Migration meditations

Good morning –

As usual, the pace of life remains slow in my small community of Toreras, even slower than usual this past week due to the Easter holiday. New rumors have begun circulating that the Ministry of Education will soon close Toreras' one-teacher school, the community's only institution with a physical presence, as a result of a drastic decline in the student population over the years. Migration has begun to pick up now that the North American winter is over, as young people test their luck reaching the U.S. by land via coyotes (professional human smugglers).

Migration is one of the more interesting topics I occasionally discuss with community members. Some are alert to the dangers the journey involves (murder, dehydration, and rape, to name a few), while others seem only abstractly aware that migration entails many risks. All know that crossing the border, usually across the Rio Grande into Texas, is no guarantee of successful passage; immigration authorities could promptly detain a border crosser upon arrival in the U.S. That being said, the impression I glean from my conversations is that many migrants from Toreras still manage to successfully reach the United States, where they quickly reunite with their family members residing in Pennsylvania or New York and find employment in the construction, manufacturing, food service, and hospitality industries. Some are able to migrate legally (negating the need to employ a coyote) with the help of family members who fled during the civil war and have since obtained American citizenship, but the majority travel sin papeles.

My experience in El Salvador will influence my views on immigration, probably for the rest of my life. The question of 'how' is still unclear. Before sharing some of my thoughts, I find it befitting to acknowledge that migration is a global phenomenon existing under a diversity of regional, political, and economic circumstances, and as such, I am careful not to universalize the observations I make from my tiny corner of El Salvador.

Having lived amid such poverty now for almost seven months, I have developed a great deal of sympathy for those who leave their loved ones, countries, and cultures to live on the fringes of a much richer society to provide financially for their families. Observing the circumstances into which they were born, their desire to migrate is easy to understand. That being said, among those they leave behind, the mentality that remittance dependence begets carries many negative social and economic consequences. Under remittance dependency (at least as far as I observe it in Toreras), children and their parents perceive little incentive to place importance on education, basic opportunities to generate income go unexploited, and people never experience the dignity and fulfillment of earning one's own living. Additionally, migration starves Toreras of valuable human capital, a reality compounded by the tendency for the more enterprising and ambitious young residents tend to be the ones to make the journey north, while the less-motivated stay behind.

I often wonder what Toreras would be like today if migration to the United States had never implanted itself into the community's DNA. For guidance we can examine Toreras' circumstances before El Salvador's civil war of the 1980s. Young men left Toreras during the war years not because fighting directly threatened the community's safety, but because of promises that the prosperous U.S. was offering asylum to Salvadoran migrants ostensibly fleeing the war. This exodus marked the beginning of the formation of Toreras' diaspora in the United States (concentrated in Hempstead, New York and suburban Philadelphia) and its inhabitants' financial dependence on their stateside relatives.

Unlike the strictly subsistence-level agriculture of today, before the war Toreras families produced more corn, beans, and other staples, and sold substantial portions of their harvests at markets in nearby towns (they arrived on horseback, as in these days there were no roads connecting Toreras to larger population centers). Back then, people worked harder and life overall was more difficult, but every colón (El Salvador's currency before dollarization in 2001) was earned and how hard each family worked was commensurate to its prosperity.

It is beyond my capability to prove counterfactuals, but I find it quite conceivable that Toreras would be richer today had migration and its corresponding remittances never become a factor in community life. Perhaps if residents flush with remitted cash had not abandoned their image of themselves as commercial farmers, they would have one day embraced more lucrative crops like coffee and cacao, or adopted new technologies to make their farming and commercializing of staple crops more productive and efficient. Unlike before the war, Toreras now is connected to roads, electricity, and cellular signal, three advancements that would have stood to benefit commercial agricultural activities. Furthermore, without migration, Toreras' population (currently about 200) would likely stand at more than twice what it is today, and as such would boast far more human capital. Lastly, Toreras would not suffer from a crippling mentality defined by its dependency on the fruits of faraway labor and its resignation toward its own economic potential, an improvement upon today's situation with potentially profound implications.

Of course, the practical application of the above thought experiment is limited. The reality is that Toreras does depend on remittances as its economic lifeline, and that young men and women grow up here expecting and hoping to leave one day to toil in the U.S. and build a better life there. In fairness, I should not fail to mention that remittances do spare people here the worst of poverty; children don't grow up barefoot and practically everyone gets enough to eat. My main point is that migration and remittances seem to preclude this community from dreaming — from asking itself what it wants to be and summoning the motivation to realize the answer to that question.