Summary
The Banco de Mexico (Mexico's central bank) claims that the real numbers are substantially higher than these official statistics, citing as evidence the fact that the population in a number of Mexican states has stopped growing despite no drop in the birth rate. (The only noticeable changes in recent years have been increasing rates of immigration of women from Mexico's more remote southern states, and of unaccompanied children, many of them looking for their parents.) The Banco de Mexico projected in February that even if Mexico achieves a 5% annual economic growth rate (higher than it has seen since 2000), the pay differential will continue drawing migrants to the north "for two or three decades." Mexico's average wage level is only marginally beyond where it stood in 1994 when NAFTA went into effect, and slow economic growth has driven millions into informal sector jobs, ranging from selling on street corners to sewing in the home.
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Dreams and Borders
The raid came on a Friday night. Law enforcement officials swooped down on hundreds of undocumented immigrants who had not made it far past the border. That's when "the American dream," as so many migrants call it without irony, ended for over one hundred of them who were detained, some hospitalized with major injuries. It was the third major raid on migrants in this location in a month's time.
"Everybody was running as fast as they could because the authorities were hitting them to force them to climb onto the pickup trucks," reported Teresa Garcia, one of the ones who ended up in the hospital. "I slipped and fell; people were stepping on me and then I lost consciousness." One woman, she added, "was pregnant, maybe five months, and I was able to see them pulling her and hitting her t...See the full content of this document
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