Migration Problems

Mexicans are unhappy about American aliens invading their neighborhoods.

In handwritten signs and graffiti, the protesters made their anger at the influx of foreigners who have recently settled in Mexico City clear:

“Gringo, go home!” “Speak Spanish or Die!” “Gentrification is colonization!”...

 Foreign remote workers began relocating in large numbers to Mexico City during the coronavirus pandemic, settling largely in central, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods such as Condesa and Roma.

Jarring many longtime residents, these areas have developed into bastions where more English than Spanish is spoken in some sidewalk cafes, and in which co-working spaces, Pilates studios, specialty food stores and clothing boutiques have sprouted, catering to the recent arrivals.

I've already written the post about this, but the disruption of communities is an unrecognized human universal that our society has no good way of talking about. It doesn't really matter if the migration is legal or illegal in terms of the destruction of existing communities and ways of life. 

It doesn't matter if it's internal to a nation, even, as I observed watching Northern American citizen migrants to Atlanta overrun and destroy the way of life where I grew up. It was the same problem: 

Ms. Sheinbaum also acknowledged the demonstrators’ concerns, and how tempers are flaring in Mexico City, North America’s largest metropolis, around the arrival of thousands of relatively well-off foreigners, especially from the United States. Many longtime residents are fuming over rising rents and food prices in parts of the city.

“The playing field is not level,” said Daniela Grave, a resident attending the protest. “If they make a living in dollars, and don’t pay taxes here, we are just in unequal circumstances, Mexicans and foreigners, where those who have salaries in dollars have all the power to exert in this city and that is what should be regulated.”

What happened between the 1970s and the 1990s was that a whole lot of corporations moved South, where everything was cheaper. Their workers could also then move South, selling a home in New York City that was worth enough to buy a big home in Atlanta or to build a McMansion in one of the small towns nearby. Those small towns quickly became suburbs instead of small towns; the farmland was bought up and turned into subdivisions.

Everyone who had lived there was priced out and had to leave the place where their parents and grandparents had lived. Property values went up, so taxes went up to the point that you couldn't keep the family home. All the extra money brought inflation, too. As your neighbors sold out and left, churches shrank or closed, the old family-run shops were sold and replaced with cheaply built chains, and all your friends drifted away until there was nobody left.

We really need a better way to address this human universal of meaning and community, and to address how it gets lost in mass migration -- whether of poor workers to rich countries, or rich workers to poorer, cheaper ones.