Mexican job-seekers often from middle class - Low-pay, even for white-collar work, sends educated Mexicans to U.S. jobs.

By Will Weissert, Herald.net

May 7, 2006

http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/06/05/07/100wir_a5migrant001.cfm

...While many Americans associate Mexican [illegal] immigration with poor, rural laborers, a large number of those seeking work in the United States these days are better-educated and hail from relatively well-to-do, middle-class backgrounds in the city.

Many set aside years of training and education to illegally clean houses, take seasonal landscaping jobs or accept positions at meatpacking plants - all of which pay better than most white-collar work in their homeland.

Many obtain visas to work, study or join family members already there. Hundreds of thousands do not.

"Before, we saw only rural people with little education," said Efrain Jimenez, vice president of a Los Angeles group serving [illegal] migrants from the northern Mexican state of Zacatecas.

"Now we see young professionals or those who, after years of working (in Mexico), haven't been able to save up much money and look for other options."...

It's hard to find any Mexican family - rich or poor - that doesn't have relatives or friends in the United States....

Of the estimated 10.6 million Mexicans - both legal and undocumented [criminal illegal aliens] - who live in the United States, nearly 700,000, or about one in 15, have college degrees, said Rodolfo Tuiran, President Vicente Fox's deputy secretary of social development until last year....

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