MEXICO CITY – Lorenzo Martínez, an illegal immigrant who has lived in Los Angeles for six years, has a message for his kin in Mexico’s Hidalgo state: Stay put.
The steady construction work that had allowed him to send home as much as $1,000 a month in recent years had disappeared. The 36-year-old father of four said desperation was growing among the day laborers with whom he was competing for odd jobs.
Sporadic employment isn’t the half of it. Martínez said anxiety also was running high among undocumented workers about stepped-up workplace raids, deportations and increasing demands by U.S. employers for proof that they were in the country legally.
“Better not to come,” Martínez said of anyone thinking about crossing into the United States illegally. “The situation is really bad.”
That message seems to be getting through. There are numerous signs of a slowdown in illegal immigration.
• A recent survey by Mexican authorities shows that fewer Mexicans say they are planning to seek work outside the country. In the third quarter of 2007, about 47,000 said they’d be packing their bags. That’s down nearly one-third from a year earlier.
• U.S. border authorities arrested just under 877,000 illegal crossers in fiscal 2007, which ended in September, down 20 percent compared to the year before.
• The growth rate of the U.S. Mexican-born population has dropped by nearly half to 4.2 percent in 2007 from about 8 percent in 2005 and 2006, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center.
• Employment of foreign-born Hispanics increased at a slower pace in the first quarter of 2007 than during the same period in the previous three years, according to Pew.
• The growth in remittances sent to Mexico has dwindled to a trickle. Through October of this year, Mexicans living abroad sent $20.4 billion home to their families, a 1.3 percent increase over the same period in 2006, according to Mexico’s central bank. Those sums were growing in excess of 20 percent annually just a few years ago.
What’s behind the apparent decline?
Some say it’s primarily the slump in U.S. construction, which has been a magnet for undocumented workers over the last few years – one in five Hispanic immigrants works in the building trades. Others say it’s largely the result of stepped-up enforcement.
Proponents of tighter security say U.S. workplace dragnets and increased deportations have made big headlines in Latin America, deterring some would-be migrants.
As the bust in the U.S. housing market eliminates construction jobs, Mexico’s economy is proving resilient, giving Mexicans added incentive to stay home. Job creation has been solid over the last two years, with nearly 2 million positions added in the formal economy.
Higinio González, 34, isn’t easily discouraged. Since 2004, he has been working in Sacramento, pulling weeds and hanging drywall, and has returned home once a year to visit his family in central Mexico.
In the past, the illegal immigrant has had little trouble slipping back into the United States. Until now. Returning from his mother’s funeral in Guanajuato state, González has been nabbed twice by U.S. agents at the California border in recent days.
“There’s a lot of surveillance. I’ve never seen so much of it,” he said by telephone from Tijuana.
With three children and a wife to feed, he’ll wait as long as it takes to get back to Sacramento. He has been weeks without a paycheck.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “It’s difficult to cross, but it’s not impossible. And I’m going to make it.”
Times staff writer Cecilia Sanchez contributed to this report.