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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Immigrants' Jobs Vanish With Housing Slowdown The gold rush came in drywall, laminate flooring and granite countertops, and Amilcar Guzman came with it. Guzman left El Salvador at age 18 in 1999 and landed in Manassas. Soon he had $15-an-hour jobs cutting lumber, driving nails and running a Bobcat loader. He got a car, got married. The Washington region was hungry for houses, houses, houses, and word of the boom reached Mexico and Central America, drawing thousands more eager, jobless men like him. Then sometime last year, Guzman said, the rush began to go bust, little by little, month by month. The contractors stopped hiring. The phone stopped ringing. Washington, it seemed, had all the houses it could hold . So Guzman got a plane ticket. On Jan. 20, he is taking his family back to El Salvador, with plans to open an auto repair shop with the money he has saved. "There's no work here anymore," he said, having spent the past month unemployed. "And when there's no work, it's time for Latinos to go back to the countries where they came from." Hispanic immigration to the Washington region has always followed a seasonal pattern, as the winter puts a chill on outdoor labor and drives workers south. But with home sales and housing starts dropping after years of steady growth, many Hispanic workers -- legal and illegal -- say the good times are gone. "The Hispanic population in Virginia has grown too much," said Guzman, echoing the sentiments of those who support tough immigration policies, "and that's closed off a lot of job opportunities." Demographers who track migration patterns and embassy staff members say it's too soon to tell exactly how the housing construction decline has affected the region's Hispanic population. But stories of departing workers abound. Some workers say they're headed home; others, spurred by rumors of construction jobs, try their fortunes in the Carolinas, Georgia, New Orleans. "It's a little better here, but not much," said Raul Amayas, 21, a Salvadoran immigrant reached by phone in Charlotte. Amayas left Manassas last month after losing his $400-a-week landscaping job. Now he's making $300 a week as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant. "It's hard here. Ugly," Amayas said. Other immigrant workers said they're optimistic things will pick up again. Julian Cabrera, 42, arrived in Woodbridge in 2004, a sharecropper from El Salvador who could no longer feed his nine children on the $5 a day he earned growing corn and beans. He has been snagging work at Route 1 and Longview Drive ever since. A year ago, he would get hired at least three times a week. But he hasn't found work once this month and is thinking of going to Texas, where his brother-in-law might be able to get him a job with a contractor. Until then, he's not sending money home to his family in El Salvador. "I call my wife every eight days," he said, eyeing passing cars for potential employers. "I just tell her to be patient." According to the National Association of Realtors, housing starts have fallen 23.5 percent between October 2004 and October 2006, and data released this month by the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors show home sales in that area plunged 45 percent between November 2004 and November 2006. Home sales in suburban Maryland are down 34 percent between November 2004 and November 2006, according to the Maryland Association of Realtors. The effects of the slowdown are also rippling through Hispanic-owned businesses. "A lot of my customers have gone to Florida, to the Carolinas," said Carlos Castro, owner of the Todos Supermarket chain and chairman of the Hispanic Business Council in Prince William County. Sales are down slightly at Castro's stores, but he said some of his suppliers are experiencing 30 to 40 percent decreases in local orders, with smaller, less-established businesses taking the biggest hit. Tracking the departure of immigrants from the Washington area is difficult. "In terms of actual data, it's too soon to say," said Steven A. Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports limiting immigration. "If the economy turns down and we were to ratchet up enforcement, there would be a multiplier effect. But that isn't likely to happen. The most likely scenario is movement into other sectors of the economy and greater geographic dispersion." Among illegal immigrant Hispanic men in the region, as many as one in three work in construction, Camarota said. No other U.S. industry employs more illegal immigrants, he said. "A slowdown in the construction industry hits illegals much harder than the rest of the general population," Camarota said. Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA of Maryland, said he's concerned that tensions over immigration will spread and intensify if large numbers of idle construction workers are not quickly absorbed by other services and industries. "We've seen workers leaving for other states for jobs in construction or agriculture," he said. Torres argued for the need for job training programs to help workers make the transition into other sectors, saying he feared that "confrontation will accelerate further" if the slowdown worsens. "That's one of the dangers of importing lots of workers," said Ira Mehlmen, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to curb illegal immigration. "After their services are no longer required, you end up with them and with their families. "There isn't much reason for them to return home when services and other benefits are available." But for many, and single men in particular, home has a powerful pull nonetheless. Aurelio Cruz has a wife and four children back in Puebla, Mexico, and every day that he's apart from them and doesn't find work "is a day of my life that I've wasted," he said. The month of December has been lost to Cruz; he hasn't been hired once. "It's a bad situation," he said. He was thinking of going home this month, but weeks of standing along Route 1 in Woodbridge waiting futilely for work have postponed his plans. "I came here to take care of my family," he said. "I can't go home with nothing. I can't go home the way I came."
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: DeaconBenjamin (#0)
Sure, the illegals can get hired for $15/hr, what about guys born and raised here? So, the bastards come here when the times are good and bleed the wealth from the country. Then, when times get tough, they bail out and take the money and run. There is no loyalty, of course, since, as illegals, they have no interest in this country but what they can get out of it. The chickens have again come home to roost.
#2. To: BTP Holdings (#1)
The next depression will be a good time to build a fence because the Hispanics will return home when the jobs dry up. Of course the criminals from south of the border will stay behind.
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