kimba it seems lots of illegals work in construction which has ground to halt
Economy forcing many Mexicans to leave United States
By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY
When her 3-year-old son begs for pizza, or when her family is shivering through a subfreezing night in the Mexican highlands — those are the moments when Rosario Araujo misses America the most.
Three months ago, Araujo and her husband, José Zavala, were still living comfortably, though illegally, in a suburb of Phoenix. He hung drywall for $10 an hour; she was a housekeeper. Their version of the American dream was modest: a small apartment, a washing machine and an occasional night out with their two American-born kids.
Then the economic crisis hit, and work dried up. So in October, the family moved back to central Mexico's empty plains, joining a small but growing flow of migrants heading home because of the U.S. recession.
"It was a difficult decision," admits Araujo, 20. "We took a lot of risks to get" to America. "We miss it."
Life on her husband's family farm seems a world away from sunny Arizona. The cinder-block farmhouse lacks central heat, so the family wraps in blankets and huddles around a space heater. They can't afford pizza anymore because they haven't yet found work here, either.
Those challenges help illustrate why most of the 11.9 million illegal immigrants that the Pew Hispanic Center estimates are residing in the USA are staying put for now. Even in bad times, U.S. salaries are still, on average, about four times higher than those across the border. The Mexican job market is flat and drug-related violence is at record highs.
Even so, the collapse of the U.S. economy — particularly the housing industry — has forced the Mexican government to start preparing for an influx of returnees in the months ahead. As was the case with Araujo's family, most illegal immigrants lack a social safety net in the USA and could have no choice but to return to Mexico, where at least they can count on family to provide shelter and food.
"We have to face the possibility of a very large number of Mexicans" coming home, Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said last month.
Besides the faltering economy, tighter border enforcement and increasing numbers of police raids on undocumented workers have contributed to a modest decline in the USA's illegal immigrant population — the first such drop in recent memory, says Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
"People still continue to come and go, but the equation seems to have switched," Camarota says. "A lot of people argued that immigrants were so permanently anchored in the United States that nothing, no enforcement, no cutoff of jobs would induce them to go home. It seems that's not the case."
If the trend accelerates, it could eventually ease some of the strain that illegal immigrants place on services such as schools and hospitals in border areas of the United States, says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, another Washington think tank.
Culture shock awaits
Many of those who return undergo a kind of culture shock after spending so many years in a more developed country. Zavala, Araujo's husband, says he is most worried about his children's education.
"The schools there (in the United States), they take the children in a bus and give them food, books, everything," he says. "Here you walk to school and you get nothing."
For now, the couple are scraping by with their dwindling savings. Zavala spends his days tending his father's three cows, waiting for planting season and worrying about the future.
Just down the road from him in the town of San José de Lourdes, population 7,000, about 50 migrant workers have returned from the USA in the past few months, says Abel Hernández, the town's administrator.
Even by local standards, the town is not a particularly inviting place.
Tethered horses stand in the dirt streets. A battered welcome sign hangs crazily from a post, one end resting on the ground; the other post was knocked down by a drunken driver and never replaced. The town's liveliest businesses are a feed store and a factory that processes corn husks for wrapping tamales.
The long tradition of migration is obvious everywhere. At a gasoline station outside town, there is a U.S. highway map on the wall and a Western Union window where residents can pick up wire transfers from their relatives in the United States.
Still, several residents who were deported from the USA or came back for family reasons say they are postponing their return until the economy improves.
"Why go back now? There's no work," says Rogelio Ortíz, who returned from Memphis in August to visit his wife and children. He's waiting to see whether the next U.S. president can help the economy. "Let's see if Obama can do something about it."
Teresa Cervantes, 21, says she and her husband decided their family no longer could afford to live in the Chicago area after his construction work dried up.
She returned this month with their two children; he probably will join them next year, she says.
The migrants who remain in the United States are sending home less money, Hernández says. Across Mexico, migrant remittances dropped 6.5% from $6.33 billion in the third quarter of 2007 to $5.92 billion in the same period this year, according to Mexico's central bank. The effect has been amplified in poor towns that rely heavily on money from migrants abroad.
In San José de Lourdes, store owner Ana María Guardado says her sales have dropped 30% as families cut back to staple foods. Rodriguez, the farmer, says his sisters used to wire him $100 every eight days. They also paid for his phone line so they could keep in touch with family back home.
He hasn't gotten a wire in six weeks, he says, and now his phone has been shut off.
Trying to assist returnees
Among the thousands of Mexicans who have been uprooted by the economic turmoil, most are moving within the U.S. rather than leaving the country, says Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador in Washington.
In some Mexican consulates, the number of requests for consular IDs has doubled as migrants update their addresses, he says. Many people in Arizona, Colorado and Virginia are moving to California and the Northeast, places seen as more migrant-friendly, he says.
"We are seeing very significant and very profound migration patterns within the United States," Sarukhan says.
For those who do return to Mexico, the Mexican government is expanding the Seguro Popular health insurance plan to absorb returning migrants and is hoping to create jobs for them with a raft of new infrastructure projects such as highways, airports and new border crossings, says Espinosa, the foreign minister.
In Mexico City — which estimates it has about 450,000 citizens living in the United States, out of a total population of 8.7 million — officials are taking more dramatic steps. The local government is bringing in psychologists from a local university to help migrant children returning from the USA to fit in at Mexican schools, says Guadalupe Chipole Ibañez, director of Mexico City's Center for Migrants.
Many of the new arrivals have trouble in grammar and literature classes, she says.
"There are children who speak and understand well in both Spanish and English, but many of them only write in English, and that is causing them a lot of problems in school," Chipole Ibañez said during a news conference in October.
Not all of the change is negative — Araujo, the former housekeeper, says she won't miss the constant threat of deportation. In Maricopa County, Ariz., where she lived, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has earned national attention for arresting illegal immigrants in anti-crime sweeps.
Blanca Castillo, Araujo's sister in-law who also recently returned home, notes that anti-Mexican sentiment seemed to be growing among Arizonans.
"Suddenly people were shouting things at you on the street," Castillo says. "It was like, as the economy went down, the racism went up."
Despite all the problems, and the increasing difficulties of getting back across the border, Araujo's husband says he would try to return to the United States in an instant if things improve.
"Maybe things will get better next year," Zavala says. "I hope so, anyway, because there's nothing for us here — nothing."
Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic.
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