Suchergebnisse

Exporting labor to the United States has become the principal industry of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Central Americans have been moving to the United States in large numbers since the 1980s, but how they gain entry has shifted thanks to the interplay between the migration industry and border enforcement. Many Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans are paying smugglers to deliver them to U.S. border agents so they can apply for asylum. The Trump administration's harsh reactions have energized asylum advocates, who argue that applicants are fleeing dislocation by neoliberal capitalism. Migrant households in the Ixil Maya municipio of Nebaj, Guatemala, express an optimistic interpretation of this situation that they call their American Dream. Their wish for high wages in the United States can be seen as the latest in a series of "hope machines" that interpret disadvantageous relations of exchange as the path to a better future. Such hopes are based on the irrefutable buying power of the dollar, but migrant remittances to their families conceal the extraction of rents. U.S. asylum advocates understandably stress that the most important challenge facing irregular immigrants is their legal status. However, with or without legal status, the underlying issue for migrants will continue to be their position in the U.S. job market, because this generates household indebtedness that increases vulnerability to human trafficking. La exportación de mano de obra a los Estados Unidos se ha convertido en la principal industria de Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras. Los centroamericanos se han estado mudando a los Estados Unidos en grandes cantidades desde la década de 1980, pero la forma en la que obtienen la entrada ha cambiado gracias a la interacción entre la industria de la migración y la industria de la deportación. Muchos guatemaltecos, hondureños y salvadoreños pagan a coyotes para que los entreguen a agentes fronterizos de Estados Unidos, pudiendo así puedan solicitar asilo. Las duras reacciones de la administración Trump han energizado a los defensores del asilo, quienes argumentan que los solicitantes están huyendo de la dislocación causada por el capitalismo neoliberal. Los migrantes en el municipio ixil maya de Nebaj, Guatemala, tienen una interpretación optimista de esta situación, la cual llaman su Sueño americano. Su deseo de salarios altos en Los Estados Unidos puede ser visto como la última en una serie de "máquinas de esperanza" que interpretan las desventajosas relaciones de intercambio como el camino hacia un futuro mejor. Dichas esperanzas se basan en el irrefutable poder adquisitivo del dólar, pero las remesas de los migrantes a sus familias ocultan la extracción de rentas. Los defensores del asilo en Estados Unidos enfatizan, comprensiblemente, que el desafío más importante que enfrentan los inmigrantes irregulares es su estatus legal. Sin embargo, con o sin estatus legal, el problema subyacente para los migrantes seguirá siendo su posición en el mercado laboral estadunidense, ya que esto genera el endeudamiento de los hogares e incrementa su vulnerabilidad a la trata de personas.

In the 1990s there were two new ideas to make the Ixil Mayas of Nebaj, Guatemala, self-sufficient. The first idea, conceived by microcredit consultants, was to make it easier for the Ixils to borrow money so that they could become entrepreneurs. The second idea, conceived by Ixils, was to use the credits to smuggle themselves into U.S. labor markets. In the process, Ixils turned many of the credits into loans to other Ixils at 10 percent interest per month. By 2006-2007 many stateside Ixils were failing to find enough work to pay their loans, and their serial debts were collapsing back in Nebaj. Currently an association of Nebaj women is asking international organizations and the Guatemalan government to save their houses and land from foreclosure. The stories that Ixils tell suggest that migration is a highly competitive process not just in U.S. labor markets but in the sending population, where people are being forced to go north by remittance- and credit-driven inflation. Their stories also suggest that migration is a process that runs on debt, with migrants indebting themselves and their relatives to the migration stream in ways that many are unable to repay. The debts not only enable migration but require more people to migrate north, in a chain of exploitation that may suck more value from the sending population than it returns.