JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Armando Vazquez, standing in front of a painting of a Mexican town, sends money to his four uncles in Mexico.

SHARE ROB VARELA/THE STAR Elena Vazquez (left) of Oxnard works with Lorena Ruiz during a citizenship class in Oxnard. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Armando Vazquez hangs a painting at the Cafe on A cultural center and gallery in Oxnard. ROB VARELA/THE STAR Elena Vazquez (right) of Oxnard attends a citizenship class in Oxnard. ROB VARELA/THE STAR Elena Vazquez (left) of Oxnard listens as Angela Guadamuz is quizzed in preparation for an upcoming citizenship exam.

By Tom Kisken of the Ventura County Star

If Irene Rojas can't send money to her parents in a mountain village in Oaxaca, Mexico, they eat twice a day instead of three times.

They earn 100 pesos a day — on good days — selling the corn they grow. They can't afford beef without help.

Rojas sends $200 a month when she's making money picking strawberries. When the 31-year-old Oxnard area woman isn't working, she wires money every other month.

She does it for the same reason as scores of other immigrants, some here legally, others not: Because of what would happen if they didn't.

"My parents would suffer a lot more," she said in Spanish.

Immigrants sent back nearly $25 billion to Mexico last year in money called remittances, nearly all of it from the United States. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, a UCLA public policy professor, calculates about a quarter of the money — more than $6 billion — came from California.

As much as $150 million was sent from Ventura County to Mexico in 2015, he said, basing the calculation on the county's estimated 62,000 undocumented immigrants.

"It's about $2,000 a year per undocumented worker," he said, noting that many people cross the border to support families in their homelands. "That's probably a conservative estimate."

As California's June 7 primary approaches, remittances are wedging their way into the presidential race. Republican front-runner Donald Trump proposes using the money as a lever to force Mexico to pay for a border wall. If they refuse, he said, the government will block at least some remittances.

His plan includes making immigrants prove they live here legally before they're allowed to wire money to Mexico.

That worries Rojas. She has no documents.

She crossed the border at age 15 with her father. They returned to Oaxaca to pay off debts. She found work harvesting squash but knew she could help her family more in California.

At 17, Rojas decided to leave again. Before her father let her go, she made him a promise: To send money.

Her gifts are used for food, medicine and doctors. Her father has diabetes. Her mother needs treatment for hypertension.

She sends the money from a store on Oxnard's Fifth Street, using a service called MoneyGram. If laws changed and wiring money no longer worked, she would send it with relatives or find some other mechanism. She would have to find a way.

"For my parents," she said.

Susana Covarrubias sends money to an uncle in the state of Sonora.

'HE'S MY BROTHER'

Some remittances come from community groups that send money to villages or organizations in their home states. The vast majority comes from immigrant workers who send money back — for spouses living in impoverished communities, for children they hope will eventually immigrate too or for themselves in anticipation of returning one day.

Mexico receives the most money from the United States. China, India and the Philippines all received more than $10 billion in one year, according to a breakdown from the Pew Research Center in 2014.

For nine years, Simi Valley real estate investor Zeyad Elalami sent money to his brother, sister-in-law and their two children in the Gaza Strip. He stopped only when the family immigrated from the Palestinian territory earlier this year.

He wired the money for the same reasons immigrants from Mexico stand in front of plastic windows waiting for Western Union tellers.

"For them to survive," Elalami said. "They have no food, no money, nothing. The unemployment rate over there is almost 85 percent."

The stories are everywhere. Call people and ask if they have friends who send money. They say they do it themselves.

Agustin Busch, a Navy veteran who once lived in Oxnard, was deported 17 years ago after being convicted of drug possession. Gabriella Navarro-Busch, his younger sister and his lawyer, uses Western Union to wire him money in Baja California where he works in construction.

Some people dismiss Trump's proposal to block remittances. Not Navarro-Busch. She talks of maybe opening a bank account across the border, in Rosarito, as a way to deal with possible changes in the law. Her brother's recent health issues mean she's started delivering money in person. That could continue too.

What the Ventura attorney won't do is stop giving him money.

"He has a hard time making ends meet," she said. "And he's my brother."

Yolanda Zamudio sends money to her 23-year-old son and her parents in the state of Guanajuato.

IT'S LIKE TITHING

In a country that produces about $18 trillion worth of goods and services, $25 billion being sent to Mexico constitutes "chump change," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. The center supports tighter immigration controls.

But the loss of money that could be spent in grocery stores and restaurants in local economies stings more because much of it comes from poorer communities, Krikorian said.

"These are precisely the places that would benefit from the capital being invested locally," he said.

Economists say the loss has to be weighed in the context of the income generated by immigrants who came here to support loved ones in Mexico.

"It's probably a small fraction of the economic activities they generate by working in the county," said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at CSU Channel Islands.

Armando Vazquez comes from Ahualulco in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Once a small and impoverished farming village, it's growing with a surge of restaurants and shops created by American dollars. Vazquez credits a tradition of remittances that stretches back as far as immigration.

"We do it like tithing," said the Oxnard artist and leader of the Cafe on A cultural center. He still sends money to his four uncles in Ahualulco.

Find a way to cut off or minimize the stream and the past would re-emerge.

"It would be catastrophic," he said. "The poor would get poorer."

Others suggest little will change even if laws are modified to block remittances because people would find other ways to give.

In a makeshift classroom at an Oxnard community center, Elena Vazquez used broken English to recite questions about the U.S. Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights.

The 54-year-old Oxnard woman is studying to become a citizen. She sees the step as completion of the journey that began when she left her family's home in Mexico City 26 years ago.

She came here for the same reasons she will stay here — for opportunity, jobs and to help her family.

From the beginning, she sent money to Mexico City, first to her sister to provide care for their mother, who was ill. When her mother died three years ago, Vazquez kept sending the money for work on the family home and because her sister at age 50 needs financial support.

"She doesn't have another way of surviving," said Vazquez.

The grim reality is why Vazquez looked surprise when asked how long she'll send money back. The answer is obvious.

Forever.

Alfonso Chavez sends $200 a month, sometimes more to his parents in Oaxaca, Mexico.

PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

This is the first in a series of stories looking at how policies proposed during the presidential campaign could impact Ventura County.

Immigration jumped to the front of the presidential debate when Republican Donald Trump promised to build a wall between the United States and Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants. He said he would compel Mexico to pay for the wall. In April he revealed more details, saying he would force Mexico to pay by stopping the flow of money being sent back to the country from immigrants in the United States. There was $24.77 billion transferred globally to Mexico in 2015, nearly all of it from the U.S. Trump said he would change a rule in the USA Patriot Act that would force anyone wiring money outside the U.S. to prove they are in the country legally. If Mexico paid $5 billion to $8 billion for the fence, he said he would not enforce the rule.

* Click the document below to read all three pages.



Sources: The Washington Post, Politifact, Vox





Staff writer John Scheibe contributed to this report.