Post by Bozur on Feb 28, 2005 17:21:59 GMT -5
NYTimes.com > International > Americas
Mexico's Migrants Profit From Dollars Sent Home
By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: February 23, 2005
graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/02/22/international/20050223_migrant.gif
A Step Up on Both Sides
In 2004, migrants pledged $14.2 million for improvement projects in Mexico, through more than 527 organizations in 34 American states.
Luis J. Jiménez for The New York Times
ON THE ROAD Mayor Alberto Ruiz Flores of Valparaíso, left, at a meeting in Oxnard, Calif., with migrants from Zacatecas.
Luis J. Jiménez for The New York Times
BACK HOME Remittances sent to Zacatecas State have financed the building and renovation of places including a rodeo arena in Valparaíso.
VALPARAÍSO, Mexico, Feb. 22 - Less than two months after he was elected, Mayor Alberto Ruiz Flores climbed in his truck and set out on a 26-hour road trip across the border to Southern California, carrying a wish list of public works projects to a backyard barbecue in Oxnard.
The reason? To solicit money from some of the 400,000 Mexicans who abandon their country each year for work in the United States, including half his town in Central Mexico. Those who have left Valparaíso send home an estimated $100,000 a day, as much money in one month as the municipality will spend all year.
A week later, Mr. Ruiz was at a restaurant in Aurora, Ill., for a meeting with a Mexican factory worker and billboard painter who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Valparaíso. The week after that, he invited migrant leaders from Dallas and Las Vegas to join him at home for the annual crowning of the municipal beauty queen.
"I consider myself the mayor of Valparaíso, and the mayor to those, like you, who had to leave Valparaíso in search of a decent life," Mr. Ruiz said at the start of each encounter. "You have shown with your generosity that you are still a part of Mexico. Without you, who knows where we would be."
For Mr. Ruiz, politics does not stop at the United States border. The same is true across Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America, where more and more officials like him answer to cross-border constituencies made up of the people at home who cast ballots and the ones abroad who pull the purse strings.
Today more than ever, the remittances sent home by immigrant workers, both legal and illegal, are translating into political clout, and their communities in the United States, better organized and more vocal than before, have become social and political forces too important to ignore.
It is a phenomenon that has made Washington a principal battleground to lobby support among Salvadorans for the Central American Free Trade Agreement; New York a crucial state in elections in the Dominican Republic, which allows its citizens to vote from the United States; and Chicago a mandatory campaign stop for Mexican politicians.
On Tuesday, in Mexico City, migrant power was further consolidated when the lower Chamber of Deputies passed legislation allowing the migrants to cast absentee ballots from the United States, which will allow Mexicans with American citizenship to vote in both places.
The measure opens the way for an estimated 10 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to vote in presidential elections next year, in a potential tidal wave that could have significant impact on this country's fledgling democracy. Other countries including Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Honduras also allow their migrants to cast absentee ballots.
For Mexico, the logistics of the huge endeavor remain unclear; legislators estimated that operating polls in the United States could cost at least $50 million. The measure, which was passed by an overwhelming majority and is expected to win easy passage by the Senate, also provides money for Mexican political parties to campaign in the United States. However, it prohibits them from receiving foreign campaign donations.
Already, the economic influence of the migrants is undeniable. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates that migrants sent more than $45 billion to Latin America and the Caribbean last year, exceeding foreign investment and official development assistance for the third year in a row.
Mexico - where people compete with oil as the country's chief export - received some $17 billion in remittances, almost twice the amount of just four years ago.
Óscar Chacón, of the immigrant advocacy group Enlaces América, calls the phenomenon a quiet revolution led by an expanding network of more than 500 mom and pop organizations that are filling in where more than a decade of free trade and foreign investment has failed to narrow the gap between the rich and poor.
Today those immigrant groups are using the power that comes with their remittances to place ever greater demands on politicians at all levels. Their leaders have met with advisers to President Bush to push for sweeping immigration reform, and with presidents across Latin America to demand everything from the power to cast absentee ballots and run for office in their homelands, to universal health insurance and college scholarships.
"Once the voices of immigrants were weak," said Efraín Jiménez, a former auto mechanic who now oversees multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects in Zacatecas, financed by immigrants in California. "We had money, but we had no organizations.
"Now we have hundreds of organizations," he said. "No president can ignore us."
So far, migrants have lost more of those political battles than they have won, especially in the United States, where Mr. Bush's plans have stalled for a guest worker program. It would offer temporary legal status to an estimated three million Mexican laborers.
Still, says Mr. Chacón, migrants are raising money for public works, forming political action committees to support candidates at home and, in small but growing numbers, returning home to run for public office themselves.
Some are serving as mayors, city council members and state legislators, bringing fresh perspective and ideas from their time spent in the United States and new demands for accountability from governments long regarded as corrupt or ineffective.
Like Mexico, most countries prohibit political parties from receiving foreign campaign donations. But in recent years, migrants in the United States have formed political action committees to sponsor campaign trips to America for candidates from their home countries. And they send delegations of campaign workers back home to help candidates press the pavement, more and more of which they have paid for.
Few places understand the changes better than Zacatecas, the Central Mexican state where Mr. Ruiz serves as mayor. More than a century of migration has inextricably linked Zacatecas to the United States. Today more than half of the state's people live north of the border, mostly in California, Illinois and Texas.
