The Forgotten Impact of Illegal Immigration

We all know that illegal and legal immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, or other places south of the border are working, then sending much of what they make back home to desperately poor family members. I doubt that, however one feels about immigration reform, anyone has a problem with that.

After all, it can only be good. You're taking care of your kids, your wife, your aged mother. The $300 a month you send back home can buy good food, help start a business, pumps money into a local economy that desperately needs the injection of cash. It can't be doing harm. Can it?

The Truth About Those Remittances

Have you ever watched one of those shows where lottery winners are interviewed, five years after the fact? While their lives before the lottery may have been poor, but stable, their lives after the lottery become a madhouse. Friends turn into vultures, scam artists slink out of the corners. From having no idea how they could possibly spend those millions, they find themselves deeply in debt and declaring bankruptcy.

This isn't because money is evil. Rather, it's because those lottery winners literally went from rags to riches. And just as a wealthy person suddenly reduced to penury is at a loss, a poor person suddenly elevated to luxury has no idea what to do with all that money.

It leads to a particular kind of self-abuse. The winner quits working, spends time partying, buys all those expensive things he or she has always wanted, takes friends on long cruises. Too much of anything can kill you - and money is no exception to the rule.

So take that analogy to Guatemala, where the average annual income is about $5000. More importantly, over half the population lives below the poverty line. This means that more than a third of family income is spent on food. These people are desperately poor.

In this culture, now, imagine that the father of a family of four treks across Mexico to the United States, and sends back half his paycheck to his wife. Like most immigrants of any flavor, he willingly works two or even three jobs, and is able to make over $600 a week working sixty to eighty hours. He lives in a small apartment with three other men who are also sending back money to their families, so does not need most of that. He opts to send back half his earnings -- $300 a week.

This is an enormous sum, three times the average income. It moves his family up from poverty to middle classdom. Understandably, his wife, though she misses him, wants her husband to continue working in America.

But here's the problem. Her son, sixteen, sees no reason to continue going to school now. He has found his heart's desire: to follow his father to America and take advantage of the American dream. He also has no desire to go to work for $15 a day on a Guatemalan farm - what is the $75 a week he could make compared to his father's kingly $300? He chooses to just hang out and wait til he also has the opportunity to travel to America.

The impact of one or two youths doing this is small on a community. But the impact of a fifth of them - or a third of them - choosing to do nothing can be significant. Business is booming for stores due to remittances, but they cannot find employees. Their best workers quit to travel north. Women choose to stay home with babies and live on the remittances. Of all the businesses in town, only the remittance office is doing well.

There are towns in Guatemala today that have been completely changed by this trend. Agriculture is neglected, food is imported, and the young people are functionally illiterate - because of the siren call of America to the north.

We in America are terribly concerned about what uncontrolled illegal immigration is doing to our culture. As usual, we are being overly self-centered.

What are those immigrants doing to their own cultures by leaving them behind?