Thread: Mega homes are immigrants' fruit........

I didn't read this last Sunday addition of my nearest city paper until today and found this. I did a search at ALIPAC and don't find that this has already been posted. I have comments to add but want to know if this article has already been posted. It sure made me angry!


http://www.newsobserver.com/689/story/452012.html

Mega homes are immigrants' fruit
Earnings from N.C. go far in Mexico

In Boye, a small, poor village in Mexico, this schoolhouse was built with money sent back by Mexicans working in the U.S.
AP Photo by Marco Ugarte

Ioan Grillo, The Associated Press

BOYE, MEXICO - Clementina Arellano grew up with her six brothers in a shack in this dusty Mexican hamlet. Now 42, she's raising her sons in a spacious, 10-room mansion with Roman-style pillars at the doorway and a garden full of flowers and singing birds.

How did she transform her fortunes so dramatically? By waiting tables and sweating in a furniture factory for about 10 years in Hickory, N.C., and sending home as much as $500 a month.

A couple of doors down, Berta Olgin, lives under a leaky roof, with skinny sheep gnawing at sparse patches of grass in her yard. Her sons all decided to stay in Mexico to work as farmers or laborers, earning about $10 a day.

The two women are a vivid illustration of why so many Mexicans head north from this valley in central Mexico. Those who make it to the United States send dollars to carve out a Mexican dream between gnarled cacti and jagged rocks. Those who stay behind condemn another generation to a life deprived of material privileges.

This is the reason millions of men and women risk their lives crossing deserts and rivers to sneak into the United States, and keep at it even as lawmakers in Washington argue over a sweeping crackdown.

Last year, Mexican migrants sent home a record $20 billion, making them Mexico's biggest foreign earner after oil, according Mexico's Central Bank. In the first four months of this year, the amount was $7 billion, a 25 percent increase over the same period last year.

Half of it flows into poor villages like Boye, a corn-growing community of 900 people founded by Otomi Indians long before Europeans came to the Americas.

The men and women of Boye began heading north about 1990, after farm prices slumped. The U.S. economy was soon to enter its longest peacetime boom, and over the next 15 years, Boye sent more than 300 people over the border, mainly to North Carolina, town officials say.

Their dollars are seen everywhere in sun-soaked Boye. The schoolhouse, village church and even the paved main streets were built with funds from "el Norte," sent by migrant clubs in the United States that collect donations from former residents.

The most startling spectacle is the houses. Families of migrants have ripped away their corrugated-iron shacks and built ostentatious brick homes over their ancestral plots of farm land.

Nicolas Sanchez, 34, proud owner of a gated residence on the edge of Boye, first trekked over the Sonora desert and headed to Hickory when he was 21. He labored by day in a furniture factory, starting at $6 an hour. At night, he worked at Taco Bell.

Sanchez wired back at least $500 a month to his parents, who collected it in pesos at a nearby town. They used about half for their living expenses and invested the rest in building a new family home. With free land, a wealth of raw materials and an abundance of cheap labor, the two-story house was built for a little more than $10,000.

Alfredo Martinez, 41, headmaster of the village elementary school, says as many as 80 percent of Boye's schoolchildren drop out to sneak over the border.

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© Copyright 2006, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company

Annie, this says it all. These people are making a mockery of us all.

I would love to prove that we have some Washington politicians getting their hands on some of that money too.