| Pages:
1
2 |
SUNDOG
Nomad
Posts: 176
Registered: 8-9-2006
Location: Baja
Member Is Offline
|
|
Border Invaders
Border Invaders
The Perfect Swarm Heads South
by Mike Davis
September 19, 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 reportedly 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, supported 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 rushing 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 Lebensraum.
Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation have already occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported 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 shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port 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 airport -- 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 Newport 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 fishing 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.
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion
from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of
American triumphalism in the Cold War, a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first
collection of Tomdispatch interviews.]
|
|
|
MrBillM
Platinum Nomad
Posts: 21656
Registered: 8-20-2003
Location: Out and About
Member Is Offline
Mood: It's a Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Day
|
|
Get The Shovels
Another Noxious load of LeftWing Crap just oozed in.
|
|
|
Don Alley
Super Nomad
Posts: 1997
Registered: 12-4-2003
Location: Loreto
Member Is Offline
|
|
I like the "Truman Show" reference to Loreto Bay.
|
|
|
Cypress
Elite Nomad
Posts: 7641
Registered: 3-12-2006
Location: on the bayou
Member Is Offline
Mood: undecided
|
|
Very informative! 
|
|
|
Al G
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 2647
Registered: 12-19-2004
Location: Todos Santos/Full time for now...
Member Is Offline
Mood: Wondering what is next???
|
|
| Quote: | Originally posted by MrBillM
Another Noxious load of LeftWing Crap just oozed in. |
I could not have said it better. I just could not be that nice?
Albert G
Remember, if you haven\'t got a smile on your face and laughter in your heart, then you are just a sour old fart!....
The most precious thing we have is life, yet it has absolutely no trade-in value.
|
|
|
Barry A.
Select Nomad
Posts: 10007
Registered: 11-30-2003
Location: Redding, Northern CA
Member Is Offline
Mood: optimistic
|
|
What a shame------
-----to me this "piece" could have been so much more informative and palatible if it had not started out with several paragraphs of "hate" against the
GOP and all connected with it, which of course were rediculous!!
I TOTALLY support gaining control of our borders, period. What happens after that we can debate.
There actually are some pretty good points in the latter part of the "Piece" (tho exagerated) that we should at least think about (IMHO)----another
point of view.
|
|
|
Al G
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 2647
Registered: 12-19-2004
Location: Todos Santos/Full time for now...
Member Is Offline
Mood: Wondering what is next???
|
|
Now I guess I will have to read it all, damn!
Albert G
Remember, if you haven\'t got a smile on your face and laughter in your heart, then you are just a sour old fart!....
The most precious thing we have is life, yet it has absolutely no trade-in value.
|
|
|
oxxo
Banned
Posts: 2347
Registered: 5-17-2006
Location: Wherever I am, I'm there
Member Is Offline
Mood: If I was feeling any better, I'd be twins!
|
|
WOW! Looks like a big sleeper cell of ultra right wing necons is alive and well in Baja. 
|
|
|
surfer jim
Super Nomad
Posts: 1891
Registered: 8-29-2003
Location: high desert
Member Is Offline
|
|
make room in the off topic area for this.....
|
|
|
Phil C
Senior Nomad
Posts: 564
Registered: 3-27-2004
Location: N. San Diego County/ Loreto Centro/Lopez Mateos
Member Is Offline
|
|
Nah, just chunk it where it belongs....
|
|
|
fishbuck
Banned
Posts: 5318
Registered: 8-31-2006
Member Is Offline
|
|
I guess most of the Nomads who have replied don't believe. I would recomend that you look at the webpage for a place called Ventana del Mar in San
Felipe. It's completely sold out and I think the cheapest lots were around 150000. The most expensive were 500000.
A round of golf is about 50-100 bucks. It's Palm Springs by the sea.
I would expect to see this pattern repeated. They fly people in there in their private DC-3 and other planes for free and give them a sales pitch.
|
|
|
MrBillM
Platinum Nomad
Posts: 21656
Registered: 8-20-2003
Location: Out and About
Member Is Offline
Mood: It's a Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Day
|
|
Don't Believe ??
A rather strange assessment of the commentary.
Whatever the merits or faults of this migration might be, it's not a matter of whether you believe it or not. Unless you're travelling in Baja with a
blindfold on, it's obvious that there is a HUGE influx of dollars and tourists/residents. SO WHAT ? you're witnessing an inevitible consequence of
available dollars and available property. Absolutely NOTHING you might think you can do will alter the course of what we're seeing, so why get worked
up over it ? It's akin to complaining about the weather.
The prime areas of Baja are going to become up-scale suburbs of the U.S. with a separate class of natives taking care of their needs. It's going to
become like some of the areas on the mainland where a friend of mine once jokingly said "I think if you're a Mexican, you need a visa to get in".
My only hope is that it all doesn't go to [Hell] before I do.
|
|
|
bancoduo
Banned
Posts: 1003
Registered: 10-3-2005
Location: el carcel publico mazatlan sin.
Member Is Offline
|
|
| Quote: | The prime areas of Baja are going to become up-scale suburbs of the U.S. with a separate class of natives taking care of their needs. It's going to
become like some of the areas on the mainland where a friend of mine once jokingly said "I think if you're a Mexican, you need a visa to get in".
