Lori Wheeler

11 June 2014

Remittances: A Driving Factor in the Guatemalan Economy

            For the last ten years one of my closest friends has worked at an Inter-American school in Xela, a city in  the province of Quetzaltenango in Guatemala. What started as an extension of his travels abroad to teach in Guatemala for a semester has turned to immigration. My friend, Michael McNabb, moved from the position of teacher to principal and then director of his school. He has married a Guatemalan woman, and now they are expecting their first child. Two Thanksgivings ago, I went to visit Michael and Luisa and his school. During my whirlwind tour of his new country, he drove me past a statue in Salcaja one day, explaining that it was a tribute to the immigrant. Our conversation continued, and I began to understand how the friend I had grown up with and went to college with fit into this world that was so drastically different from the one in which he and I had grown up. You see, Guatemala is filled with workers constantly emigrating to the United States. US immigration is big business in Guatemala, but especially for my friend and his family. This means that in building his school, he does important work for the young Guatemalan families who hope to see their children go to work in the United States in the future. The Inter-American school Michael oversees provides students with a traditional American K-12 education in English. His students are taking the same classes that students in the US are taking and many are learning English at the same time. The goal of the school and the students—what parents pay for—is to see as many students be accepted into and attend colleges and universities in the United States so they can enter the professional world of the US or return to Guatemala with the acumen and, more importantly, networks with American businessmen. The Cordero family into which my friend married has a daughter who immigrated with her husband and children to Miami, and many cousins who have immigrated to the US also, some of them in New Jersey, a popular landing place for Guatemalan immigrants. With his unique perspective as an immigrant to Guatemala, Michael sees both the causes and effects of immigration to the US and is able to see the implications of the anecdotal evidence that surrounds him in his family and those of his students. According to him, there are both positive and negative aspects of Guatemalan immigration to the US, but in the eyes of some Guatemalans, the positives far outweigh the negatives.

            For my research, I wanted to explore this culture who celebrated the immigrant in greater depth. I wanted to understand why a culture would celebrate its fathers and sons leaving for a foreign land, and to determine just much the immigrant is truly celebrated. I wanted to discover how immigration could be seen in such a positive light by those left behind. While I easily found articles that discussed Guatemalan immigration to the US, the biggest problem in my research was understanding the almost interchangeable way that the words migrant and immigrant were used in reference to Guatemalans going to the US for work. The migrant worker moves from one place to another for work, but it typically denotes that the movement is within the same country, while the immigrant leaves one country for another to find work or to create a new life. In many of the articles I read and on the websites I visited, the terms were not distinguished from each other. This led me to the question of how Central American cultures see themselves in terms of nationality and mobility that must wait to be answered later.

            The questions with which I began my research, however, were answered in the process. I found pieces that explained the benefits as well as the drawbacks of immigration to the US and related individual accounts of those who immigrated and those who remained in Guatemala. To understand the willingness of so many Guatemalans to leave their own homes, it is important to remember the nature of the immigrant as one who is leaving a difficult situation to face what are perceived as better opportunities elsewhere. Guatemalans are just finally healing from the civil war that devastated their country for several decades, and like many immigrants who came before them, put many Guatemalans in political, physical, and financial danger. The biggest wave of immigration to the US from Guatemala occurred during this civil war and has continued since. Guatemala began to rely on the business of immigration to the US. Immigrant remittances make up 11% of Guatemala's GDP, the largest foreign income of the country, and the second largest in the country, foreign or domestic (http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4143-guatemalas-deadly-lifeline-over-reliance-on-the-united-states). In 2006, Guatemalans living in the US sent home $3.6 billion dollars in remittances (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052901125.html). In fact, these remittances have greatly changed the face of the physical and political landscape in Guatemala. The country has a long history of "government repression" which in addition to many other things created conditions of "extreme poverty" (Brabeck, Lykes, & Hershberg 277), but remittances from immigrants have given many Guatemalans the power they lacked for so long. This money "contribute[s] to building more sustainable livelihoods, increase[s] the resource base, and improve[s] the opportunities of households of using their assets for improving their living standards" by building and/or improving homes, buying land, sending children to school, and creating new business (Aguilar-Stoen 26-27). Investments such as these certainly benefit the families of immigrants, who are receiving the remittances, but those benefits have ripple effects on non-immigrant families by urbanizing city centers and creating the need for better infrastructure. At first glance, it seems as if immigration to the US is exclusively positive for Guatemala and its people. No wonder a town like Salcaja, where 44% of families have at least one member in the US, would erect a monument to the immigrant (http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4143-guatemalas-deadly-lifeline-over-reliance-on-the-united-states).

            There is more than one face, however, to Guatemalan immigration to the US. In addition to creating opportunity, it limits in many ways the ability of non-immigrant families to find the same success as immigrant families, sustaining the gap between classes. Psychologically and socially, though, it can have dire consequences. Many families are separated: husbands from wives, parents from children, and nuclear families from extended families. This creates problems when families are reunited, or when there is the expectation of being reunited that can never be fulfilled. The most pressing issue found in the articles I read was the effect of family separation on children. For some children, it instills a fear in them of instability, but in others, being separated from authority figures, especially while receiving remittances, allows them choose a life of consumption instead of investment. Many young people are dropping out of school, waiting to head north themselves (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052901125.html). The youth are not the only ones, though, spending their money on frivolous items; it is the adults as well (http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0704768.htm). Because immigrants are sending home remittances, land prices have been inflated and other "patterns of inequality" have surfaced (Aguilar-Stoen 33). While cooperatives have been created to benefit families of immigrants and make the most of the investment of remittances, many of these new benefits, such as availability of land and loans, are not available to non-immigrants or their families. Even more troubling are the numbers of immigrants returning home because of the stricter US immigration laws that began in the 1990s and continue post-9/11. The workers return to Guatemala and face a re-assimilation process into their country and their family.

            The original research questions lead to a better, but not full, understanding of the complexity of the interchangeability of the words immigrant and migrant when referring to the Guatemalan worker. For many, there is movement in both directions: both to and from the US. Yet, all of the anecdotal evidence supports the idea that once a worker goes to the US for work, that's where he wants to be, no matter how much danger he faces from the coyotes or the INS. More importantly, the examination of the causes and effects of Guatemalan immigration to the US shows the need for greater awareness on the part of those who both send and receive remittances of the consequences of those remittances. The research provides a warning to use immigrant remittances in a way that benefits both family and country; otherwise, the effort of immigration becomes nothing more than one more difficult way to simply "make it," and sometimes, even worse, becoming fruitless. 

Works Cited

Aguilar-Stoen, Mariel. "'Con nuestro propio esfuerzo': Understanding the Relationships between International Migration and the Environment in Guatemala." European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 93 (2012): 25-40. Print.

Brabeck, Kalina M., M. Brinton Lykes, and Rachel Hershbert. "Framing Immigration to and Deportation from the United States: Guatemalan and Salvadoran Families Make Meaning of Their Experiences." Community, Work & Family 14.3 (2011): 275-296. Print.

McNabb, Michael. Skype interview. 2 June 2014.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052901125.html

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4143-guatemalas-deadly-lifeline-over-reliance-on-the-united-states

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0704768.htm