Fewer Mexicans try twice to enter the U.S.

SASABE, Mexico - The sandy streets of Sasabe are empty. Migrant smugglers have to hunt for business at border-town shelters. Deported migrants give up after one try, taking their government up on free bus rides home.

A U.S. crackdown is causing the longest and most significant drop in illegal migration from Mexico since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. Officials say the U.S. economic downturn, tighter security, and a more perilous and expensive journey are persuading many who try to sneak into the United States to give up sooner.

Border Patrol arrests are down 17 percent so far this year along the U.S.-Mexico border after falling 20 percent all of last fiscal year and 8 percent the year before that. While it's impossible to know how many people are crossing illegally, the patrol uses apprehensions to estimate the ebb and flow of traffic.

The downturn in illegal immigration has created labor shortages throughout the United States and several states are considering temporary-worker programs, especially in agricultural fields, where produce is going bad.

Mexicans in the United States are starting to send less money home, too.

Remittances soared in the early part of the decade to become Mexico's largest source of foreign income after oil exports. But they rose just 1 percent in 2007, reaching $24 billion, and in the first quarter this year, they slipped almost 3 percent from the same period last year, Mexico's central bank said this week.

Adolfo Vasquez, 41, a corn farmer from southern Mexico, picked fruit for three years in Washington state. Last year it took him two tries to get to his job. This year, he walked for four nights before U.S. Border Patrol agents caught him. He doesn't plan to try again.

"It's very disheartening, because every time it gets twice as difficult," said Vasquez. "We're going to go to Los Cabos or Tijuana. We hear there is work there."

The proportion of returned migrants who try again through the heavily traveled desert corridor west of Sasabe has dropped from 80 percent to 40 percent since January, said Border Patrol spokesman Jose Gonzalez. Agents keep fingerprints on all those apprehended and can determine multiple offenders, even if they give false names.

U.S. authorities attribute the drop to tighter security and a program in the Tucson sector that has prosecuted more than 3,000 migrants for crossing illegally since it started in January. They face jail sentences from a few days to six months.

But none of the migrants interviewed knew about the new prosecution program. Those on their way home said the main deterrents were tougher security and the dangers of the desert, including bandits who rob and even rape migrants on both sides of the border.

The U.S. Border Patrol has added 200 officers since last year to the Tucson sector, and 3,000 agents now search the vast desert for illegal migrants by truck, horse, ATV and helicopter.

The patrol also has four drones scanning for drug and migrant smugglers, as well as two newly built 12-foot walls with steel posts near Nogales and in Sasabe.

At the same time, Mexican drug smugglers have started to collect fees for access to the main routes into Arizona. As a result, the Mexican government's migrant rescue group has seen a 257 percent increase in the number of people seeking discounted bus tickets home this year.

On a recent day, only eight men waited for their smuggler near a pile of rusting cars.

Juan Luna, 39, a bricklayer from Guanajuato state, said he had been heading to Oklahoma to work as a dishwasher. But after two nights of walking through the desert, he and five others were caught.

"The United States is where those without resources go," Luna said at the Nogales bus station where he was waiting to return home. "That was a little door we still had open. But they are closing it, and now we don't know what we will do."