Four months ago we presented what was easily the clearest and most undiluted by media propaganda clue about the future of the European experiment, when we noted that even immigrants from places such as Afghanistan and Bangladesh, using Greece as a stepping stone onward to the gateway Shengen country of Italy, no longer have the urge to pursue their European dreams, and instead return home.From the Christian Science Monitor:
As Art Cashin explained, "Over the decades, immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and other poor nations would work their way to Patras. They would stay for days or weeks awaiting a chance to smuggle themselves on to a freighter headed for Italy. Once there, they could make their way north into Europe to find hope and opportunity and maybe a job. Last week his relatives told him that things were changing. The immigrants still come to their way station of Patras (hope still blooms). But now, after a couple of weeks in Greece, they are trying to hop ships going the other way. They are going back home. Life was better, or at least no worse, where they came from and they had friends and family for support back there." It appears that the immigrant boycott is spreading, only this time instead of "discretionary" immigrants, or those that have not been fully assumed by society (think "cheap labor" along America's south, such as California, Texas and Arizona), it is starting to hit the core of the cheap PIIGS labor force: the migrant workforce, and in this case the Albanian diaspora working out of Greece at a fraction of the normal cost.
And as one Albanian migrant worker, so critical to keeping the Greek construction sector supplied with cheap jobs puts it, "It looks like there's no money left," he said of Greece. "It all dried up." As a result even the Greek illegal-yet-symbiotic-aliens are giving up and going back home. Yes folks: the "indicators" on the ground are telling us that it is now easier to make money in Albania than in Greece....MORE
Tiny Tamaula is the new face of rural Mexico: Villagers are home again as the illegal immigration boom drops to net zero...Previously:
...One million Mexicans said they returned from the US between 2005 and 2010, according to a new demographic study of Mexican census data. That's three times the number who said they'd returned in the previous five-year period.
And they aren't just home for a visit: One prominent sociologist in the US has counted "net zero" migration for the first time since the 1960s.
Experts say the implications for both nations are enormous – from the draining of a labor pool in the US to the need for a radical shift in policies in Mexico, which has long depended on the billions of dollars in migrant remittances as a social welfare cornerstone....MORE
July 2011
"Improving Mexican economy draws undocumented immigrants home from California"
Nov. 2009
Mexicans Send Money North To Help Relatives In U.S.
January '09
How Bad is It? Immigrants Leaving Great Britain, U.S.
Not emigrants, these are immigrants leaving....
In August '08:
Illegal Immigrants Returning to Mexico in Record Numbers
September '08:
California’s doldrums sending some immigrant laborers home
Then in October '08:
Polish immigrants leaving Britain: What the Poles did for us
Britain's Polish workers are heading home in search of a better life – and it's our loss, says Harry de Quetteville.
Decision to return to Mexico becomes a question of family for local immigrants
Tough Economy Making Illegal Immigrants Return to Homelands
New loan program seeks to aid Mexican workers returning home
Immigrants Return Home
Amazing signposts on the road to economic perdition. It's been going on a while, each recession gets a bit worse, from a 2002 Federal Reserve Board Open Market Committee transcript:
“There is growing anecdotal evidence that this may be due to Mexican immigrants departing the United States in search of a better life in Mexico
