http://www.laprensagrafica.com/opinion/ ... futuro.htm

After 25 years of internal conflict, I finally learned to live in two countries. I don’t have to choose. I work in the United States, a country which has given me endless opportunities, and one which I’ve learned to admire. My children also live there. But I return to Mexico continuously, where my family still lives – to feed my spirit. The problem is that you can’t live from the spirit alone. That’s known by the more than 100 million Mexicans who daily face a permanent economic crisis, drug violence – 5,000 dead in the last three years – and an H1N1 flu epidemic that does not yield. Mexico, with its friends, loves and long dinner table conversations, protects even the most vulnerable one. One eats better, I’m sure, than in the majority of the world’s countries. There are no beaches or vistas as beautiful. And, even so, Mexicans keep thinking about leaving. Why? One doesn’t have to dig deep to know the reason.

A recent Pew Global Attitudes poll found that the majority of Mexicans is dissatisfied with the direction the country has taken. 81 percent believe criminality is an enormous problem, 75 percent complain about the economy and 68 percent consider that their political leaders are corrupt. This is not new. When I left Mexico a quarter of a century ago, crimes due to drug traffic were not a central issue, but we already complained bitterly. It’s as if Mexico were a country of permanent crises. Some courageous and optimistic persons decided to stay to try to change the country from the inside. Others of us thought that we couldn’t wait two or three decades for the country to change, and thus we decided to change countries. And we left. As a fact, last year the Census Bureau counted 11,412,668 persons born in Mexico, living in the United States.

The truth is that no one wants to leave their country. Why leave your parents, your friends, the places where you grew up? One leaves his country because something expels you from there. President Felipe Calderon himself acknowledged in October that the number of those in poverty grew from 14 million to 20 million. And there’s also something that pulls the emigrant to the other side. [“the other sideâ€