Migrants send less money back to Mexico

The number of residents from this part of central Michoacan state who are making the trip this year is about half the usual rate of 8,000, said Juan Felipe Ruiz Lopez, a former undocumented worker in Georgia who now oversees migrant issues for the municipality that includes Tejaro.

"In another year, we could be at the end of the era of illegal migration because of all the fear," Ruiz said.

Many Michoacan residents continue to head north in search of work, and migration experts say any slowdown would probably end once the U.S. economy recovered. But migrants have been quick to adapt to the shifting conditions, such as staying put on the U.S. side to avoid the new rigors of reentering illegally after coming home to Mexico.

Spring is when many Mexican migrants head north in hopes of beating the intense desert heat along the border for summertime jobs in construction, landscaping and farming. But the U.S. housing downturn has dried up much of the building-related labor market, and a striking number of workers here say that, for now, they are unwilling to accept the physical and legal risks and fast-rising smugglers' fees to reach an iffy job situation on the U.S. side.

"It is just too hard to get there," said Jose Chavez Oliveros, 32, who returned home last year after working in an aluminum factory in Nevada for $8 an hour.

Sweating as he shoveled manure in a cow shed here the other day, Chavez said he had no plans to try his luck again, though his $15-a-day wage as a farmhand is a pittance compared with his U.S. pay.

He recalled having to hike with five others across the desert in Arizona to evade U.S. Border Patrol agents after waiting all day by the roadside for a smuggler, who charged the migrants $1,300 apiece. Some people here cited fees as high as $4,000.

"Compared with dying in the desert, it's better to stay here," Chavez said.

A drop in money transfers, or remittances, from migrants abroad has forced families here to further tighten their belts and choked businesses that rely on wages earned in the United States.

Eleazar Chavez Ayala said sales at his family's hardware store in Tejaro had fallen by half because so few residents were buying sink fixtures and other supplies for home improvement, often the trophy for months spent working in the U.S.

"There is a lot of worry and very little work," said Chavez, 31.

Michoacan is especially vulnerable because it depends more heavily on migrants' remittances than any other state in Mexico. The estimated $24 billion sent to Mexico last year was barely higher than in 2006, a sobering deceleration just a few years after growth had galloped. The news was even worse in Michoacan, where transfers fell in each quarter from 2006, ending down 6.4% overall, according to the Bank of Mexico.

Rita Perez, 54, said it's been six months since she received money from any of her four sons in Reno, all gardeners. None has steady work now.

Previously, the sons rode out down times or slow winter months by taking jobs in fast-food restaurants, she said. But this year there were none.

Perez, who had been used to getting $200 to $300 every two weeks, now relies on her daughter, who has three children of her own and a job in a Tejaro store that pays $30 week.

"Sometimes we can't afford beans," Perez said.

On the edge of a tree-shaded plaza in nearby Tarimbaro, the municipal seat, the town's lone money exchange has seen transfers drop to about $800 daily from $7,000, said co-owner Maria de los Angeles Duarte.

She said those still sending money do so less often, every two weeks instead of weekly.