A billion here a Billion there/all from US????
April 17, 2006
Latin America Border Series:
Remittances Driving Central American Economies
Fair doses of media attention recently have been cast on the role of migrant remittances in the Mexican economy. Statistics reported in a paper
authored by a Costa Rica-based researcher suggest remittances are even more economically vital to Central America than they are inMexico-at least for
many families.
According to figures compiled by Marije van Lidthe de Jeude, a Dutch anthropologist and independent researcher who has worked with the United Nations
and other
international organizations, the four Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua received a combined $7 billion
dollars out of a total of $34 billion dollars in remittances from the United States that entered Latin America just in 2004.The four small countries
account for barely 6 percent of Latin America's total population.
Van Lidthe de Jeude said Central American remittances have grown "exponentially" since 1990, reaching a point in 2003 when migrant dollars constituted
20 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) of El Salvador and 30 percent of the GNP of Nicaragua.
Another important development reported by van Lidthe de Jeude: remittances dominate the legal foreign revenues entering Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Guatemala.
Not surprisingly, most remittances flow from jobs in the United States, but an undetermined sum comes from in-region migration, especially from
Salvadorans working in Guatemala and Nicaraguans laboring away in neighboring Costa Rica
Van Lidthe de Jeude recently spoke about the experience of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica at the international conference on borders sponsored by state
universities from New Mexico, Texas and Chihuahua and held in Ciudad Juarez. The Dutch scholar said no firm numbers exist about the number of
Nicaraguans living and working in Costa Rica, but one 2005 estimate puts the figure at somewhere between 350,000-450,000 people-about 10 percent of
Costa Rica's total population. More than 50 percent of the migrants are
women, a trend also evident in Guatemala where 63 percent of all Salvadoran migrants are female.
According to van Lidthe de Jeude, Nicaraguan emigration to Costa Rica picked up during the Sandinista revolution and civil war of 1979 to 1990, but
continued afterward for "pure economic reason." Today Nicaraguan labor fills jobs in the agricultural, domestic services, construction, and private
security sectors. Like their Mexican counterparts, [very few of Mexicans illegals in the States, 3%, work in agricultural]Nicaraguans send money home
that is spent on educational, housing and other ordinary expenses. Like Mexicans in the United States, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica increasingly
constitute the majority of faces on certain job sites. For instance, Costa Rica's prime export, coffee, "can't be harvested without the help of
Nicaraguans," van Lidthe de Jeude maintained. Once picked by students given time off from school, the coffee bean is now harvested by Nicaraguan
seasonal workers.
Documented or not, Nicaraguans are even landing jobs as private security guards. "Most of those jobs are filled by Nicaraguans," van Lidthe de Jeude
said. "It's also interesting to note that apparently in Costa Rica there are more houses with fences and private security walking on the streets
guarding houses or streets than in many cities in Colombia, for example," she added.
In her remittance paper, van Lidthe de Jeude cites other Central American studies that, like Mexico, assess remittances as carrying importance for
local and family economies but still lacking broader, positive economic development impacts. Quoted by van Lidthe de Jeude, one study contends that
remittances not only achieve transfers of wealth, but deepen economic dependence as well, contributing to "the strengthening of inequalities between
developed countries and (nations) on the path of development."
Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
My smidgen of a claim to fame is that I have had so many really good friends. By Bernie Swaim December 2007
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