So, it turns out that the moolah leaving the country isn't being USPS'ed
out by a bunch of "illegals", after taking those jobs from U.S.
citizens. No, it's U.S. citizens, themselves, spending their - soon to
be - American Peso where it'll go farther.
Wow, that blows my whole image of "America". Hahaha
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092006N.shtml
Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South
By Mike Davis
TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 19 September 2006
The visitor crossing from Tijuana to San Diego these days is
immediately slapped in the face by a huge billboard screaming, "Stop the
Border Invasion!" Sponsored by the rabidly anti-immigrant vigilante
group, the Minutemen, the same truculent slogan re****tedly insults the
public at other border crossings in Arizona and Texas.
The Minutemen, once caricatured in the press as gun-toting clowns,
are now haughty celebrities of grassroots conservatism, dominating AM
hate radio as well as the even more hysterical ether of the right-wing
blogosphere. In heartland as well as in border states, Republican
candidates vie desperately for their endorsement. With the electorate
alienated by the dual catastrophes of Baghdad and New Orleans, the Brown
Peril has suddenly become the Republican deus ex machina for retaining
control of Congress in the November elections.
A faltering GOP hegemony, too long sustained by the scraps of 9/11
and the imaginary weaponry of Saddam Hussein, now has a new urgency in
its appeal to the suburbs. Not since Kofi Annan conspired to send his
black helicopters to terrorize Wyoming, has such a clear-and-present
danger threatened the Republic as the sinister armies of would-be
busboys and gardeners gathered at the Rio Grande.
To listen to some of these demagogues, one would assume that the
Twin Towers had been blown up by followers of the Virgin of Guadalupe or
that Spanish had recently been decreed the official language of
Connecticut. Having failed to scourge the world of evil by invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, Republicans, sup****ted by some Democrats, now
propose that we invade ourselves: sending the Marines and Green Berets,
along with the National Guard, into the hostile deserts of California
and New Mexico where national sovereignty is supposedly under siege.
As in the past, nativism today is bigotry as surreal caricature,
reality stood on its head. The ultimate irony, however, is that there
really is something that might be called a "border invasion," but the
Minutemen's billboards are on the wrong side of the freeway.
The Baby-Boomers Head South
What few people - at least, outside of Mexico - have bothered to
notice is that while all the nannies, cooks, and maids have been heading
north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the Gringo
hordes have been ru****ng south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and
affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.
Yes, in former California Governor Pete Wilson's immortal words,
"They just keep coming." Over the last decade, the U.S. State Department
estimates that the number of Americans living in Mexico has soared from
200,000 to 1 million (or one-quarter of all U.S. expatriates).
Remittances from the United States to Mexico have risen dramatically
from $9 billion to $14.5 billion in just two years. Though initially
interpreted as representing a huge spike in illegal workers (who send
parts of their salaries across the border to family), it turns out to be
mainly money sent by Americans to themselves in order to finance Mexican
homes and retirements.
Although some of them are certainly naturalized U.S. citizens
returning to towns and villages of their birth after lifetimes of toil
al otro lado, the director-general of FONATUR, the official agency for
tourism development in Mexico, recently characterized the typical
investors in that country's real estate as American "baby boomers who
have paid off in good part their initial mortgage and are coming into
inheritance money."
Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal, "The land rush is
occurring at the beginning of a demographic tidal wave. With more than
70 million American baby boomers expected to retire in the next two
decades... some experts predict a vast migration to warmer - and cheaper
- climates. Often such buyers purchase a property 10 to 15 years before
retirement, use it as a vacation home, and then eventually move there
for most of the year. Developers increasingly are taking advantage of
the trend, building gated communities, condominiums, and golf courses."
The extraordinary rise in U.S. Sunbelt property values gives
gringos immense economic leverage. Shrewd baby-boomers are not simply
feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly
speculating in Mexican resort property, sending up property values to
the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into
slums or forced to emigrate north, only increasing the "invasion"
charges. As in Galway, Corsica, or, for that matter, Montana, the global
second-home boom is making life in beautiful, natural settings
unaffordable for their traditional residents.