My only hope is that it all doesn't go to [Hell] before I do. |
No wonder everyone HATES us. Just remember;
what goes around comes around.
|
|
|
Dave
Elite Nomad
Posts: 6005
Registered: 11-5-2002
Member Is Offline
|
|
| Quote: | | Quote: | Originally posted by bancoduo
My only hope is that it all doesn't go to [Hell] before I do. |
No wonder everyone HATES us. Just remember;
what goes around comes around. |
Remember:
Most every square inch of Baja is/was owned by Mexicans. It's not like they are/were forced to sell to gringos.
Gringos live here because Mexicans allow us the opportunity.
|
|
|
Don Alley
Super Nomad
Posts: 1997
Registered: 12-4-2003
Location: Loreto
Member Is Offline
|
|
| Quote: | Originally posted by Dave
Remember:
Most every square inch of Baja is/was owned by Mexicans. It's not like they are/were forced to sell to gringos.
Gringos live here because Mexicans allow us the opportunity. |
True. But just as some Americans believe more should be done to limit the Mexican presence in the US, the article suggests that perhaps Mexico should
put more limits on the growing American presence in Mexico. I tend to agree with that; I believe Mexico should protect more of it's coastline from
development and create more approachable public space, as California and Oregon have done. That will still, imo, leave plenty for economic
development. I also believe it would help if Mexico would lift resrictions on American economic activity in Mexico other than real estate related
business. Mexico needs more economic activity and it can't afford to be so picky about the nationality of the folks generating that activity.
Much of the northward immigration is illegal. The southward, gringo moves are "legal" as long as everyone accepts that the fideocomiso laws are
legitimate when the nation's constitution prohibits foreign ownership of many of the properties in question. I wouldn't be surprised if someday
someone takes the fideocomiso laws to court.
I'm in Montana now, and there is vitually no sign of Mexican immigrants here. And there is a labor shortage, especially in entry-level jobs. We just
moved and had a tough time finding help. $500 to wash windows? We envied you folks who can get some help at the Home Depot parking lot. And it's
slow eating in many of the restaurants, especially the "fast food" places. Kalispell is offering higher wages, and $200 sign up bonuses for fast
food workers, to no avail. We need people who can flip more that one burger at a time.
I wonder if many immigrants are illegal only because politicians do not want to take resonsibility for authorizing large foreign communities in the
US, yet also won't take action to stem the flow because they don't want to take responsibility for a shortage in labor and the resulting higher wages,
higher prices, general inflation, and resulting higher interest rates that could kill the housing boom which is driving the economy.
[Edited on 9-23-2006 by Don Alley]
|
|
|
MrBillM
Platinum Nomad
Posts: 21656
Registered: 8-20-2003
Location: Out and About
Member Is Offline
Mood: It's a Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Day
|
|
Apples and Oranges
There is NO equivalence between the Northward migration of Mexicans and the Southward migration of U.S. residents. Those heading North bring with
them working skills (perhaps), but NOTHING in the way of financial resources. Those migrating South bring moderate to vast amounts of said resources
contributing to the economic improvement of Mexico.
As Dave has said, the process that we are seeing develop is an example of the free market at work. ALL participating parties are doing so willingly.
There is no force or coercion involved. Money will ALWAYS trump all other philosophical concerns. I hate to see it as much as anyone else. I am not
benefiting and the likelihood is that it can only affect me negatively, but it is as certain as the Sun coming up and the tide coming in so there is
little benefit to moaning and groaning over these developments.
The fideocomiso laws have been challenged in the past and the Mexican Supreme court on each occasion has upheld those laws. However, the past has
shown that the law in Mexico, like many other third-world countries, is subject to the whims of the politicians so it is possible that they could once
again simply sieze all property legally controlled by foreigners. Given the Huge foreign investment, though, it is far less likely today than it was
in the past.
|
|
|
awfulart
Nomad
Posts: 260
Registered: 5-10-2003
Location: Rio Rico AZ
Member Is Offline
Mood: Wondering what our Nit-Wit elected officials are doing now?
|
|
Mexico has many more serious problems than North Americans legally moving, living and working in Mexico. Why else would theie citizens want to
illegally cross the border into U.S. The imbalance in economic opportunity in Mexico and the apparent graft, corruption and probably overpaid
useless polticians is certainly a contributing factor in the economic ills of the Mexican Citizen. I wonder what the consequences would be if the
illegals could no longer send money back to Mexico?
|
|
|
TMW
Select Nomad
Posts: 10659
Registered: 9-1-2003
Location: Bakersfield, CA
Member Is Offline
|
|
The government would hold their families for ransom.
|
|
|
Cypress
Elite Nomad
Posts: 7641
Registered: 3-12-2006
Location: on the bayou
Member Is Offline
Mood: undecided
|
|
Gosh! Most of the folks heading south are paying customers and attempting to
abide by the laws of the host country. Most of the folks heading north are
looking for a paycheck and are forced to break the law of the host country when they cross the border. We're not talking about bad people on either side of this issue. There's got to be a way to resolve this problem.
|
|
|
ncampion
Super Nomad
Posts: 1238
Registered: 4-15-2006
Location: Loreto
Member Is Offline
Mood: Retired and Loving it
|
|
How about the idea of LEGAL vs ILLEGAL. The invasion from the South is ILLEGAL(for the most part). The Americans that come to Mexico do so LEGALY
(for the most part) Play by the rules and I'll be happy.
|
|
|
| Pages:
1
2 |
![[*]](images/xmbforum/default_icon.gif){kind=icon}
