by Juan Lee
Quite predictably Mexico is now facing a serious labor shortage. Fernando R. who works at a ranch in Butte City, recently returned from a trip south to his village Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutiro in Michiocan, Mexico. He said, “All the Mexicans are gone. It was like a plague or something wiped them out and now we got all these Honduran peoples living here that I don’t know. My whole village has changed and it’s affected the culture and everything, I have no reason to go back now. It’s very sad.”
In other areas Mexico’s mining industry had to resort to hiring women because so many of the young men had gone north to work high paying jobs in construction, mining and agriculture in America. This labor imbalance has been a bonanza for women like Cony S., an industrial engineer. She is the only female administrator at the Penasquito mine in Zacatecas, a state in north-central Mexico with a long mining tradition. Many other women work down in the mines. “Our presence has been growing in this industry,” she says. Cony says that 10 percent of the 3,000 employees in this deposit, where an enormous desert guards some 13 million ounces of gold, silver and zinc, are now women.
The labor shortage has had a dramatic impact on Mexico’s coffee industry too. Unseasonal rains and cold weather have resulted in the beans ripening at an uneven pace and now there are too few workers available for harvest, which means a large percentage of the coffee crop will be lost. These anomalies are exacerbated by a shortage of labor at all Mexican farms, but especially those that grow fresh fruits and vegetables. It could mean that these traditional crops that are labor intensive may be substituted for other crops.
Mexican business owners are blaming the United States for their losses due to our loose labor laws, lack of immigration enforcement and an open border that has drained their nation of manual laborers. They feel their workers are getting around the law and entering the US illegally thanks mostly to certain special interest employers that have paid off the politicians. Although they note that US recession has slowed the exodus and some have even returned home because they were laid off in the United States.
Re: “Mexican business owners are blaming the United States for their losses due to our loose labor laws, lack of immigration enforcement and an open border that has drained their nation of manual laborers.”
Now that figures. Heaven forbid they hold Vicente Fox and their own government accountable, or take some of the responsibility for this situation themselves.
Poor oil and mineral rich Mexico. The U.S. is to blame for all their ills.
Vincente Fox encouraged illegal immigration and provided direct assistance. That much is a provable fact.