“Generally, people come with capital,” Quiroz said. “They buy houses, cars. And then they say, I want to invest in a business.”
In another sign of the influx, private jet flights between San Antonio and Mexico nearly doubled between 2008 and 2010, reaching 3,997 in 2010, according to city officials.
The city’s Mexican Entrepreneurs Association, founded 15 years ago, has grown from a handful of members to 200. On a recent evening, dozens of members and guests sipped red wine and nibbled canapes of smoked salmon and roast beef at a networking event.
A bearded man in a white guayabera dress shirt said he had moved to the city in December after narrowly escaping a kidnapping attempt in Monterrey. Like many of the new arrivals, he commutes to Mexico, flying there for two-week periods to run his cattle-feed firm.
“We can’t dismantle our business in Mexico. People depend on us” for their jobs, said the entrepreneur, who identified himself only as Jose for security reasons.
He feared for the safety of his wife and two college-age daughters in a city where cartel gunmen throw up blockades on busy streets and dangle battered bodies from bridges.
“We were always in danger,” Jose said. “Getting my family here was important.”
They now live in The Dominion, San Antonio’s most exclusive gated community. Jose is looking to set up several businesses in the city and get U.S. work visas through those investments.
“We want to respect the laws,” he said.
The number of investment visas given to Mexicans has risen sharply. A total of 10,512 E-1 and E-2 investment visas were granted to Mexicans from 2006 to 2010, a 73 percent increase over the previous five-year period, according to the State Department. Mexican professionals have obtained tens of thousands of other kinds of visas in recent years. Some complain, however, that the process has gotten more difficult, with increased fees and government scrutiny.
But many of the newcomers don’t need visas. Take Pablo Jacobo “Jack” Suneson. He was born in Laredo, making him a U.S. citizen, although he grew up with his Mexican mother just south of the border. They ran a well-known craft shop, Marti’s, in Nuevo Laredo.
That was back when tourists would throng Nuevo Laredo’s bars and shops. But with the rising drug violence, “a whole industry has evaporated along the northern Mexican border,” he said.
Suneson now operates Marti’s out of a building a few blocks from the Alamo. He sells the finest Mexican crafts — $189 silk scarves by the trendy designers Pineda Covalin and 198 salt-and-pepper shakers by the Taxco silver artist Emilia Castillo.
“This is where the new boom, the new action is. It’s not in Monterrey or Guadalajara, where they should be bringing up a new middle class,” Suneson said. “It really should be happening there.”
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