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Saturday, July 30th, 2011

Improving Mexican Economy Draws Undocumented Immigrants Home From California

Author:     STEPHEN MAGAGNINI
Source:     The Scramento Bee
Publication Date:     Thursday, Jul. 28, 2011 - 11:16 am
 Link: Improving Mexican Economy Draws Undocumented Immigrants Home From California
Stephan:   My sister and brother-in-law recently visited us and, then, took off for a drive across Washington parts of Oregon, and Idaho, not have travelled in the U.S. for some years. They returned and spent a last night with Ronlyn and myself before flying back to France, where they live in the country. They were appalled by what they saw. The poor condition of the roads, the rusting bridges, the dying towns, the empty factories, and the depressed people had a powerful and unhappy effect on them. America, they said, is falling apart and failing its people. Sadly, I agreed and, increasingly, so do thousands of immigrants, as this story points out. Note also the further confirmation of the trend SR readers will find very familiar. The best birth control in the world is an educated, happy, financially secure woman.

There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.

‘It’s now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico,’ Sacramento’s Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. ‘We have become a middle-class country.’

Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.

An estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants have left California since 2008, though the remaining 2.6 million still make up 7 percent of the population and 9 percent of the labor force, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Among metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, Sacramento County ranks among the lowest, with an unauthorized population of 4.6 percent of its 1.4 million residents in 2008, according to Laura Hill, a demographer with the PPIC.

The Sacramento region, suffering from 12.3 percent unemployment and the construction bust, may have triggered a large exodus of undocumented immigrants, González Gutiérrez said.

The best-paid jobs for undocumented migrants are in the building industry, ‘and because of the severe crisis in the construction business here, their first response has been to move into the service industry,’ […]

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