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.
