Labor Export Devastating Mexican Communities - K-R via SJ Mercury-News

[Leigh Meyers <leighcmeyers@xxxxxxxxx>]

"No corner of Mexico has been left untouched by emigration. In 31 
percent of Mexico's municipalities, population is shrinking steadily 
because of migration to the United States,"

Posted on Sun, Mar. 26, 2006   
Migration to U.S. emptying much of Mexican countryside
LABOR EXPORT DEVASTATING
By Jay Root
Knight Ridder

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/14191386.htm

JOAQUÃN AMARO, Mexico -- Decades ago, before massive waves of young men 
fled north, Pedro Avila Salamanca helped his father harvest corn and 
fatten pigs. He learned to write his name in a one-room schoolhouse. 
Sometimes he rode to town on a donkey.

It's all a distant memory now. Everywhere abandoned houses are 
crumbling. The towns are shrinking. And Avila, 89, who wears donated 
clothes and lives on the meager checks his daughters send from the 
United States, can't remember the last time he ate meat. ``What would I 
buy it with?'' he asked.

Avila is a part of the immigration debate that neither Mexican political 
leaders nor cheap-labor advocates in the United States like to talk 
about: Heavy migration has all but emptied much of the Mexican countryside.

Money sent back to Mexico from those working in the United States 
reached a record high last year, $20 billion, making remittances from 
migrants Mexico's second-largest source of income, surpassed only by oil 
exports.

But the export of human labor has been devastating here. It's left the 
land dotted with near-ghost towns inhabited by the very old and the very 
young, their lives dependent on whatever money their relatives send home.

If there were economic development here, there would be few people of 
working age to reap its benefits.

``For the governing class, immigrants become the solution. They leave. 
They reduce the political and social pressure . . . they even reduce the 
costs of public-works projects,'' said Rodolfo GarcÃa Zamora, an 
economist and immigration expert at the Autonomous University of 
Zacatecas, the government-operated university in this state. ``They can 
only hope that everybody leaves and sends home collective remittances.''

In five states, including Zacatecas, remittances from abroad now equal 
or exceed the salaries generated locally. In the state of MichoacÃn, 
money sent home from the United States is equivalent to 182 percent of 
in-state income.

No corner of Mexico has been left untouched by emigration. In 31 percent 
of Mexico's municipalities, population is shrinking steadily because of 
migration to the United States, according to figures provided by GarcÃa 
Zamora.

In Zacatecas, known for silver mines and dry, mountainous terrain, the 
data is even more stark: 45 of the 58 municipalities are shrinking. The 
state's population would double if all its emigrants and their offspring 
returned home from the United States.

The population drain is no secret in tiny JoaquÃn Amaro, just up the 
road from the tiny ``rancho'' where Avila was born in 1916. There are 
nine times more people from this town living in Cicero, Ill., than in 
JoaquÃn Amaro itself.

Florentino RodrÃguez, 75, is back here after spending most of his 
working years -- from 1951 to 1994 -- in the United States. Today, nine 
of his 10 living children live there. His wife recently died.

Tears rolled down RodrÃguez's face when he was asked to describe life in 
his shrinking hometown.

``It's hard. I'm all alone,'' he said. ``The men go to the United States 
and they stay. Only the old ones are left behind.''

Across the border, meanwhile, the exodus has sparked a fierce debate in 
the U.S. Congress and beyond. Many business and farm interests say 
entire industries would collapse without immigrant labor. Conservative 
activists favor deportation and a wall on the border. Liberal groups 
want to put immigrants on a path to U.S. citizenship.

If anything binds them together, it's the conviction that something 
needs to change. The number of illegal immigrants estimated to be in the 
United States has grown nearly 50 percent in the past six years, to 12 
million from 8.4 million in 2000, according to a report released this 
month by the Pew Hispanic Center. More than half the unauthorized 
population comes from Mexico.

As Congress debates enhanced border security and guest-worker proposals, 
experts and many immigrants themselves say the only way to keep people 
in Mexico is to create good jobs here.

That was behind a proposal put before Congress in 2004 to create a North 
American Investment Fund that would have sent $20 billion in American 
and Canadian development aid to Mexico to start projects there. The 
proposal went nowhere.

``If we don't start now with a bold program, illegal migration will only 
get worse,'' said one of the proposal's proponents, Robert Pastor.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who sponsored the 2004 bill, said it may be a 
long time before Congress is willing to take that step.

``We've got a lot of education to do,'' Cornyn said. ``I don't think the 
American people support the idea of just taking their tax money and 
giving it to somebody else just because we want to help them out.''

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Leigh
http://leighm.wordpress.com/