More immigrants buying land in native countries

The Boston Globe reports:

She was raised in a little wooden house with a thatched roof in the Dominican Republic, a nation she left behind 17 years ago to clean offices in Boston's skyscrapers and dorm rooms at Harvard University.

But now Vinela Arias is preparing to return home in style. A few weeks ago, she and her boyfriend put a bid on a two-story stuccoed colonial in an elite gated community in Santo Domingo with three bedrooms, a sundeck, and private quarters for a live-in housekeeper.

One day, Arias hopes, she will never have to lift a mop again.

"It's the kind of house I dreamed of," said Arias, who arranges the furniture in her new home in her mind while riding the bus from her Roxbury neighborhood to work. "It's mine."

It is the American dream in reverse: Arias is part of a growing contingent of immigrants who are gobbling up real estate in their native countries, discouraged by high housing prices and foreclosures in the United States and enticed by the possibility of returning home to a better life than the one they left behind.

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