[Peace-discuss] a bailout for immigrants.

[E. Wayne Johnson]

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November 16, 2009


  Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives

By MARC LACEY 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/marc_lacey/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

MIAHUATLÁN, Mexico 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/mexico/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> 
--- During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo's son, an illegal 
immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a 
month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like 
these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, 
Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to 
do: wiring pesos north.

Unemployment has hit migrant communities in the United States so hard 
that a startling new phenomenon has been detected: instead of receiving 
remittances from relatives in the richest country on earth, some 
down-and-out Mexican families are scraping together what they can to 
support their unemployed loved ones in the United States.

"We send something whenever we have a little extra, at least enough so 
he can eat," said Mr. Salcedo, who is from a small village here in the 
rural state of Oaxaca and works odd jobs to support his wife, his two 
younger sons and, now, his jobless eldest boy in California.

He is not alone. Leonardo Herrera, a rancher from outside Tuxtla 
Gutiérrez in the southern state of Chiapas, said he recently sold a cow 
to help raise $1,000 to send to his struggling nephew in northern 
California.

Also in Chiapas, a poor state that sends many migrants to the United 
States, María del Carmen Montufar has pooled money with her husband and 
other family members to wire financial assistance to her daughter 
Candelaria in North Carolina. In the last year, the family has sent 
money --- small amounts ranging from $40 to $80 --- eight times to help 
Candelaria and her husband, who are both without steady work and 
recently had a child.

"When she's working she sends money to us," the mother said. "But now, 
because there's no work, we send money to her."

Statistics measuring the extent of what experts are calling reverse 
remittances are hard to come by. But interviews in Mexico with 
government officials, money-transfer operators, immigration 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
experts and relatives of out-of-work migrants show that a transaction 
that was rarely noticed before appears to be on the rise.

"It's something that's surprising, a symptom of the economic crisis," 
said Martín Zuvire Lucas, who heads a network of community banks that 
operate in poor communities in Oaxaca and other underserved Mexican 
states. "We haven't been able to measure it but we hear of more cases 
where money is going north."

At one small bank in Chiapas that used to see money flowing in from the 
United States, more money is going out than coming in.

"I'd say every month 50,000 pesos are sent from here to there," said 
Edith Ramírez Gonzalez, a sales executive at Banco Azteca in San 
Cristóbal de las Casas. "And from there, we'd receive about 30,000 
pesos." Fifty thousand pesos is $3,840.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/americas/16mexico.html?_r=4&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/americas/16mexico.html?_r=4&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print>

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