Now here’s a story you never thought you’d read.

It’s a story with a familiar twist; relatives in one country send money to their impoverished relatives in another country.

It’s the countries involved that demonstrate just how badly the Rushpubliscums screwed everything over.

During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to do: wiring pesos north.

Unemployment has hit migrant communities in the United States so hard that a startling new phenomenon has been detected: instead of receiving remittances from relatives in the richest country on earth, some down-and-out Mexican families are scraping together what they can to support their unemployed loved ones in the United States.

“We send something whenever we have a little extra, at least enough so he can eat,” said Mr. Salcedo, who is from a small village here in the rural state of Oaxaca and works odd jobs to support his wife, his two younger sons and, now, his jobless eldest boy in California.

He is not alone. Leonardo Herrera, a rancher from outside Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the southern state of Chiapas, said he recently sold a cow to help raise $1,000 to send to his struggling nephew in northern California.

Also in Chiapas, a poor state that sends many migrants to the United States, María del Carmen Montufar has pooled money with her husband and other family members to wire financial assistance to her daughter Candelaria in North Carolina. In the last year, the family has sent money — small amounts ranging from $40 to $80 — eight times to help Candelaria and her husband, who are both without steady work and recently had a child.

“When she’s working she sends money to us,” the mother said. “But now, because there’s no work, we send money to her.”

Statistics measuring the extent of what experts are calling reverse remittances are hard to come by. But interviews in Mexico with government officials, money-transfer operators, immigration experts and relatives of out-of-work migrants show that a transaction that was rarely noticed before appears to be on the rise.

“It’s something that’s surprising, a symptom of the economic crisis,” said Martín Zuvire Lucas, who heads a network of community banks that operate in poor communities in Oaxaca and other underserved Mexican states. “We haven’t been able to measure it but we hear of more cases where money is going north.”

At one small bank in Chiapas that used to see money flowing in from the United States, more money is going out than coming in.

“I’d say every month 50,000 pesos are sent from here to there,” said Edith Ramírez Gonzalez, a sales executive at Banco Azteca in San Cristóbal de las Casas. “And from there, we’d receive about 30,000 pesos.” Fifty thousand pesos is $3,840.

How much longer can it be before televisions all over the world feature a teary-eyed Sally Struthers, begging for a few pesos (or rubles, or renmibis) to feed some starving child in Peoria? And how long will it be before right wing Mexican politicians promise to crack down on the flood of illegal gringos taking away Mexican jobs?

Heckuva job, Rushpubliscums.

Tags: economy, failure, mexico, remittances, rushpubliscums

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 7:17 am and is filed under Jolly Roger, The Republican Depression of 2008-?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.