While in Oaxaca, Mexico last May, I met a woman surveying the ruins of Monte Alban. Her name was Carole, she said, and she was thinking about living in Oaxaca for a while. She had toured the U.S. in her FEMA trailer which she had been living in since a hurricane hit her place in Florida a few years back. With the cost of living going up in the U.S., she decided that a retiree such as herself would fare better in Mexico. She and her late husband had good memories of Oaxaca, she said, and she could see herself being happier there than in the U.S. with the money she had.

I also met a former doctor, his wife and son in a mescal workshop where they were learning how to make fine quality mescal, of which tequila is a subtype. The doctor, Bill, said that he left the U.S. for Mexico because his work as a doctor disillusioned him about the war on drugs. Further, his fast-paced lifestyle afforded him little time with his family.

Healthy, adventurous retirees like Carole and families like Bill's are not the only ones moving south of the border. Many elderly Americans move to Mexico for the cheaper health care costs. They can get anything from in-home health care services to a spot in a nursing home for a fraction of the U.S. price. With the housing market and mortgage industry in the States worsening, the number of Americans looking to Mexico for a better deal is likely to increase.

So while many Mexicans of working age move to America to look for jobs, older Americans are moving to Mexico because it is a place in which they can afford to retire. It is unfortunate that neither of these needs can be met within one's own country. It has long been said that illegal immigrants should not take jobs here and use our health care without paying taxes. (How is it that people believe they are draining our health care system if many Americans can't even afford to use it?) To point out the other side of the story, it is also not fair for the U.S. to leave its elderly to fend for themselves.

Americans are scared that with the rising costs of health care and the bad housing market they won't be able to afford the cost of living. So, they lash out at illegal immigrants as the cause for their misfortune when it would better serve them to consider the system set up at home that denies them what they need to live. In other words, good fences may make good neighbors, but those aren't your neighbors over there - those are your parents.

Snyder is a psychology graduate student.

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