(snip)"As economy sours, some migrants return south
Mexico City expects up to 30,000 more than usual will head home
updated 6:32 p.m. ET, Fri., Oct. 24, 2008
SAN DIEGO - After struggling just to pay his $300 monthly rent and send money to his wife and two children back in Honduras, Dionisio Urbina has given up. The day laborer is saving for a one-way plane ticket home.
"I lost hope about finding work," the 54-year-old illegal immigrant said outside a Home Depot store as he entered his fourth straight week without a job. "I'm homesick. It's best to leave."
Thousands of Latin American immigrants both legal and illegal are going back home as the economic crisis in the U.S. causes jobs to dry up in the construction, landscaping and restaurant industries.(snip)
(snip)Magnet weakens
There are other signs the U.S. is no longer the magnet it was a few years ago, when the economy was thriving and the housing boom produced plenty of work:
Fewer immigrants are getting caught crossing U.S. borders illegally. The Border Patrol said it made 723,825 apprehensions in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, down 18 percent from last year and down 39 percent from nearly 1.2 million in 2005.
Immigrants are sending less money home. Remittances by Mexicans living in the United States registered their biggest drop in August since record-keeping began 12 years ago. Mexico's central bank said they fell 12 percent from August 2007.
With an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., the number returning home is relatively small.
The vast majority of Mexican immigrants who have lived in the U.S. a few years will stay put because the job prospects are far worse back home and they have family in this country, said Wayne Cornelius, director of the University of California, San Diego's Center for Comparative Immigration Studies.
"They would be condemning themselves to a lower standard of living," Cornelius said.
Karina Corona, who came to the U.S. on a fake passport in 1995, is struggling to make ends meet but said she won't go home to Culiacan, Mexico, because there is no work there and her hometown is a hotbed of drug violence.
The single mother had to quit a second job as a seamstress to care for her children, leaving her to live on about $1,500 a month as a delicatessen cashier. She stopped taking graphic design classes at a San Diego community college and fell behind on rent.
But Mexico "would be even worse than here," said Corona, 34. "We're going to stick it out."
Other reasons to head home
At a day laborer site in Laguna Beach, south of Los Angeles, Juan Pacheco, 48, said he planned to return to Oaxaca, Mexico, in January, about two years after he came north to work construction. On an earlier stint in the U.S., he sent home $200 a week to his wife and children and bought a house in Mexico, where his family grows corn and beans.
Pacheco has worked only one or two days a week in the past year, barely enough for food and the $200 monthly rent. His voice cracks when he talks about phone calls to his 5-year-old daughter.
"She says she doesn't remember me, that she wants me to go home so she can meet me," he said.
Ramon Lopez has lived north of the border for 36 years, working in hotels and restaurants. But he recently returned to Mexico with his wife and mother-in-law because he could not find work or pay his bills.
"I had my lows, I had my highs, but ultimately, things have become critical," he said in Tijuana. "There's too much pressure for the rent, for food, for transportation."(snip)
ultimately, every unskilled (illegal) immigrant who decides to leave the USA saves Americans thousands of dollars in state and local budget expenditures, as well as opening up the potential availability of paid work for unskilled Americans.
The 'tin foil hat' crowd would also point out that, as the US economy worsens - as state and local budgets feel tremendous pressures - as unskilled and semi-skilled American unemployment levels rise - the US gov't may be called on to greatly intensify efforts to forcibly remove illegal immigrants from US soil ( and thus from US schools, from US hospitals, from US state and local benefit rolls etc.). Have a look at
(snip)"Most recently a contract was awarded to a Halliburton company, KBR. The contract, awarded in 2006, allows for the creation of new camps that can hold up to 400,000 people. This is in addition to the many camps that already exist. The stated reason for the new camps is “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs”. The press release remains in the KBR archive, it can be seen here.
Since our government has been lacking in the control of illegal immigration or any other type of immigration for that matter, we are left with the ominous line “support the rapid development of new programs”. It is perhaps the most disturbing part of the press release. What are these new programs? How rapid is the development? Maybe we don’t even want to know the answers to these questions.
These types of programs have spanned several administrations, both Democratic and Republican. They come from within the depths of government and are likely born out of a sense of self preservation by the government. In history, we have seen this type of behavior before most prominently, in Germany, the Soviet Union, and China. In the past our government and citizens frowned on things like this.
So yes, the camps do exist. They are there. They’re waiting to be used. But the big question, ‘Why?’, remains unanswered. Except for the vague stated reason, “support the rapid development of new programs”. Maybe it is a good idea to keep a watchful eye on the rapid development of new programs."(snip)
and speaking of 'new programs' ...
(snip)"Posse Comitatus? They don't need no stinkin' Comitatus! There is a new program for returning troops as 'relief duty' reintegration with civilian American society. US soldiers will be re-trained for use as a 'rapid response force' to be used for 'internal emergencies'.
Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations
Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command.
The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds. "(snip)
from
there would appear to be a lot of 'dots' out there just waiting to be connected !
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