By: ildefonso gutiérrez azopardo & José martín buenadicha  (Page 5/5)

Without any type of investment, minimal structures, elaborating projects, or becoming indebted with loans, they receive thousands of million dollars and euros from workers abroad. They are remittances that have begun to form part of the economy and are calculated with the banking and commercial organizations and the budgets of States that receive them. They surpass the development help destined to the Third World. In many nations they also surpass any other type of entrance of currency. Immigrants in Spain have sent their respective countries about 3,000 million euros in the last year.

This money is used for acquisition of a house, education for the children, health of the family, and debt payments, the rest is used for food and consumer goods. An amount of money is sometimes used for opening a small business and very little is saved. The damage caused by banking organizations with bankruptcies, cases in Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, prevents people from trusting these organizations with their money. This has increased the purchase of consumer goods, even with the risk of price increase for their constant demand. If these remittances are not used in productive investments, they are going to become bread for today and for hunger for tomorrow. Receiving and spending is becoming part of a new lifestyle, considered a “national disaster” by some Central American countries. Some describe this as a “dependency syndrome.” Monthly, thousands of families wait for the money sent by their relatives, leaving behind all attempts of looking for the solution for their problems by their own means. Without these remittances, many countries would enter a catastrophic recession.

Social and family disintegration

This disintegration is also noted in society. There is always a sensation of “save yourself” and those that stay have to aspire to leave someday. Those that are deported prepare the opportunity to return it without anyone being able to convince them otherwise. Those most serious cases are those that are expelled for some crime. In Central America, the bands of delinquents called “maras” constitute a serious problem, for they frighten the society and that has motivated a meeting between the presidents of the affected countries in search of a solution that is not easy to find.

At what cost are receiving countries favored?

The positive aspects are real and we are living and perceiving them every day, but at what or who’s cost? Is it that millions of remittances are the price of the suffering of the trip, the abandonment of their loved ones, of uprooting, of the marginalization, the solitude and the anguishes to obtain proper documentation and of a job not properly paid?

The political directives of the North are directed towards a radical control and decrease of immigration. What will be of the countries of origin the day immigration is drastically suspended, after they have been deprived of natural resources? Isn’t it best to prevent than to heal?

While there is an impoverished country, there will be immigration.

Ildefonso gutierrez azopardo is a specialist in refugees and african americans. josé martín buenadicha is affiliated with the center for the studies of migration and racism, cemira, universidad complutense de madrid, spain.