Immigration news & Gossips ( Musyi Munene)

There was no one thing that caused Hector Salinas to pack his bags and give up for good on the trials of life as an illegal immigrant in southern Florida.

But the reasons he enumerates are echoed by increasing numbers of Latin American immigrants, both legal and not, who appear to be souring on their job prospects and going home.

It was the scant money he made at a menial restaurant job, Salinas said, just enough for food and rent, with barely anything left for his family in Mexico – the reason he came in the first place.

It was the constant fear of being detained by US immigration, especially after the relative with whom he shared a home in west Kendall got stopped while driving without a licence.

After that, they sold the car and got around with great difficulty on a bicycle.

Finally it was the loneliness. He did not bring his wife and young children, whom he had not seen for two years, for fear of the risk of arrest and detention.

“I never lacked for work, but I never felt good here,” Salinas, 43, said in Spanish one recent afternoon, his last in Miami before boarding a plane to Mexico City.

“The patrones pay only what they want. You live with very little, and then you’re also alone, and always fearful of arriving at work and having them come looking for you.

“I don’t like living with this uneasiness.”

No hard figures exist, but various surveys and anecdotes from immigrants, their advocates and consular officers in Miami suggest that more Latin Americans are voluntarily heading back home, the apparent result of the US economic downturn and anxiety generated by a federal crackdown on illegal immigration.

The hardest hit appear to be those in agricultural, construction, food processing and service jobs in which many immigrants work.

In southern Miami-Dade county, even before the winter growing season came to an end, many farmworkers from Mexico and Central America were leaving for home.

“They can’t find work,” said Elvira Carvajal, a volunteer at the Florida Farmworkers Association in Florida City. “Then there is fear in the community because of immigration raids … What are they going to do? A lot of people are opting to leave.”

At the Nicaraguan consulate in west Miami-Dade county, the number of Nicaraguan citizens applying for tax exemptions to move their household goods back has risen significantly, said Consul General Luis Martinez. Many are men who found construction work has dried up.

“At least in Nicaragua, they can figure something out to make a living without the fear of getting detained,” Martinez said.

A 2007 US department of homeland security report found that the number of permanent legal residents entering the country last year from South and Central America dropped by a quarter. That followed a big increase from 2005 to 2006.

A recent survey of Latin American immigrants by the Inter-American Development Bank highlights their malaise: 81% said it was more difficult now than a year ago to get a well-paying US job.

More than a quarter said they were considering going home in the next few years. And 68% said anti-immigration sentiment was a major problem – almost double the percentage who said so in 2001.

Not everyone agrees the trend is clear-cut. A consular official in Miami said many Brazilians are going home – some unwillingly, because deportations have increased, and others drawn by an economic revival at home.

“But every day more people are arriving,” said consular official Paulo Amado.

One difference, he said: Those coming to stay increasingly have work visas, in part in response to US immigration enforcement.

The departures are evidence that the Bush administration’s decision to tighten the screws on enforcement is paying off, say proponents of stricter immigration laws.

Several states passed their own laws, from tighter employment verification requirements to authorising local police to act as immigration agents.

Passage of similar laws in Georgia, coupled with a construction slowdown, prompted Salinas to join a relative in southern Florida.

“That’s the whole point of enforcement, to change the climate, to make it as hard as possible for you as an illegal alien, so you can’t just melt away into the shadows,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies, a Washington group favouring sharp curbs on immigration.

But the crackdown’s critics say it has mainly succeeded in spreading fear among the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country without solving the underlying problem.