Amid Slump, Fewer Mexicans Are Going to United States and Sending Money Home

ANDOCUTIN, Mexico -- There are hundreds of sleepy little towns in Mexico just like this one. The old church is restored, but there is no priest. The roads are newly paved, but there are no cars. The homes are tidy, but there are no families inside. The doors are locked with chains.

"They are all empty. You see the streets? You don't see anybody. Because everybody is gone, and I don't know if they are ever coming back," said Elias Calderón, 68, a retired steelworker who spent his work life in Chicago and returned to the town of his birth.

No one is leaving Andocutin on the traditional trek north to the United States, because they say there is no work for them there. Nor is anyone coming back home.

Here in the heart of Mexico, there is stark evidence that well-worn patterns of migration -- the annual movement of Mexicans back and forth to the United States -- have been disrupted by the global economic slump, even as the journey north has been made more difficult by tighter border controls and the recent outbreak of swine flu in Mexico.

For the first time in a generation, since officials began to tally accurate records, the Mexican government reports a dramatic, sustained decline in the number of Mexican migrants going to the United States. The most recent count found that 186,000 fewer Mexicans left for other countries in 2008, compared with the previous year, a precipitous 22 percent drop, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

For years, Mexico's poor have always left hardscrabble farm towns such as Andocutin to venture north for work. Calderón went, just as his father and grandfather did. It was a rite of passage for a teenager to take his first trip. During Christmas and holidays, the men came back, often as proud providers, carrying billfolds of cash and driving pickup trucks with U.S. plates. "Life was pretty good back then," Calderón said.

Andocutin has always survived on the two-way flow of migrant workers. For better or worse, it is the economic model for much of rural Mexico: leave, work, send money home. There are now a record 12.7 million Mexican immigrants living in the United States; one in three immigrants are now from Mexico, and half of them are undocumented. Remittances they send home are the lifeblood of Andocutin.

Now fewer people are leaving and even fewer are coming back. There is no work for Mexicans up north, people in Andocutin said, and there is certainly nothing for them to come home to.

"There is clearly a slowdown of Mexican migration to the United States," said Ernesto Rodríguez Chávez, a demographer at the National Institute of Migration in Mexico City. "If the trend continues, and we think it will, there will be even fewer Mexicans going to the United States this year."

The reason, experts said, is that work is far harder to find north of the border, especially in construction, manufacturing and the unskilled-service industry, three sectors in which Mexican immigrants, many illegal, play an outsized role. Experts and immigrants said those already in the United States are mostly staying put and hoping for an economic turnaround.

"They have complex social networks; they know how the economy is going," said Fernando Robledo Martínez, director of the Institute of Migration in the state of Zacatecas. "We don't have any evidence of a massive return of migrants."

Luis Vega Tirado, 47, who has a degree in architecture and works in construction, said, "People have the dream of coming back someday." But more and more, he said, it is just a dream.