Mexico's Migrants Profit From Dollars Sent Home
By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: February 23, 2005
graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/02/22/international/20050223_migrant.gif
A Step Up on Both Sides
In 2004, migrants pledged $14.2 million for improvement projects in Mexico, through more than 527 organizations in 34 American states.
Luis J. Jiménez for The New York Times
ON THE ROAD Mayor Alberto Ruiz Flores of Valparaíso, left, at a meeting in Oxnard, Calif., with migrants from Zacatecas.
Luis J. Jiménez for The New York Times
BACK HOME Remittances sent to Zacatecas State have financed the building and renovation of places including a rodeo arena in Valparaíso.
VALPARAÍSO, Mexico, Feb. 22 - Less than two months after he was elected, Mayor Alberto Ruiz Flores climbed in his truck and set out on a 26-hour road trip across the border to Southern California, carrying a wish list of public works projects to a backyard barbecue in Oxnard.
The reason? To solicit money from some of the 400,000 Mexicans who abandon their country each year for work in the United States, including half his town in Central Mexico. Those who have left Valparaíso send home an estimated $100,000 a day, as much money in one month as the municipality will spend all year.
A week later, Mr. Ruiz was at a restaurant in Aurora, Ill., for a meeting with a Mexican factory worker and billboard painter who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Valparaíso. The week after that, he invited migrant leaders from Dallas and Las Vegas to join him at home for the annual crowning of the municipal beauty queen.
"I consider myself the mayor of Valparaíso, and the mayor to those, like you, who had to leave Valparaíso in search of a decent life," Mr. Ruiz said at the start of each encounter. "You have shown with your generosity that you are still a part of Mexico. Without you, who knows where we would be."
For Mr. Ruiz, politics does not stop at the United States border. The same is true across Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America, where more and more officials like him answer to cross-border constituencies made up of the people at home who cast ballots and the ones abroad who pull the purse strings.
Today more than ever, the remittances sent home by immigrant workers, both legal and illegal, are translating into political clout, and their communities in the United States, better organized and more vocal than before, have become social and political forces too important to ignore.
It is a phenomenon that has made Washington a principal battleground to lobby support among Salvadorans for the Central American Free Trade Agreement; New York a crucial state in elections in the Dominican Republic, which allows its citizens to vote from the United States; and Chicago a mandatory campaign stop for Mexican politicians.
On Tuesday, in Mexico City, migrant power was further consolidated when the lower Chamber of Deputies passed legislation allowing the migrants to cast absentee ballots from the United States, which will allow Mexicans with American citizenship to vote in both places.
The measure opens the way for an estimated 10 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to vote in presidential elections next year, in a potential tidal wave that could have significant impact on this country's fledgling democracy. Other countries including Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Honduras also allow their migrants to cast absentee ballots.
For Mexico, the logistics of the huge endeavor remain unclear; legislators estimated that operating polls in the United States could cost at least $50 million. The measure, which was passed by an overwhelming majority and is expected to win easy passage by the Senate, also provides money for Mexican political parties to campaign in the United States. However, it prohibits them from receiving foreign campaign donations.
Already, the economic influence of the migrants is undeniable. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates that migrants sent more than $45 billion to Latin America and the Caribbean last year, exceeding foreign investment and official development assistance for the third year in a row.
Mexico - where people compete with oil as the country's chief export - received some $17 billion in remittances, almost twice the amount of just four years ago.
Óscar Chacón, of the immigrant advocacy group Enlaces América, calls the phenomenon a quiet revolution led by an expanding network of more than 500 mom and pop organizations that are filling in where more than a decade of free trade and foreign investment has failed to narrow the gap between the rich and poor.
Today those immigrant groups are using the power that comes with their remittances to place ever greater demands on politicians at all levels. Their leaders have met with advisers to President Bush to push for sweeping immigration reform, and with presidents across Latin America to demand everything from the power to cast absentee ballots and run for office in their homelands, to universal health insurance and college scholarships.
"Once the voices of immigrants were weak," said Efraín Jiménez, a former auto mechanic who now oversees multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects in Zacatecas, financed by immigrants in California. "We had money, but we had no organizations.
"Now we have hundreds of organizations," he said. "No president can ignore us."
So far, migrants have lost more of those political battles than they have won, especially in the United States, where Mr. Bush's plans have stalled for a guest worker program. It would offer temporary legal status to an estimated three million Mexican laborers.
Still, says Mr. Chacón, migrants are raising money for public works, forming political action committees to support candidates at home and, in small but growing numbers, returning home to run for public office themselves.
Some are serving as mayors, city council members and state legislators, bringing fresh perspective and ideas from their time spent in the United States and new demands for accountability from governments long regarded as corrupt or ineffective.
Like Mexico, most countries prohibit political parties from receiving foreign campaign donations. But in recent years, migrants in the United States have formed political action committees to sponsor campaign trips to America for candidates from their home countries. And they send delegations of campaign workers back home to help candidates press the pavement, more and more of which they have paid for.
Few places understand the changes better than Zacatecas, the Central Mexican state where Mr. Ruiz serves as mayor. More than a century of migration has inextricably linked Zacatecas to the United States. Today more than half of the state's people live north of the border, mostly in California, Illinois and Texas.