. |  | |
Why would someone choose to be an illegal immigrant? Hope for a better future, of course. Mexico's government, realizing that millions of its citizens are denied that hope, is finally trying to build it. A new program supports immigrants who invest in agribusinesses that would slow the flood of human capital leaving Mexico.
This is a good, if limited, idea that carries with it a much bigger lesson for the United States' immigration policy. Invest in job development and training in Mexico — and many workers will happily stay home.
Right now, the deck is stacked against most Mexicans. In 2005 the Inter-American Development Bank asked immigrants (Mexicans and others) who send money home what they had left behind. Fifty-four percent had no job. The 46 percent who did work averaged only $150 a month.
This lack of a future would send nearly anyone with initiative and a sense of family duty searching for something better.
Since the 1990s, some Mexican state and local governments have tried to take advantage of those qualities. The governments match funds sent by immigrants in the United States for specific improvements in their hometowns: roads, schools, water systems.
In 2001, Mexico's federal government started the "three for one" program, matching these infrastructure projects with funds from three levels of Mexican government.
Now, as Chronicle reporter Jenalia Moreno noted in a recent story, Mexico's federal government is offering up to 40 percent in matching funds to prosperous immigrants in the United States willing to invest in viable Mexican agribusinesses.
"Our idea is to generate sources of employment in Mexico ... and produce products that can be consumed here in the United States," Rodrigo Diez De Sollano, of Mexico's agriculture department, said.
The idea has promise. Mexicans in the United States send home about $24 billion a year. Most goes from family member to family member. But as immigrants, legal and illegal, succeed economically, they have faithfully remembered their communities, as well. In 2006, 723 hometown associations spent $69.9 million on improvements.
Spending some of this money on shrewdly chosen job projects could have far greater impact. An example: In the state of Oaxaca, many women struggled to raise families on the remittances sent home by husbands, who had left for the United States because their tiny farms could not support them.
A nonprofit partnered with the development bank to fund an organic "nopal" cooperative on some of those lands (nopales are the nutritious leaves of cactus, now a coveted U.S. health food). The cooperative, which started with a few dozen farms, now includes 200, and their incomes are high enough for the husbands to come home.
Such individual ventures, of course, can only address a fraction of the needs Mexican workers face. Only major structural change — cracking open monopolies, enforcing the tax system and ending corruption — will build an economy that will keep Mexico's hardest workers at home.
But the new plan does offer a lesson that American policymakers should heed: Creating jobs in Mexico is the most efficient way to stem illegal immigration. Mexico, for its part, must fight to create viable jobs — and pressure its new billionaires, such as Carlos Slim, to give with the same generosity as hardworking immigrants. |
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