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Are the illegal immigrant boom times starting to end?
If you read an Associated Press report last week, it would seem so. Mexican businesses and the nation’s Central Bank have reported not as many remittances have been sent from people in the United States to Mexico. In fact, the bank said it has seen the payments drop about 2 percent to $11.6 billion this year.
Business in towns in Mexico also have been laying off people because they say Mexicans aren’t receiving money from family members in the U.S., and thus are not buying as many goods.
The reasons? Analysts told The AP that illegal immigration raids in the U.S. and a slowdown in the U.S. economy have caused the drop.
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That seems logical, as raids would either force people into hiding or encourage them to move back home out of fear. But the number of raids has been limited. The use of E-Verify and the focus on hiring legal workers, such as in Arizona, likely has had an impact, too.
The state of the U.S. economy is at the heart of what’s occurring. Builders who once were constructing homes by the thousands have seen business slow significantly; slow enough to the point that they’ve had to reduce the number of people who work for them.
The AP story reported about 152,000 Mexican immigrant workers (it didn’t say if they were illegal or not) lost construction jobs in the United States last year, based on a Pew Research Center report in June.
As the boom times in the United States slow, the job market shrinks. Businesses are making the decision not to spend their money on more personnel and they are making cuts.
So, what Mexico is experiencing seems to be tied to the U.S. economy. And that’s the danger for Mexico: Being linked too closely to another nation’s economy can lead to impacts.
This, in turn, isn’t healthy for the U.S. economy because one of its largest trading partners doesn’t have the buying power for U.S. goods, something that gives the U.S. economy a boost.
This may be a down time, but people are still going to try and illegally cross the border to enter the United States. Residents of Cochise County know this. And when the U.S. economy picks up again, it will be a chance to see if the new border security efforts and internal employment checks and new worker ID laws really do have an impact on turning illegal immigrants away, or if people will still see opportunity and do anything to take a part in it.
Brian wrote on Aug 5, 2008 12:41 PM: