Sidebar by Nancy Hiemstra
Immigration – September 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Current immigration trends from Mexico to the United States can be most directly tied to changes in the global economy in the last 40 years. In the 1960s and ’70s, Mexico and other Latin American countries were encouraged by the Western world to borrow heavily in order to develop national industry and infrastructure. It was easy to get loans because the profiting OPEC countries deposited a lot of their profits in U.S. banks as the world’s oil dependence grew; and these banks, in turn, gave huge loans to developing countries at variable interest rates, which were initially very low.
