Thread: CA: Too broke to buy a ticket home, Valley's immigrant day l

Too broke to buy a ticket home, Valley's immigrant day laborers just hang on
By Tony Castro, Staff Writer
Updated: 01/24/2009 10:04:40 PM PST

They are down and out in the United States and homesick for Guatemala. And El Salvador. And Honduras. And Mexico.

And they would go back without even an American penny in their pocket if only they had enough to get home.

They are the discouraged and disillusioned Central American and Mexican day laborers who, in a sign of how hard times are in this economy, find themselves so broke they can't send much, if any, money back to loved ones they haven't seen for years.

"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas - and wishes he could leave sooner.

"I would leave today, with just the clothes on my back, if I had the money. It wasn't that long ago that I used to put money aside to send home. Now I'm saving it in hopes that I can go back home."

Perez, who hasn't seen his wife and family in five years, is among the hundreds of day laborers who gather each morning at the same corners in various parts of the Valley, hoping to find work cleaning yards, hauling furniture, painting houses or doing light construction.

But in an increasingly tight economy, homeowners are now handling many of the tasks they used to hire day laborers to perform.

"The dream I had when I left Guatemala to come to America is now gone," said Perez with a trace of bitterness.

He is not alone.

The economic recession and the crackdown on illegal immigration have forced growing numbers of Central American immigrants to consider giving up their dreams in the United States and returning to their homelands, according to an Inter-American Development Bank survey of 5,000 Latin immigrants.

"If we're going to be this far from home and not making any money, what's the use of being here?" said Guatemalan-born Galindo Ochoa, 23.

"If you ask any one of us out here, I think they'd all say they want to go back home. Wouldn't we?" Galindo asked, throwing out the question to several dozen fellow countrymen waiting for work along a street in Canoga Park.

Speaking mostly in Spanish, the workers talk about how life in the United States has become as much of a hardship as in Guatemala.

In Southern California, day- laborer employment has fallen off by up to 75 percent in the past year, according to anecdotal documentation of the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

In the Valley, the day- laborer force estimated at 4,000 a year ago is believed to have fallen by one-third.

"Day laborers have always made their living on the leftovers of the construction market," said Antonio Bernabe, day-laborer organizer in the Valley for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

"But in this economy, there are now very few leftovers for day laborers."

The impact has been seen in the drop of money Latino immigrants have been sending to family members in their home, according to a new report by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Hispanic Center.

More than 70 percent of Latin American immigrants are sending home less money than in 2008, posing new economic problems for families that depend on money from abroad for food and other necessities, the study found.

According to the Inter-American Development Bank study, only half of the 18.9 million Latino immigrants in this country now send money regularly to relatives in their home countries, compared with 73 percent in 2006 when the amount of remittance to Latin America totaled more than $45 billion. Total remittances for 2008 have not yet been compiled and analyzed.

Most of the remittances go to Mexico, which has by far the largest number of day laborers in the United States. One of Mexico's biggest banks announced this month that Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are likely to send home even less money this year, forecasting a second straight year of declining remittances - that country's second-largest source of foreign income, after oil.

Banamex, a unit of Citigroup Inc., estimated that remittances will drop by 2.5 percent this year. It also estimated that 2008 remittances dropped 2percent, to $23.5 billion, the first annual decline since the bank starting tracking the money 13 years ago.

"The impact of the job declines and losses among day laborers and immigrants, who then are unable to send money to family in their countries, is tremendous not only on those families but also on those countries' economies," said Daniel R. Blake, an economics professor at California State University, Northridge.

"There's going to be even greater pressure on the social services in those countries and on the governments to deal with the greater needs from their people."

Day laborers such as Ochoa and Perez say the pain of being away from loved ones has been more heartfelt in the past year.

Once sharing cramped, small apartments with up to a handful of other day laborers, they have been forced to pack in even more roommates just to pay the rent.

When they hear from home, it is with woeful tales of hard times in the Third World.

"We can't send them money and we can't afford to call our families like we used to," said Ochoa, who has a wife and a son in Guatemala. "Where I used to call my family three or four times a week, I now call maybe once.

"I miss them, and I would go home if I had the money."

Perez said he is bracing himself for the culture and family shock of returning home to a wife and three children he has not seen since 2004.

"I think I still have only three children - my wife might have had another in that time!" he said, half joking and with some sadness in his look.

"I don't kid myself. Five years is a long time. She has needs like everyone else. Who knows how much she has changed? Or what changes have gone on in my old hometown?

"But I could not be any more disillusioned about life than I've become in the past year."

A glance at Ochoa's and Perez's decline in earnings over the past year underscores how far their dream has fallen.

