In guatemala, a steep climb for returning migrants.
| Autor | Conaway, Janelle |
Flights chartered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement land almost every weekday in Guatemala City, bringing back Guatemalan citizens who have been working in the US without documents--or at least trying to. These days, many more Guatemalan migrants are deported by land from Mexico before they ever reach US soil. What happens to those who return, once they're back in their homeland? Many of them, faced with crushing debt and few opportunities, head back north. Others try to make a go of it at home, but they have little support. A few groups are trying to make it easier for people to stay, but it's an uphill climb.
Migration experts talk about "push" and "pull" factors--the myriad of reasons that drive people from their place of origin and draw them elsewhere. A young man who can't find a job in Guatemala may have extra incentive to leave if gang violence is encroaching, or an earthquake has devastated his village, or a bank note is coming due; on the "pull" side, he's more likely to head for the US if he already has a brother there, or if the US construction industry is booming, or if he thinks it will only get harder to cross the border in the future.
"It's an accumulation of factors, not necessarily A, B, or C," said Jorge Peraza Breedy, the International Organization for Migration's chief of mission for the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It's important to address the needs of those who are returned to their country, he said in an interview with NotiCen, "so that they do not feel the need to emigrate again." In other words, he added, not leaving also has to become a viable alternative.
That's not always the case now. "It's hard here in Guatemala," said Yolanda Rivas, 26, who was deported in early April, after being detained in Hidalgo, Texas, and held for three weeks in a detention center in Taylor. The US$7,500 she paid the coyote, or smuggler--she got a bank loan by putting up her family's home as collateral--bought her three crossing attempts, and this was her second deportation. Right after she landed back on Guatemalan soil, she wasn't sure what she was going to do next, but a couple of weeks later she had made up her mind.
"With all the debt I have, I think I will give it another go," she said in a phone interview from the house where she lives with her parents and three younger siblings near Huehuetenango, in Guatemala's Western Highlands. She added that the interest on the debt was...
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