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EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM: The TerryReport
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News, commentary, opinion on politics, government, books, social trends, American life, travel, cycling, books, other stuff
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Our neighbor to the south is changing dramatically. There are more and more middle class, skilled jobs available and, according to reports, the companies doing the hiring are having difficulty finding enough people to do them. As far as I can tell, there is no mass movement of Americans heading to Mexico, other than retirees and travelers, but perhaps a lot of people should be considering it if they have hit a dead end here in the states and don’t know what else to do. It is possible that the “immigration problem” could, over the next decade or so, reverse itself and become one of how many Americans can be accommodated in Mexico, not the other way around.
Here are some more or less random thoughts to consider in regard to Mexico.
First, you can make a lot less there and live quite well. The peso equivalent of 30, 000. dollars a year is a lot of money in Mexico. As reported by the NY Times, a comfortable three bedroom house can be had for 80,000 or so. Not everything is cheaper, but the ordinary goods that people buy day to day definitely are less expensive. Food has to be priced at a level people can afford to pay. You can’t sell an orange there for 12 pesos (about a dollar), because no one would have the money to buy it. For producers and other businesses, the choice is either to sell at the local market rates or not offer the product.
The general corruption of the society in which police officers often take part in crime against citizens has to be considered. Bribes, according to those who live there, are an established way of life in Mexico and if you can’t pay them, you can’t operate in some areas and sectors of the economy. The drug war, very real and dangerous in the border towns along Texas, Arizona and California, is on-going. It also hits various places in the interior (we should remember that we have had drug wars here, too, including in our capital, Washington, DC, in the 1980s. Those turf battles between drug gangs here were not nearly as violent as those in Mexico, but they happened and took many lives.)
If someone gets arrested in Mexico, including American citizens, they do not have the protections of the American Constitution and American laws. In a more difficult local situation, it is easier for someone to get caught up in a legal tangle, even unintentionally or entirely by accident.
If I were 34 or even 44, with skills that were no longer needed here and with employment available in Mexico, I would consider it. Leaving the U.S. is a big step, but there are frequent flights back and living decently in another country beats living unemployed with no prospects here. It would be a lot easier to transfer back with money in your pocket and strong employment history than going begging for jobs here. Our ancestors came to North America for many reasons, but economic opportunity was certainly a major one. Now, the idea of shifting somewhere else when the need arises is not nearly so difficult. Doug Terry, 11. 26.13
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Note: I have spent close to a month this past year in Mexico, staying first near the Yucatan port city of Progresso and, on the second trip, on the island of Cozumel. My father worked in Mexico for an American company for a time when my older brother and I were very small, but I have no memory of that time. From the family photos I have seen and the recollections of my parents, I know that Mexico was a far different place then and that my mother did not like the experience at all. They would drive to the Texas border towns to buy groceries, because they did not believe the Mexican food offerings were clean. Now, in towns like Merida and elsewhere, there are huge Costco like stores available selling groceries, bikes, electronics, clothes and just about anything else. Merdia is a thriving middle class city, with the undertow of poverty still readily apparent. More thoughts on this issue coming up.
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More on working in Mexico from someone who has done it.
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RETIRING TO MEXICO? Its not as easy as it seems.
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The Dallas Morning News ran a somewhat confused article about people living on boats in the western Mexico town of La Paz, a small city north of Cabo San Lucas.
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LA PAZ, Mexico They’re nomads, sailing freely, crossing international waters, guided by one principle: Just float.
“Good thing is we don’t have a schedule,” said Allyson van Os of Dallas. “We just do the things we like to do, when we want to do them. That’s our schedule.”€ť
Van Os, 62, is one of millions of baby boomers living part of their lives on boats, inspired by a lifestyle that she acknowledges is harder than it seems.
She and her husband, Ed, and two dogs, Dexter and Peque, dock their 65-foot boat, the Virginia Reel, in the waters of La Paz in the Baja Peninsula, the same place where Spanish conquistador Cortes first docked his boat in 1535. They are joined there by more than 100 other boat owners, part of a growing nautical tourism business in Mexico that isn’t without legal hassles, including tax agents, but that is a dream many boat owners say is worth pursuing.
With an estimated 80 million baby boomers retiring in the coming years, Mexico looms large as an alternative place to live not just on land, but on sea. Recreational boating industry experts predict that the number of boomer boat owners will grow, although finding exact figures, anywhere from 10 million to 17 million, by some estimates, is difficult in part because of their nomadic existence.
Many of these retirees are living seasonally or year-round on boats, lured by the simplicity of life and lower cost of living. They are also searching for tranquillity, a place away from the fast pace and hectic life increasingly dominated, they say, by time pressures in an age of social media.
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to go to recent posts, nearly 300 pages of news and comments filed during the first nine months of 2013 and during the critical election year of 2012.
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to go back to prior years (500+ pages) of The TerryReport
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