For months, both have been averaging one day of work a week, earning from $60 to $80 a day. They used to work up to seven days a week at that rate.

"We didn't realize how good it was until it was gone," said Perez.

"In Guatemala, I could live with my family at my parents' house," Ochoa said.

"I would find some kind of work. I might not make much more a week there than I do here working only one day a week. But I would be home. I wouldn't be a stranger in another country."

But now Guatemalan day laborers wishing to go home face the task of saving $400 or more for the airfare to return home.

"If you're from Guatemala and you want to go home, it has to be by plane," said Ochoa. "We're not trying to be picky. But it's not a trip that can be done safely by bus."

Turning themselves into U.S. immigration authorities for speedy deportation is no easy answer. Illegal immigrants often languish for months as prisoners in detention centers. When they are deported, they may end up hundreds of miles from their home towns, families and friends.

Perez suggested a novel solution for how immigrant day laborers could return to their homelands even quicker.

"If those people and groups who are crusading to get immigrants out of the United States would offer the air fare for us to go home, we would," he said, making direct reference to members of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project.

The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.

"It's not like there's any great love there," said Perez. "If you're Guatemalan, Salvadoran or Honduran, you want to fly home.

"If we're going to go home, we want to make sure we get there alive."

http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11547727

"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas - and wishes he could leave sooner. "

So much "lamenting" the same BS in so many articles by lazy news writers, I think they make most of this garbage up to meet a deadline.
Too lazy to go out and see whats really happening and editors of the same ink.

Perez suggested a novel solution for how immigrant day laborers could return to their homelands even quicker.

"If those people and groups who are crusading to get immigrants out of the United States would offer the air fare for us to go home, we would," he said, making direct reference to members of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project.

The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.

"It's not like there's any great love there," said Perez. "If you're Guatemalan, Salvadoran or Honduran, you want to fly home.

"If we're going to go home, we want to make sure we get there alive."

It would make sense to give these people a one-way bus ticket to the border. A nice way of deporting them. In the long run I'd rather pay to send these people home then continue to foot the bill for their families, unemployment etc. Crime is going to continue to skyrocket as long as we import povery.

No... Lock them up .... I want jail time for the damage these people have done to our country

POP open the FEMA camps NOW... and you FREAK POLITICIANS THAT ALLOWED THIS ... PRAY you are not indicted for crimes against America and the American People

You need to be put on trial and LOCKED behind bars

I have No Sympathy ... as a matter of fact I want and demand justice

YA KNOW What... open up a lane on the INTERSTATE HEADING south with water stops and let them walk home.. all the way home to discourage them from coming back

"If those people and groups who are crusading to get immigrants out of the United States would offer the air fare for us to go home, we would," he said, making direct reference to members of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project.

Ya know what.... lock them up... PICK Mater's and Tater's for 2 years at 10 cent an hour to pay for that 400.00 dollar ticket

Charge them for room and board for the cost to keep them in FEMA camps

THEN BAR THEM from re-entry with a 20 year minimum sentence ...

Where are the real men not demanding this.. you have been Invaded America and you still dont know it

Its cheaper to give them a ticket home. But first put them in a detention center for a month or two....to give em a taste. Then a requirement of receiving a ticket home is that they have to sign a paper that they will never return....not illegally OR legally. They have to give fingerprints. Then fly them home....hasta la vista...happy trails and all that. Then if they are EVER caught in this country again.....give em 20 years in prison.

All these idiots know how to do is whine and play their drama queen, "please feel sorry for me" tune every time they get themselves into a stupid situation of their own making.

It seems they made more money Mexico. After all, they paid coyotes thousands of dollars to bring them here. They need to go to the Mexican gang bangers and drug runners for a loan to get them back home the same way these fools got here, by shadow of night, sneaking in. They can walk back across the desert as far as I'm concerned.

The bottom may have fallen out of our economy but it does have its UP SIDE! I'd rather have hard financial times here in the USA than illegal aliens from Mexico always looking for special treatment and a pity party in MY country! GO HOME! Go be a blood sucking tick on the Mexican government's a_ _!

IAs love to whine don't they.

" Our arduous journey through the Sonoran desert almost killed us. We are not criminals, we just want to work! There's no work now, how are we going to get back to our countries? There aren't any jobs in our countries...boo hoo hoo..."

Only liberal American saps believe this crap.

Originally Posted by jimpasz

"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas - and wishes he could leave sooner. "

So much "lamenting" the same BS in so many articles by lazy news writers, I think they make most of this garbage up to meet a deadline.
Too lazy to go out and see whats really happening and editors of the same ink.

Yes, most likely..otherwise this statement is exactly why they shouldn't be given a path to citizenship..it shows exactly where their allegiance lies.