Some expatriates are experimenting with exotic places such as the
Riviera Maya in Yucatan or Tulum in Quintana Roo, but more prefer such
well-established havens as San Miguel de Allende and Puerto Vallarta.
Here the norteamericanos make themselves at home in more ways than one.
An English-language paper in Puerto Vallarta, for instance,
recently applauded the imminent arrival of a new shopping mall that will
include Hooters, Burger King, Subway, Chili's and Starbucks. Only
Dunkin' Donuts (con salsa?), the paper complained, was still missing.
The gringo footprint is largest (and brings the most significant
geopolitical consequences) in Baja California, the 1,000-mile long
desert appendage to the gridlocked state-nation governed by Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Indeed, Baja real-estate websites ooze almost as much
hyperbole as those devoted to stalking the phantom menace of illegal
immigrants - just in a far more upbeat tone when it comes to the
question of immigrant invasions.
In essence, Alta (Upper) California is beginning to overflow into
Baja, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable
social marginalization and ecological devastation in Mexico's last true
frontier region. All the contradictions of post-industrial California -
runaway land inflation in the coastal zone, sprawling suburban
development in interior valleys and deserts, freeway congestion and lack
of mass transit, and the astronomical growth of motorized recreation -
dictate the invasion of the gorgeous "empty" peninsula to the south. To
use a term from a bad but not irrelevant past, Baja is Anglo
California's Lebenstraum.
Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation have already
occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has ex****ted
hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones
of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing
the West Coast's major ****pping companies, has joined forces with Korean
and Japanese cor****ations to explore the construction of a vast new
container ****t at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would
undercut the power of longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.
Secondly, tens of thousands of gringo retirees and winter-residents
are now clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest
coast from Tijuana to Ensenada, a recent advertisement for a real-estate
conference at UCLA boasts that "there are presently over 57 real-estate
developments... with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of
over $3 billion... all of them geared for the U.S. market."
Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a gilded gringo enclave has
emerged in the twenty-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de
Cabo. Los Cabos is part of that global archipelago of real-estate hot
spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values suck in
speculative capital from all over the world. Ordinary gringos can
participate in this glamorous Los Cabos real-estate casino through the
purchase and resale of fractional time-shares in condominiums and beach
homes.
Although Western Canadian and Arizona speculators have taken large
bites out of Baja's southern cape, Los Cabos - at least judging from the
registration of private planes at the local air****t - has essentially
become a resort suburb of Orange County, the home of the most vehement
Minutemen chapters. (Many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no
contradiction between fuming over the "alien invasion" with one's
conservative friends at the New****t Marina one day, and flying down to
Cabos the next for some sea-kayaking or celebrity golf.)
Manifest Destiny, the Sequel?
The next step in the late-colonization of Baja is the "Escalera
Nautica," a $3 billion "ladder" of marinas and coastal resorts being
developed by FONATUR that will open up pristine sections of both Mexican
coasts to the yacht club set.
Meanwhile, The Truman Show has arrived in the picturesque little
city of Loreto on the Gulf side of the peninsula. There, FONATUR has
joined forces with an Arizona company and "New Urbanist" architects from
Florida to develop the Villages of Loreto Bay: 6,000 homes for
expatriates in colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez.
The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word
in Green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile
usage. Yet, at the same time, it will balloon Loreto's population from
its current 15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and
environmental consequences of a sort that can already be seen in the
slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.
One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has
preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the
West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous
environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape as they do
the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula's small towns and
fi****ng villages.
Thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north,
however, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could
be swept away in the next generation. One of the world's most
magnificent wild coastlines could be turned into generic tourist sprawl,
waiting for Dunkin' Donuts to open. Locals, accordingly, have every
reason to fear that today's mega-resorts and mock-colonial suburbs, like
FONATUR's entire tourism-centered strategy of regional development, are
merely the latest Trojan horses of Manifest Destiny.
--------
Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Planet of Slums (Verso
2006), and, with Justin Chacon Akers, No One is Illegal (Haymarket
2006). His history of the car bomb - Buda Wagon's - which grew out of a
two-part Tomdispatch article, will be published by Verso early next year.
- - -
Always an enlightening moment, with:
Turin
I have such sites to show you...
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