30 The Americas The EconomistJuly 25th 2020
21named Susticacán, recalls a friend fretting:
“I don’t know who my daughters will mar-
ry.” And ageing takes a toll. “It is very diffi-
cult to sustain a municipality” when all the
people aged 20-40 are leaving, says Anton-
io Aceves, the mayor of Jerez de García Sali-
nas, a Zacatecan town of 50,000 close to
Los Haro.
But migration has an uncanny ability to
fortify the very places it fractures. Polo La-
rez was born in El Sauz, a Zacatecan village.
As a child he walked barefoot for miles each
morning to sell buckets of maize harvested
by his parents. When he was 11, in 1979, they
paid a “coyote” $600 to smuggle him to Cal-
ifornia in the back seat of a car with a fake
birth certificate. “I had to say my name was
Hugo Salas,” he recalls with a smile. For
four decades while working as a gardener,
Mr Larez sent money to his sister in El Sauz.
His first gift to her was a washing machine,
saving her a long walk to the nearest river.
Mr Larez now has a house in Jerez awaiting
him when he retires. It has a jacuzzi.
Zacatecans were also pioneers in the
practice of sending collective remittances
to improve infrastructure back home. The
state, federal and municipal governments
would all match what migrants’ clubs in
America sent. Some 5,500 public works,
worth 3.5bn pesos ($270m), were complet-
ed under the “3x1” programme in two de-
cades before President Andrés Manuel Ló-
pez Obrador scrapped it last year. Migrants
liked to give money because improve-
ments raise property values, says Efraín Ji-
ménez, of fedzac, a migrants’ club.
Returned migrants enrich their home-
towns with knowledge as well as money. At
a cafe in the centre of Jerez, Erika González
Ramírez sells cappuccinos with tiny pieces
of ginger floating inside. She picked up this
technique to warm the soul while living in
chilly Alaska. Rogelio Trujillo, a retired gar-
dener whose bristling moustache reaches
his chin and who moved to California in
the 1960s, volunteered for the mayor of Je-
rez during a stint back home, uprooting old
trees that had ceased to blossom and plant-
ing magnolias in their place.
In Los Haro, Ms Nava’s parents put herto work in the fields after she finished
primary school. But her education re-
sumed when she began working in the
Napa Valley in her 20s. Back farming in
Mexico since 2010, she points with pride to
the pipes in the ground as she strolls
through her plum tree orchard. She learned
about irrigation in Napa while working in a
nursery. She has also learned to plant the
occasional Santa Rosa plum tree, brought
down from California. Their plums are
worse than the local Herodaones but they
spread pollen through the rest of the or-
chard, ensuring a bountiful harvest, she
explains. It is hard to learn such tricks
without leaving the village.
The problem is that this gainful chapter
of Mexican history may be coming to an
end. Today a sixth of Zacatecan households
receive remittances, more than in any oth-
er state. Some $1.1bn, equivalent to 70% of
the state’s budget, was sent in 2019. But Za-catecan migrants are much older than the
national average of 45 years. Migrants are
likeliest to send remittances around the
age 40, and send the largest sums in their
early 50s, says Jesús Cervantes of the Cen-
tre for Latin American Monetary Studies.
Much of Mexico is “probably at peak remit-
tances right now”, says Douglas Massey, a
sociologist at Princeton.
For a while, retirees returning home
may make up for lost remittances, by hir-
ing construction workers and the like. Lon-
ger term, parts of the state face a decline.
With the border-crossing now so much
harder, other places in Mexico are more at-
tractive. Mr Aceves in Jerez describes a cy-
cle in which the town’s residents move to
nearby bigger cities, like Zacatecas and
Aguascalientes, with the youth from the
villages moving to Jerez to replace them.
That supply of rural youth is dwindling.
Meanwhile many former residents, andOver the hill
United States, Mexican-born populationSources:MigrationPolicyInstitute;USCensusBureau129630
1980 182000Number, m
50
40
30
20
10
0
1980 182000Median age, yearsW
orking froma shadyveranda
overlooking a shimmering sea,
with five-star restaurants and golf
courses within easy reach: what better
place could there be to while away the
pandemic than Barbados?
Like most of its Caribbean neigh-
bours, Barbados has been good at keep-
ing covid-19 out. A single new case hits
the headlines. But that does not mean the
island has been unscathed. Normally
tourism brings in more than half of its
foreign earnings. Now, many tourists are
banned and the economy is reeling. The
tourism minister, Kerrie Symmonds,
puts unemployment at close to 40%.
Cue the latest proposal of the prime
minister, Mia Mottley. She intends to
introduce a “Welcome Stamp” for visi-
tors to “work remotely in paradise” for up
to a year. The idea is that if holidays are
not possible, then maybe the island can
attract well-heeled office workers who
no longer have to go to the office. A few
new telecommuters could spend as
much as a boatload of briefly alighting
cruise-ship passengers. Other Caribbean
islands are considering rival schemes;
Bermuda has announced one.
It did not take a pandemic for some
digital workers to consider moving to a
beach. But before now, it was legally
difficult. Getting a work permit or im-
migrant status meant weeks or months
of form-filling. Workers had to pay Bar-
badian income taxes. The new procedure
looks quick and easy by comparison. Fora feeof$2,000foroneperson, or $3,000
for a family, you can take your Zoom calls
from a real pristine white sandy beach,
instead of merely selecting it as a virtual
background. You continue paying tax
according to the rules of whichever
country you came from.
There will be some checks on new
arrivals. We do not want “the scum of the
earth, but decent and upstanding types”,
says Mr Symmonds. Applicants must
have health insurance, and the main
breadwinner must earn at least $50,000.
But otherwise the gates are open. “We
welcome all. Everyone,” says Ms Mottley.
“All must breathe, in this world and in
thiscountry.”Welcome Zoomers
The CaribbeanBarbados invites you to work from the beach