The hidden element of the immigration debate

"Honduras today survives on remittances, but mass migration also causes enormous damage," said Julio Velásquez, an official of the Honduran National Human Rights Commission. "Those who manage to reach the U.S. can lift their families a little out of poverty, but often the families fall apart and the kids end up in gangs or on drugs. We need to create the conditions so people don't need to leave, instead of thinking of migration as something to admire."

Broken families - this is the hidden element of the immigration debate. And it is a problem which will not improve much, if at all, by passage of the type of expanded guest worker program that is so dear to El Presidente Arbusto and all the liberals in the Congress.

The immigration "reform" bill currently in the Senate, the last I heard anyway, wants to double the H1 visa quotas (there are separate quotas for professionals and seasonal or temporary workers) to something over 300,000 per hear. No one talks about the damage such long separations do to the families involved, at least not yet. Watch for this issue to surface after the amnesty and expanded guest worker programs become law. This will be a powerful emotional argument for expanding family unification, thereby admitting even more people who will strain the social safety net.

There is a misconception that temporary guest workers are concentrated in seasonal occupations in fields like agriculture and construction. Some do, but many do not. Moreover, construction is a year-round business even here in Pennsylvania where the only segment of the business that shuts down altogether in winter is highway construction and maintenance. In some of the more southerly parts of the country even a lot of agricultural employment is year-round. Here in southeastern Pennsylvania, mushroom growing, which is done indoors, is an intermittent but year-round employer of large numbers of foreign, largely illegal, labor. A producer of sod in the deep south lobbying for easier access to foreign seasonal labor complained last year that he hade trouble recruiting local labor because his farm needed workers only 11 months out of the year.

And, the guest worker programs on the books and in the bill are not seasonal. They admit workers for about two years straight then send them home - in theory. Of course, those who go home can re-apply and many do, often requested by their prior employer to return to the same job if their work was satisfactory. This compounds the negative effects on children growing up without fathers in their home countries.

Money sent directly to Honduran families from relatives working in the United States, both legally and illegally, provides nearly one-third of the national income -- $1.8 billion in 2005, $2.3 billion last year.

The same is true for other countries in the region. For Mexico, with it's vastly larger number of workers (mostly illegal) in the US, the value of remittances is much larger. Throw in the billions we spend on food stamps and other subsidies for Puerto Rico and the cost of US dollar support of the region is staggering.

Ten percent is the usual figure cited for the proportion of the combined populations of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean islands already in the US. Here is the Honduran situation in a nutshell (all from this Washington Post article):
Population - about 7.5 million
Attempting US border crossing - 90,000 per year
Number deported from US - about 14,000 so far in 2007, up from 18,941 for the entire year of 2005