Mexicans Living in the U.S. Sending Less Money Home to Families

ATOTONILCO, Mexico | Mexicans working in other countries are sending less money home, threatening businesses, stalling construction and choking cash flow to hamlets where as much as half the population works in the United States.

Analysts said stepped-up immigration raids and the slowdown in the U.S. economy accounted for the drop in the payments, which many migrants use to sustain families back home.

The payments, or remittances, have fallen about 2 percent this year to $11.6 billion, the first such drop in more than a decade since reliable records have been kept, Mexico's Central Bank said Wednesday.

And the buying power of this money has been battered by the weakening U.S. dollar, which has lost about 8 percent of its value against the Mexican peso so far this year.

In Mexico, businesses that once thrived selling everything from beds to bricks to the families of migrants have laid off workers. In this town of verdant fields beneath the snow-clad slopes of the Iztaccihuatl volcano, there's little left to rely on but small farms.

"There's no money anymore," Carlos Escalona said of his family's business, which sells concrete blocks and bricks to help people build houses with the money migrants send home. Sales have fallen by a third, forcing the business to lay off 70 percent of the staff.

Of migrant workers in the U.S., Escalona said, "They lose their jobs, then they're afraid to leave the house."

Bank of Mexico President Guillermo Ortiz said about 22 percent of Mexican workers in the U.S. have jobs in construction, an industry that has slowed sharply. About 152,000 Mexican immigrant workers lost U.S. construction jobs in 2007, while overall unemployment for Mexican immigrants in the U.S. rose from 5.5 percent to 8.4 percent over the year, according to a June report by the Pew Research Center.

Gone are the days when migrants came back to Mexico each year flush with cash, then returned to jobs waiting in the United States, as they did during the boom years of 2002 to 2006. Now, more migrants rounded up by U.S. immigration officials are being sent home penniless.

Ortiz said remittances will probably drop 2 percent to 3 percent for the full year, the first sustained drop since 1995, when the bank began keeping a tally. In small towns, about one in eight families gets money from workers in other countries, the government estimates. The payments have become a key source of foreign currency for the bank, representing Mexico's second-largest source of outside income, after oil exports.