Housing Slump, Crackdown Cut Flows, Hurt Mexican Peso

Bloomberg reports:

Ernesto Perez, a 27-year-old Mexican immigrant, says construction work in New York has become so scarce he's stopped sending money back to his parents in the southwestern state of Guerrero.

``If I don't find work soon, we're moving back home,'' Perez said last week as he walked away from the corner in Queens, New York, where he and dozens of Hispanic workers hope to get chosen for construction jobs. On this day, Perez gave up after a six-hour wait.

The U.S. housing slump is squeezing Mexican migrant workers from Los Angeles to New York, where permits for new home construction are down 20 percent this year, according to the Census Bureau. That's reducing the pace of money transfers, the second-biggest source of dollars in Mexico after oil exports, and turning the peso into a laggard among Latin American currencies.

Remittances rose 3.4 percent in the first quarter, the slowest growth in eight years. The peso has strengthened 0.1 percent this year to 10.8137 per dollar, the second-worst performance among the most-traded currencies in the region.

One way of looking at the housing slowdown.