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  1. #1
    Administrator Jean's Avatar
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    Immigrants who left U.S. returning, officials say

    Immigrants who left U.S. returning, officials say

    10:34 PM PDT on Tuesday, October 19, 2010

    By DAVID OLSON
    The Press-Enterprise


    With signs of economic recovery growing, some immigrants who left the Inland area for their homelands after losing their jobs are returning to the United States, Mexican officials and leaders of local immigrant-assistance groups said.

    U.S. unemployment is still high, but hope is rising, said José Mendoza Morfin, municipal president of Cotija, Mexico, the hometown of an estimated 2,000 Inland immigrants.

    "The United States is beginning to stabilize," Mendoza said in Spanish during a recent visit to Perris. "They know that in a short time they're going to have a job."

    But migrants are cautious, Mendoza said. Some are returning to different regions than those they left, choosing to bypass high-unemployment states like California for places with more jobs, he said. Others are returning alone, leaving families behind in Mexico until the economy improves further, he said.

    There is no way to measure how many immigrants left the United States because of the recession. But experts agree that the economic downturn -- coupled with more aggressive immigration-law enforcement -- fundamentally shifted immigration patterns, especially in hard-hit regions like the Inland area.

    The massive, years-long increase in the Inland area's foreign-born population came to a halt in 2008, when the number of immigrants began falling, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. It's unknown how many are in the United States illegally, because the Census Bureau doesn't ask immigration status.

    Nationally, the number of people who illegally crossed the border plummeted from an estimated 850,000 each year in the first half of the decade to about 300,000 annually from March 2007 to March 2009, according to a September report by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. The number of illegal -- undocumented -- immigrants living in the United States declined from its 2007 peak of 11.8 million to 10.8 million in 2009, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates.

    FEWER PEOPLE HEADED SOUTH

    But Inland immigrant-rights advocates said it has been months since they heard of families returning to Mexico for economic reasons.

    Some Riverside County schools saw an unusually high number of Latin American and Asian immigrant parents pull their children out of school during the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years to return to their homelands, said county schools Superintendent Kenn Young. Last academic year, relatively few parents did so.

    "The exodus appears to have stopped," he said.

    Juan Antonio López, general manager of Crucero, a Greyhound Lines subsidiary that has stops in Riverside and San Bernardino, said his employees are telling him that far fewer people are returning permanently to Mexico than a year or two ago.

    Some immigrants may be moving to other states. Undocumented immigrants are more likely to relocate -- whether abroad or within the United States -- to look for work because they are ineligible for unemployment and other government benefits and because they are less likely to have strong roots in an area, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, an associate professor of political science at UC Riverside and an expert on immigration.

    Even before the recession, illegal immigrants were increasingly settling outside California and other traditionally immigrant-heavy states, opting for states that previously had few immigrants.

    "The uneven nature of the recovery may maintain this trend," Ramakrishnan said, referring to stubbornly high unemployment in states like California and more optimistic economic forecasts in other states. "It might even increase the trend."

    Ramakrishnan said one reason more undocumented immigrants did not return to their homelands during the recession is because increased border security would have made it more expensive and difficult for them to cross back into the United States later.

    It's also why some migrants who returned to Mexico aren't coming back to the United States.

    Alberto returned to the Inland area in February after a year and a half in his hometown of Cotija, Michoacán. He said he doesn't want his wife, Maria Guadalupe Salgado, to cross the border because it would be too difficult and dangerous.

    Alberto, who lives in Perris and has an agricultural job, does not want his last name used because he is in the country illegally.

    Alberto was arrested by immigration agents at his Riverside home in June 2008 and later deported. He thought of trying to cross the border illegally shortly afterward, but with the economy struggling, he decided it wasn't worth the risk. Salgado and their three U.S.-born children joined him in Mexico a week later.

    In Cotija, he earned about $50 a week selling coconuts and coconut juice. It wasn't enough to support his family.

    "He was desperate," Salgado said by phone from Cotija. "We had nothing there, but we have nothing here either."

