Today the price of living is higher than ever, food prices are higher as well as heating and electricity. Most people in America can handle prices quite well and still have enough money to afford cars that get 20 miles to the gallon (with gas being over $3 it's a real pain). Some people assume that impoverished countries such as Mexico have a lower cost of living due to the fact that they make much less than we American's. This is an incorrect assumption for surveys have proved that most food products in Mexico are about the same or even higher than the prices of everyday stuff like “leche y pan.”
In the modern US, the national minimum wage of a person (minus charity and other conditions) is $5.15 while the minimum wage in Nogales, Mexico in 2006 was 48 pesos per day of 6 pesos an hour or around 55 cents per hour. When you add that up to the price of living, which I already mentioned was comparable to the US's; you get a very high poverty rate. When you compare how many hours it takes for us to get a loaf of bread to that of a Mexican person, it is simply appalling. While working at minimum wage in the US (which I may remind you not so many people do), you could earn a loaf of bread in just over 10 minutes. Yet if you were in Mexico at the minimum wage it would take just under two hours or 117 minutes to earn a measly loaf of bread. That is why so many people from Mexico are attracted to the US.
As it was said in the days of yesteryear, “America is the land of opportunity.” This is especially true for the Mexican people who are paid so little. You could compare the migration of Mexicans to America to the Irish migration of the late 1800's through the early 1900's. We did not like the Irish too much, yet here they are today and I hope that in the future we will have the diversity of having Mexican-American's living in our country.
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