Donald Trump Is Handing a Windfall to Mexican Immigrant Families Isabella Cota - Bloomberg
go to original October 3, 2016

A truck arrives to pick up day laborers in the Dallas suburb of Plano. (Laura Buckman/Bloomberg)

Mention the name Donald Trump to Gerardo Lozano, and it doesn’t take long for him to explode. “I can only imagine,” he says, the anger building in his voice, “what it will be like if he becomes president.”

Lozano, 58, short and wiry with thick glasses and a black-and-gray “TEXAS” ball cap, is an undocumented Mexican immigrant. For 15 years now, he’s worked in the U.S., the last two of them as a day laborer in Plano, just outside Dallas. He does a little roofing, some landscaping, plumbing, whatever comes his way. On a good day, he can pocket $150.

What Lozano doesn’t know about Trump’s candidacy is that, strangely enough, it has benefited him greatly. The value of those paychecks he earns, when converted into pesos and wired back home to his family in Mexico, is soaring. That’s because Trump’s harsh discourse toward Mexicans - build a huge wall, throw out all illegal immigrants, renegotiate NAFTA - has rattled markets and pushed the peso down against the dollar month after month.

Each dollar that Lozano ships across the border today provides his wife Maria with almost 20 pesos. In mid-2015, before Trump entered the race, each dollar fetched just over 15 pesos. The extra cash has helped Maria pay for all sorts of little luxuries: new blue jeans and skater-style sneakers for their 16-year-old son; and weeks-worth of supplies of beef, chicken and bars of soap. She’s even looking to salt away a little of the money so she can build a proper staircase to the second floor of their home in northern Mexico.

It all adds up to a mini-windfall for the Lozanos and countless other Mexican families spread out across both sides of the Rio Grande, and it is one of the great ironies of the 2016 presidential campaign. Donald Trump, the man whose improbable political rise was built largely on his pledge to crack down on illegal immigrants, is inadvertently assisting many of them.

Read the rest at Bloomberg

Related: What Can Mexico Do About Trump? (The New York Times)

Related: Citing Trump as “Hurricane”-Sized Threat, Mexico Takes Action (CBS News)

Related: Here’s What Donald Trump Got Wrong About Mexico’s Taxes (TIME)

Related: Goldman Sees Feast or Famine for Mexico Peso After U.S. Vote (Bloomberg)

Related: Donald Trump Tumbles on Rich List, Down USD 800M: Forbes (The Financial Express)

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