Chronic_loser said:
I would like to see your "villages.. mostly vacant except for children and old people."
Hateful shriveled up xenophobic rants get the contempt they deserve....., except on FR immigration threads. Here they are "patriotic."
51 posted on 01/01/2006 8:50:29 AM PST by chronic_loser"
Ghost town
The Mexican state of Zacatecas, once a place rich in silver but now one of the poorest areas in the country, is illustrative.
US President Bush and Mexico President Fox
The Mexican migration issue is high on the agenda for Bush and Fox
More Zacatecans live now in Los Angeles than in the city of Zacatecas.
The State Governor, Ricardo Monreal, acknowledges that "their economic influence is huge and their political clout as a consequence of that is huge too".
"It is thanks to them that I became state governor," says Mr Monreal.
Remittances also have social and human implications.
In the village of Jomulquillo, a couple of hours from the city of Zacatecas, what hits you as soon as you arrive is the silence.
One of the few locals remaining there says that at the moment there are 80 people living in the village - 300 live in Los Angeles.
With the empty houses, the closed windows and locked doors, this feels like a ghost town.
But the pain of families being separated is somewhat compensated by these remittances that, in the case of Zacatecas, not only help the relatives but also their villages of origin.[snip]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3582881.stm ILLA JUAREZ, Mexico (CNN) -- It is an aspect of the immigration story that goes largely untold. As millions of Mexicans leave for a chance at a better life in the United States, they aren't just changing American society, but society in their homeland as well.
Take, for example, the town of Villa Juarez, in the state of San Luis Potosi, the geographic center of Mexico.
This largely agricultural community has 13,000 residents, most of whom have the same surname, "Izaguirre," though most are not directly related.
But the village is undergoing a transformation of sorts. It has lost five thousand residents in the last five years alone, most headed for the U.S. Most of those migrating are young men, leaving behind mainly women, children and the elderly.
http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/2001/fyi/news/09/24/hispanic.hometown/ In Quiringuicharo (key-ding-gwi-CHARO), two-story houses wear fresh coats of paint. But few cars move through the well-paved streets.
No chit-chat can be heard from the shops. No food vendors ply their trade.
The refurbished town square sits empty, no children run playfully down its walkways.
A cross atop a hill can be lighted, but no one has turned it on for months.
Quiringuicharo has a heartbeat, but it pulses 1,500 miles away - in and around several crowded Rolling Meadows apartment and condominium complexes.
About one-half to two-thirds of Quiringuicharo's 4,000 residents live in the United States.
Back near Quiringuicharo's red-brick central plaza, 46-year-old Irma Herrerra says the suburban complex is known by its Mexican name. "We call it the 'Ranchito Quiringuicharo.'"
She's never seen the suburb where her three brothers, her son, daughter and husband now live.
She chooses to stay in Quiringuicharo, a veritable ghost town.
"All of the houses are empty," she says. "They have all gone north."
Back in Mexico, Albert owns his own home.
It rises two stories with three spacious bedrooms.
Stairs spiral up to the roof where he would sometimes sit in the mornings to look out at the town and the hills beyond.
Now it stands empty.
Quringuicharo sits an hour and a half from Michoacan's capital city of Morelia and about one hour from Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city. Michoacán is an agricultural state from which 17 percent of Illinois Mexicans emigrate.
http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/2001/fyi/news/09/24/hispanic.hometown/ ___________________
The Mexican government – PAN President Vicente Fox is as bad or worse than the formerly dominant PRI officials – refuses to implement the free-market reforms that will enable its people to find work at home. One news article a few months ago reported on the ghost towns of Mexico, places where 90 percent of the adult male population is gone, in America working and sending money home.
That’s not healthy.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/greenhut/greenhut8.html _______
The amount of migration worries me - we leave our villages and we see other ways of life. We worry about the breakdown of our families... There are people here who haven't seen their wives or children for eight or ten years and that's not fair, that's not right."
While jobs in the United States bring money back home, the absence of men has lead to the breakdown of family life. In Oaxaca's neighbouring state of Veracruz, a fall in coffee and papaya prices recently forced the men to migrate. Lucretia is waiting in vain for her husband to come back: "The first time that he left he used to send us money but very little and now it's the same, he doesn't have a job. One day he works, the next he doesn't and also we don't hear from him... I was thinking of going to help him out so I also could earn some money, but it's not possible because I can't leave the children - and it is not easy because I think he's got another woman and he's going to stay there."
http://www.tve.org/lifeonline/index.cfm?aid=1018 Leaving ghost towns
The dramatic numbers, Mexican officials have said, led them to conclude that seeking immediate amnesty may not be the answer and could spark even more immigration to the United States.
The current exodus has transformed huge sections of the countryside in Mexico into a series of ghost towns with freshly painted homes but no one to inhabit them.
Victoria Almanza of Guerrero, who works as a maid in an upscale hotel in downtown Chicago, timidly points out the difficulties of crisscrossing the border because of a U.S. crackdown along the 2,000-mile-long region.
"It's not easy going home," she said. "We feel trapped here."
http://are.berkeley.edu/APMP/pubs/agworkvisa/foxpushes071601.html I checked the links. Every one of them. They are stories of men who have no income and do as I once did....., they work in another area and send home money so the family can make ends meet. Yes, they do cross a border illegally to do so. Further, if you bothered to read the stats, you would know that this has always occurred. The big difference is that now, as opposed to when we had easier border crossings, men came, made money, send it back, and returned. Now, with the restrictions on border crossings, the men tend to leave and not come back, as it is difficult, expensive, and dangerous to do multiple crossings. However, even if that were NOT the truth, what frosts me with you and you cabal of self-righteous immagraphobes is your willingness, no, your EAGERNESS to pounce on the slightest opening to denigrate our neighbors south of the border. You know (or you should know) that the majority of Mexican men do not, as a whole, abandon their families. There are exceptions, of course, but I don't think you want to put our track record in the USA us a basis for comparison, either.
If you and your little cabal of self righteous rants wanted to talk about how the border situation is awful, turns honest people into criminals on both sides of the border, causes resentment among Americans, breeds corruption, and various other problems, I would be right there with you. I am in agreement that we need a fence/wall/secure border, and I think the hissy fit that Vincente Fox is throwing is stupid, shortsighted (he is a politician playing to passions where he is) and bound to cause even more resentment over here.
What I despise about you and your buddies is your willingness to sieze on any thread, pull the most LAME, STUPID and HATEFUL connections, like saying that the existence of children expoited in the sex trade in Mexico is caused by the migration of men north of the border to send money back to their families. You cap off that bit of cultural gymnastics by sneering at the "family values" of those south of the border, as though the existence of perversion for profit existed only there, was not in evidence in the USA (or any other country, I guess) and the fact that it was there was evidence of the degeneracy of a culture.
You and you little band of haters come up with this crap constantly on immigration threads. Sneers and condescending remarks, wishing evil on people whom you never met and know NOTHING about, combined with your haughtiness and arrogance toward people who are on the lowest rung of our society would make anyone but the most self righteous bigot ashamed. Moreover, you and your buddies will make the most outlandish, unsupported allegations against anyone who challenges your line of junk. I have been accused of every kind of ideological deviancy, economic dishonesty, and unethical motivation, simply for saying that this kind of tripe is wrong, it is hateful, it is wicked and all of the horrid mess about the border (and it is a horrid mess) does not justify it. I have come to utterly despise it, and you and your buddies for your smug, arrogant, shriveled little souls on display.
There, go run to the mods and whine about that.