According to the state official, despite that pressure, Baja California has an unemployment rate of 5.6 per cent, "the lowest on the northern border and southern United States."

By way comparison, the state's unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in January of 2010.

Those statistics are meaningless to the people struggling every day to find a job.

On the Tijuana border with Rosarito Beach, near where the state is constructing a convention center, 360 workers are building a new phase of a residential development with a view to the sea.

Arnulfo de la Cruz Rodríguez, 50, works there as a construction supervisor. The Zacatecas native said that at least 50 people arrive daily at the site looking for work, most of them people like him, deported from the United States.

"Practically all of us who are here have had a hard time getting a job because many of us don't have any documents and most of the construction projects are stopped or already have workers," said de la Cruz, who worked in San Fernando until he was deported due to a drug problem.

Another worker at the site is Leonardo Ruiz Mendoza, 19, from Oaxaca, who worked as a baker in San Diego until he was deported. He said he looked for a job in Tijuana for two months until he got a job as a construction assistant, the fourth time he asked for work there.

The two men said it had been tough to land a job and both said they intended to return to the United States as soon as they could pay a smuggler.

p]The workers said that a construction assistant is paid $100 per week, comprised of six, 10-hour days, while a construction supervisor gets paid $184 a week. That's about one-third of what they used to get for similar work in the United States, they said.

[/p]

Border authorities in both countries said that the United States deported a little more than 392,000 undocumented immigrants to Mexico last year.

Díaz, the researcher, warned that Mexico's economic recovery will be accompanied by a surge in unemployment, which could potentially generate greater social pressures and political conflicts.

He's not alone in sounding alarm bells.

Other researchers, including the social anthropologist Víctor Clark, have warned that thousands of deported people, among them some gang members, and the war against the drug cartels, can combine into an explosive cocktail.

The historic lack of job opportunities, coupled with unemployment, may lead the newly arrived to see petty crime, even organized crime, as an easy alternative.

Omar.millan@sandiegored.com