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US construction slump means Mexicans going home
Ernesto Perez, a 27-year-old Mexican immigrant, says construction work in New York has become so scarce he's stopped sending money back to his parents in the southwestern state of Guerrero. ``If I don't find work soon, we're moving back home,'' Perez said last week as he walked away from the corner in Queens, New York, where he and dozens of Hispanic workers hope to get chosen for construction jobs. On this day, Perez gave up after a six-hour wait.The U.S. housing slump is squeezing Mexican migrant workers from Los Angeles to New York, where permits for new home construction are down 20% this year, according to the Census Bureau. That's reducing the pace of money transfers, the second-biggest source of dollars in Mexico after oil exports, and turning the peso into a laggard among Latin American currencies. Remittances rose 3.4% in the first quarter, the slowest growth in eight years. The peso has strengthened 0.1% this year to 10.8137 per dollar, the second-worst performance among the most-traded currencies in the region. Morgan Stanley predicts the Mexican peso will fall for a second straight year because of the slowdown in money transfers, a drop in oil production and weakening demand for the country's exports. Cross-border transfers, which totaled $23 billion last year, also have been hurt by President George W. Bush's crackdown on illegal immigrants. Bush increased security along the border and stepped up raids on factories hiring undocumented workers to help win congressional support for a bill that would give illegal immigrants a chance for permanent residency. The number of people caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico dropped almost one-third in the first quarter to 265,000, according to U.S. Border Patrol data. The decline in illegal immigrants mirrors the U.S. housing market. Residential construction in the U.S. fell by 17 percent in the first quarter, according to the Commerce Department. The construction industry is the biggest source of work for Mexicans in the U.S., accounting for about 20% of jobs, data from Mexico's central bank shows. The pace of money transfers has moved in step with the U.S. construction industry since the late 1990s, said Dawn McLaren, a research economist at Arizona State University in Tempe. The correlation between the two has become so strong that she uses border apprehensions as a ``leading indicator'' for the U.S. housing market. Posted by: trailing wife 2007-05-30 |
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