🚀 go-pugleaf

On 7 Feb 2007 10:14:07 -0800, "Don Gabacho" <jpastore@nettaxi.com>
wrote:

>'River of gold' swells to a flood
>
>Flow of money from Mexicans in the U.S. counters pressure to control
>migration
>By S. Lynne Walker
>COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
>
>February 7, 2007
>
>MEXICO CITY - Mexicans living abroad sent home a record $23 billion
>last year, raising new questions about whether the government of
>President Felipe Calder�n can afford to slow migration.
>
>
>PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
>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.
>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."
>
>
>PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
>At the Monte de Piedad in San Ysidro yesterday, Diana Trejo counted a
>customer's cash for a wire transfer to Mexico. Store owner Francisco
>Anzar said most customers come in once or twice a month to send
>between $100 and $300.
>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.
>
>Calder�n 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, Calder�n 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."

Deportation of every single illegal alien would spawn great economic
growth coupled with increased social stability.

Max