    Alberto sends money from Perris to help pay for food and for school supplies and uniforms for the children, aged 6, 10 and 13.

    Salgado works at a salon in Cotija and sells tacos, soft drinks and other items from the front of the house she and the children share with Alberto's parents. She wants to return with the kids to join her husband but fears she wouldn't be able to find work in the Inland area.Alberto earns about $300 a week, getting extra money doing handyman jobs on the weekends. As recently as late 2007, he was making as much as $2,800 a week with overtime at a Long Beach refinery.

    The Rev. José Cruz Moreno Cárdenas, pastor of Our Lady of Popolo Catholic Church in Cotija, said others who returned to Cotija from the United States are also struggling. "They thought it would be easy," Moreno said in Spanish while at a Perris festival last month. "Then after some days or months, they realized it's just as hard there (in Cotija) as it is here."

    PLANNING TO STAY IN MEXICO

    Some immigrants who returned to Mexico because of the U.S. economic crisis say they have no desire to go back to the United States.

    Albertano Hernández Castro, mayor of the small Michoacán town of Juárez, said jobs in the guava fields surrounding his town are plentiful and, even though they pay much less than U.S. positions, the cost of living -- including often-rent-free housing -- is lower.

    Todd Sorensen, an assistant professor of economics at UC Riverside and an expert on immigration, said the same relatively low wage may be enough to keep one person in his or her homeland but spur someone else to emigrate. Rossy Ochoa could afford more clothes and other items when she lived in the Inland area, where she earned more than three times what she now receives in Mexico. But she said she is happier back in the house where she grew up, in the small city of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán.

    "Here I am in my own country," Ochoa said in Spanish by phone from Lázaro Cárdenas. "It's less stressful here."

    Ochoa and her 15-year-old daughter, Montserraht, left Moreno Valley in late 2008 after Ochoa lost her job at a Riverside recreational vehicle factory.

    Several of the 300 employees at tomato and cucumber greenhouses outside Cotija are reverse migrants who are now planning to stay in Mexico permanently, said Carlos Nampulá, director of a Cotija organization that advises greenhouse investors.

    The greenhouses are among a growing number of projects throughout Mexico that aim to provide jobs so Mexicans don't feel a need to leave their homeland.

    Hector Montaño, 30, said he left the Cotija area in 2004 because he was barely scraping by working in the sugarcane fields. He found work picking strawberries near the Santa Barbara County city of Santa Maria but, after his hours were cut in late 2007, he returned to Mexico with his wife and three children. He now earns nearly $90 a week at the greenhouse, up to $120 with overtime.

    "With the job I have, I can stay here," Montaño said in Spanish by phone from the greenhouse.

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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    OH terrific! Just in time for November 2, 2010 elections.

    A Nation Without Borders Is Not A Nation - Ronald Reagan
    Save America, Deport Congress! - Judy

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  3. #3
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    U.S. unemployment is still high, but hope is rising, said José Mendoza Morfin, municipal president of Cotija, Mexico, the hometown of an estimated 2,000 Inland immigrants.

    "The United States is beginning to stabilize," Mendoza said in Spanish during a recent visit to Perris. "They know that in a short time they're going to have a job."
    Anyone who still doesn't believe the government of mexico is encouraging this invasion is simply not paying attention. Instead of invading us with their military, they are invading us with their raza. They will always remain loyal to mexico, as will their anchor babies who are being erroneously conveyed citizenship as a result of the 14th Amendment being hijacked in the name of "diversity and multiculturism."
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  4. #4
    Senior Member Bowman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NoBueno

    Anyone who still doesn't believe the government of mexico is encouraging this invasion is simply not paying attention. Instead of invading us with their military, they are invading us with their raza. They will always remain loyal to mexico, as will their anchor babies who are being erroneously conveyed citizenship as a result of the 14th Amendment being hijacked in the name of "diversity and multiculturism."
    You are exactly right, read my post about the book "La raza cosmica" they are sore about losing their Empire to the English and Americans, and want to retake it.
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

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