As illegal immigrants flooded north through the sun-baked Mexican border town of El Sasabe to find work in the US earlier this decade, shopkeeper Ramona Flores thrived.
But with the US economy hemorrhaging jobs in the recession, and security tightening in the desert corridor to the north, her business is off by a half as the town’s smuggling boom turns to bust.
“The decline started a couple of years ago, and now we’re in crisis,” said Flores, 40, standing behind the counter of her store, empty but for one small girl paying for a bottle of soda with a few grubby peso coins.
“People don’t want to go because they know they’re not going to find work ... the American Dream has become a nightmare,” said Flores, who is also the town’s administrator.
Arrests on the southwest border dropped to 705,022 last year, their lowest level since the 1970s, a report last month by the US Department of Homeland Security said.
The study attributed the stark fall, from a mid-decade high of almost 1.2 million arrests, to a decline in US economic growth and enhanced border security.
The one-two punch has hit El Sasabe hard. The town, which straddles illegal immigration’s superhighway to Arizona, fed, watered and bedded up to 1,500 migrants a day from across Mexico and Central America in 2005, the migrant welfare agency Grupo Beta says.
Many of the taco stands, stores and flophouse hotels that blossomed in the boom have shut their doors as the number of migrants making the trek has fallen to at most 250 a day. Others say they are struggling.
“We used to be pretty much full every night, although we haven’t had a guest here in three days,” said Alejandra Nunez, housekeeper at the Perla Hotel on the dusty main strip, which has 11 rooms, each with several beds.
“We’re seeing more people heading to Mexico with their furniture and ... belongings,” she said.
In past recessions, border apprehensions have declined, only to pick up again with recovery.
Residents in El Sasabe said the sharp fall in migrants had also been accelerated by drug cartel-related violence, which has claimed more than 2,500 lives since January in Mexico. One local official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said cartels had killed several “coyotes,” as paying guides are known, to clear the desert borderlands for marijuana trafficking.
Flores, however, said she felt the hardscrabble town’s fortunes would revive once US employers started hiring again.
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