Economic Hardships In Puerto Rico Spur A Mass Exodus To The U.S. Mainland
By Nancy San Martin
nsanmartin@MiamiHerald.com
Yessenia Puente is disenchanted with the Isla del Encanto.
She became a widow six years ago. Public schools don’t provide a safe environment for her three children. Her income as a hotel manager barely covers living expenses, much less private school tuition. And every two days, she must contend with no running water at home due to water rationing measures imposed by the government in response to a prolonged drought.
So on the same day that a new 11.5 percent consumer tax took effect last week , a moving truck showed up at Puente’s apartment in the Carolina suburb of San Juan to load up her belongings for shipment to Orlando. The boxes were marked with “#1465” — that is the number of families this one moving company, La Rosa del Monte, has packed for Orlando since January.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while because I’ve seen how things are deteriorating,” said Puente, 35. “But with everything happening now, I decided it’s time to go. The system doesn’t work here.”
Like Puente, thousands of others are bidding farewell to their lives on the island to begin anew elsewhere in the United States.
In what some experts characterize as the largest out-migration since the 1950s, emigration to the U.S. mainland has accelerated in recent years, with 144,000 fleeing from mid-2010 to 2013, according to a Pew Research Center study using U.S. Census Bureau data. The island’s population now stands at 3.6 million, down from it’s population peak of 4 million residents in 2009.
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