| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | October 2008 
Crisis, Crackdown Turn Mexicans Off American Dream
 Michael O'Boyle - Reuters
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Acatzingo, Mexico – Caught by the U.S. economic crisis and a crackdown on illegal immigrants, Mexican workers are increasingly quitting the United States and coming home, disillusioned with the American dream.
When the U.S. economy began to slow, Ernesto Lorzo and Margarita Martinez first halted construction on the house they were building in Mexico with the dollars they earned in the United States.
Then, when their employers began demanding proper work documents, they packed up their home in Newark, Delaware, and returned home to Mexico with their two U.S.-born children in August.
“We couldn't take it,” said Martinez, sitting in the living room of their home in Acatzingo, a village southwest of Mexico City, where a staircase leads up to a second floor that was never built.
The slowdown in the U.S. economy has hit immigrant families hard, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, as they struggle to find work in the construction, food and other industries.
That is compounded by workplace raids and tighter security on the U.S.-Mexico border that have created a tougher environment for the 12 million or so undocumented immigrants in the United States.
It is also hurting the economies of Mexico and other Latin American countries that rely on the cash sent home by their citizens working abroad.
Martinez said she left her job at a fast food restaurant when her bosses asked for working papers. Pregnant and fearful she could be pulled over by police, she was scared to venture out even to the laundry mat near their home in Newark, Delaware.
“It's better to be poor back in Mexico than to be a hamster in its cage up there,” Martinez said. Illegal immigrants in some cases can now expect lengthy prison sentences for breaking U.S. immigration laws.
The amount of money sent home by Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States is dropping fast due to the U.S. downturn and the growing number of returnees. Remittances sent by Mexicans plummeted 12 percent in August.
El Salvador, which gets a huge 18 percent of its gross domestic product via the money wire, saw its first slide in remittances in six years in August, and remittances to Guatemala are also down.
MONEY DRIES UP
In the nearby village of Tepalcatepec, concrete homes built with dollars sent home by migrants stand next to tin-roof shakcs.
“Many people have stopped sending so that they have enough money up there to live, for rent, insurance, telephone, bills,” said Francisco Trujillo, a local official.
As the flow of cash dries up, local residents are selling off the cars, stereos and other goods they purchased with money their relatives earned in the United States, Trujillo said.
Figures for the number of immigrants returning are hard to come by but the Pew Hispanic Center said last week the size of the illegal immigrant population in the United States, which grew by two-fifths since 2000, appears to have declined in the last year.
“This is the first time in almost a decade that the number of unauthorized foreigners in the United States has started to drop rather than increase,” said Philip Martin, a professor at the University of California, Davis.
Some groups studying immigrants say many undocumented workers have not gone home, only moved to different parts of the United States.
Still, officials in Mexican states that have large populations in the United States say people are coming home and warn the economic slowdown could soon spur a flood of returnees.
Amalia Garcia, governor of the north-central state of Zacatecas, has asked federal lawmakers to create a fund worth 7 billion pesos ($570 million) to pay for aid to immigrants who return to poor areas.
One such returnee is Alfredo Mendoza, who made $11 dollars an hour plus lots of overtime building houses near Washington until the work dried up. He moved back to Terrenate, another village near Acatzingo, last December.
When he was in the United States, he shared a small apartment with as many as eight other men and sent up to $1,200 dollars a month home to his parents, who razed their mud-adobe hut and built a spacious ranch-style home instead.
But Mendoza did not save up enough to build his own place before the U.S. housing market turned south. Now back home, where jobs pay only $20 a day, he and his family are living with his parents.
“It feels really bad, because you could not accomplish what you thought you could,” Mendoza said.
U.S. businesses have long relied on illegal immigrants to keep wage costs down but experts say it is still too early to say if the return of workers to Mexico is big enough to dry up a source of cheap labor.
“If history is any guide this will turn out to be a short-term blip,” said Martin of the University of California.
In the town of Tenancingo, which governs the villages of Acatzingo, Terranate and Tepalcatepec, mayor Gabriel Gallegos estimates that as much as a third of the 100,000 people from the town and surrounding villages are in the United States.
He jokes that in Delaware his constituents have settled ”another Tenancingo,” but he is worried the U.S. slowdown could send many people packing for home.
“If they all come back in a bunch, it is going to bring on a lot of economic problems, because we don't have jobs for them,” Gallegos said. “Some who come back turn to crime.”
(Additional reporting by Alberto Barrera en San Salvador; Editing by Kieran Murray and Eddie Evans) |
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