“Up north is where we’ve gotten the money for everything – to build houses, to take care of families, to sow in the fields. If they don’t send money, the town stops.” Those are the words of Rosa Gomez Hernandez, a 37-year-old resident of Mexican town San Bartolome Quialana, and whose ability to live and work in Mexico is a direct effect of the work done by Mexicans in the United States.
The Washington Post’s Teo Armus and Karla Gachet write from San Bartolome Quialana to reveal the profound economic impact on the town from production outside of it. This is work done in the United States.
Armus and Gachet report that over the decades, “The small adobe homes in this Zapotec community of about 2,500 people gave way to two-story cement houses with wrought-iron gates. Roads were paved. A basketball court rose near the town center.”
Immigrant believers and skeptics alike will attribute the growth of this small town to remittances from illegal workers in the U.S., which is the point. And it’s a crucial one. Growth and opportunity in Mexico increasingly are an effect of economic activity outside of it. Which tells us two things.
First is that legal or illegal, Mexicans working in the U.S. are adding enormous value to the U.S. economy. Second is that the surest way to keep the U.S./Mexican border empty of migrants is to paradoxically open it. More specifically, to reduce the frequently lamented Mexican and central American impact on borders, border towns, schools, hospitals and roads, is to legalize the inflow of individuals who want to work.
The more that hard-working, productive central Americans can come to the U.S. to work, the less the urgency of exponentially more mothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandma and grandpas to get to the United States themselves. There’s no need.
So long as the most able and ambitious can make their way to the U.S. without ICE hassles and brutal border crossings, the more that the able and ambitious can earn in sufficient amounts and remit in sufficient amounts so that their families can stay put. Call U.S. economic growth and work legalization the picture definition of border security, and of the kind that builds on itself.
The more that central Americans are free to prosper stateside, the more that the U.S. economy grows in such a way that central American economies can grow themselves. Elevated by remittances, the need for so many to get to the United States will abate.
Conversely, let’s not forget what migrant-skeptic conservatives have said for decades: incentives matter. If remittances are shrunk due to harassment, deportment or both, poverty in central America will soar. And with the poverty, so will soar the urgency of those in central America to get to the U.S.
Immigration skeptics argue against all economic logic that the arrival of workers reduces wages for the locals, but that’s even more reason to legalize their arrival and work in the first place. If central Americans are free to come out of the shadows, they can attain higher wages commensurate with their skills instead of lower wages born of hiding their existence as much as possible.
The exciting, happy truth is that migrant workers don’t just lift the U.S. economy, but by doing just that they elevate the economies of the towns, cities and countries they come from via remittances. If we legalize what elevates immigrant and the U.S. alike, we set the stage for empty borders and the eventual return of migrants to the native country where they can enjoy the fruits of their productive work.
