Answer to Question 1
the Holocaust
Answer to Question 2
The border is not where the U.S. stops and Mexico begins, said Mayor Betty Flores of Laredo, Texas. It's where the U.S. blends into Mexico (Gibbs 2001:42). The term borderlands refers to the area of a common culture along the border between Mexico and the United States. Though particularly relevant to Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the growing Mexican influence is relevant to the other Latino groups as well.
Legal and illegal emigration from Mexico to the United States, day laborers crossing the border regularly to go to jobs in the United States, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the exchange of media across the border all make the notion of separate Mexican and U.S. cultures obsolete in the borderlands.
The economic position of the borderlands is complex in terms of both businesses and workers. Very visible on the Mexican side are maquiladoras. These foreign-owned operations are exempt from paying Mexican taxes and are not required to provide insurance or benefits for their workers. Mexican labor costs (wages plus benefits) are typically 8 to 16 per hour, which is considered very good by prevailing wage standards in Mexico. However, this one example of international trade soon was trumped by another aspect of globalization. As low as these hourly wages seem to people in industrial countries, multinational corporations soon found even lower wages in China. More than 75 percent of the new 700,000 maquiladora jobs created by NAFTA were eliminated between 2000 and 2011.
Immigrant workers have a significant economic impact on their home country while employed in the United States. Many Mexicans, as well as other Hispanic groups, send some part of their earnings back to family members remaining in their native countries. This substantial flow of money, sometimes called remittances, totals an estimated 24 billion annually. Most of the money is spent to pay for food, clothing, and housing, but increasingly a growing proportion is being invested to create small businesses.
The close cultural and economic ties to the home country that are found in the borderlands also can be found with other Latino groups. Such economic and political events continue to have a prominent role in the lives of immigrants and their children, and even grandchildren, in the United States. In recent years, Mexicans have also turned their attention to their other borders as migrants from other Latin American countries enter Mexico, sometimes illegally, to either settle there or move north to the United States.
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European wildcat
Choir of Cologne Cathedral, Germany.
Steady State in the Two-Country Model
European Mistletoe