Border traffic isn’t all one way
“IN CHICAGO WE used to grind our teeth on our commute. Here we walk to work through cobbled streets, and the only traffic is the occasional donkey delivering firewood,” says Michael Coleman, who moved to Mexico two years ago with his wife Lisa. In sun-kissed San Miguel de Allende, a sumptuous colonial town in Guanajuato state, the Colemans have realised a new sort of American dream, abandoning careers in advertising and headhunting to open a small boutique in one of Mexico’s loveliest spots.
As fewer Mexicans try their luck in el Norte, more Americans are migrating south. In 1990 fewer than 350,000 foreigners were living in Mexico. By 2010 there were nearly a million, most of them Americans. The recession back home has slowed the flow. But hotspots such as Baja California Sur, which offers a rugged coastline for silver-haired surfers, have taken on a strong gringo accent. San Miguel, with around 10,000 American residents, even boasts a US consular agency.
Expats are drawn by Mexico’s good weather and low cost of living, which translates into nicer houses and plenty of help to clean them. In some places immigrants have pushed house prices beyond the reach of most locals: San Miguel’s grander places go for well over $1m, an extraordinary sum in a pueblo in rural Mexico. But the newcomers have brought in tourism and provided employment, and many expats have set up charities for causes like children or the environment, says Irma Rosado, a local-government official.
Short-stay tourists have been surprisingly gung-ho in the face of Mexico’s well-publicised violence. Last year a record 23.4m of them visited the country. Deep discounting has kept them coming; lower prices mean that income from tourism this year is about 6% down on 2008, the all-time high. Some areas have suffered badly: Acapulco, where Bill and Hillary Clinton honeymooned during its heyday, is now one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, and visitors have dried up. But the honeypots of Cancún and Los Cabos remain calm and are still getting plenty of sunbathers.
The number of day-trippers, though, has almost halved. The fall began after September 11th 2001, when America tightened its border controls and crossing became a question of hours, not minutes. On Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución, Jorge Bonillas charges tourists $1 for a photo with his donkey Silver, which he has painted as a zebra. He says that business is barely a tenth of what it was before 2001. Down the road Arturo Rendón tries unsuccessfully to tempt young tourists into a bar blaring out rock music and offering absinthe before noon. Tijuana used to be packed with young Americans at 4am, he remembers. These days, “at 1am you are alone.”
Speedier border crossings would help. Work is under way to install more checkpoints, and pre-clearance programmes are slowly expanding, despite Mexicans’ touchiness about American agents working on their soil. Foreign investment along Mexico’s coast is held back by a constitutional ban on foreigners owning property along the border, including the seafront (supposedly on grounds of national security). Expats get round the clause by buying their property through a trust. Repealing the ban would tempt more to invest in Mexican property.
A bigger opportunity lies in health care. Absurdly, many American expats drive from Mexico to the United States for cheap treatment because Medicare, America’s free health programme for the elderly, cannot be used in Mexican hospitals. If American citizens could use Medicare in Mexico, taxpayers back home would save money (and Mexico’s health-care industry would do more business). Alas, politics has so far made such a deal impossible: sending pensioners to get their teeth fixed in Juárez is a difficult sell.
*There are a million, mostly Americans and Canadians living in
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@MorganeBravo
Miembro de la Red de Talentos Mexicanos en el Exterior
Capítulo Francia
Responsable Antena Paris &
Responsable del sector estratégico de Ciencias Sociales a nivel Europeo
