No remittances without representation!

The June 8 news article "In Guatemala, Harris offers stern words on corruption" reported extensively on Vice President Harris's travel to Guatemala, where the United States, by offering financial cooperation, hopes to reduce the flow of illegal migration from Central America and stimulate better behaviors, e.g., less corruption.

Though those financial contributions are indeed important, they are peanuts when compared with the remittances sent home by the migrant workers. The reality is that what the migrant workers from many Central American nations earn abroad is often much more than the gross domestic product of their home countries. The sad reality is that their remittances help to keep in power those ineffective governments that made them immigrate and that keeps them from going home.

If the United States really wants to help, then look to politically empower as much as possible those migrants in their homelands. For instance, should they not have an important direct representation in their respective congresses? No remittances without representation!

http://theamericanunion.blogspot.com/

A letter published in the Washington Post 

No remittances without representation!

 The June 8 news article "In Guatemala, Harris offers stern words on corruption" reported extensively on Vice President Harris's travel to Guatemala, where the United States, by offering financial cooperation, hopes to reduce the flow of illegal migration from Central America and stimulate better behaviors, e.g., less corruption.

Though those financial contributions are indeed important, they are peanuts when compared with the remittances sent home by the migrant workers. The reality is that what the migrant workers from many Central American nations earn abroad is often much more than the gross domestic product of their home countries. The sad reality is that their remittances help to keep in power those ineffective governments that made them immigrate and that keeps them from going home.

If the United States really wants to help, then look to politically empower as much as possible those migrants in their homelands. For instance, should they not have an important direct representation in their respective congresses? No remittances without representation!

http://theamericanunion.blogspot.com/2021/06/no-remittances-without-representation.html

Remittance fees: The tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg

The remittances are to migration like the part of the cash dividends from corporations that you send to your grandmother and children are to the economy… just the tip of the tip of the iceberg!

Of course the cost of sending those remittances can only be the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

There has been an incredible fixation by many institutions with the fees charged by the banks for the service of making the remittances. Yes, of course it is good that these fees become more competitive but it is almost laughable to think about all the resources used up in analyzing this very minor issue in an immigrant’s reality.

Just the money spent on communicating by telephone with home, or buying yourself over the borders, or the costs derived from not having a driver license and living in cramp living quarters, surpasses by far the sum of all the fees paid to the banks. So please stop talking so much about the fees, and help the immigrants to make more money instead… with which they would happily pay even higher fees to the banks, if so asked. Talk about shortsightedness!

That is what I said over and over while I was an ED at the World Bank; and that is what I wrote in my book Voice and Noise; and that is what I kept on saying thereafter in all the many conferences on remittances that I have assisted to… to the extent that I now almost feel embarrassed for them.

Yet, years later, I still have to be asking: How many more millions in research, conferences and publications are the development institutions to waste on this really silly and minor aspect of the migration issue?

Please help the migrants make more money instead!

The current analysis of the remittances takes the eyes away from much bigger issues

The press announces that “Migrants send home $62bn to Latin America and Caribbean” and the commentaries that generally follow evidence how much, by focusing the attention on the remittances as such and which could in fact be compared to the cash dividends of the corporate world, the development banks might be missing so much of the real story.

If these remittances represent 15% of what the migrants earn then the real underlying economic activity is worth more than $420bn, and a country such as El Salvador has just as much GNP produced by its emigrants abroad than the GDP produced in el Salvador; and who is to argue that someone from El Salvador is less El Salvadoran just because he works abroad.

This calculation does also evidence that way too much detailed and expensive attention has been given to the analysis of what channels are used for the remittances, and the costs of these transfers. Frankly, in my book, this amounts almost to a lack of respect for the migrants since indeed these transfers do certainly represent the least of their thousands of problems and hardships.

Let us hope the development agencies will soon start looking at the real issues, such as how to increase the earning potential of these millions of sacrificed migrants; such as helping in the development of temporary migrant worker programs that satisfy the interests and meet the concerns of all parties; and to study whether they migrants could be better off reinvesting their savings in their own and their children’s educations instead of perhaps only ending up providing temporary support to their ineffective national governments who most probably were the main cause of why they had to emigrate in the first place; and to the rate of that heart-drain by which they might start to forget their homeland and how to slow it down.

Now, while analyzing all these issues, let us please never forget that all these remittances are of a very private nature; no different from any money a son could send his mother in a developed country; and so we need all to be extremely respectful of that.

The true nature of remittances

Mr. Chairman, I see references over and over again to the remittances of foreign workers in developed countries back to their not-so-developed homelands and so I feel once again compelled to remind my colleagues about the true nature of these flows. The remittances come from very private earnings.

Picture yourself working in a foreign country for less than minimum wages, alone, perhaps sleeping in lousy quarters, not understanding all that they say to you, and still you take a substantial part of your earnings and send them home. That’s what these remittances are all about. They are quite close to being like sacred religious donations.

Please do not confuse these flows with other financial flows. Do not even think of taxing them or assisting third parties to lay their hands on them. Be extremely careful. Do I exaggerate? I hope so but I have already read in World Bank publications about the securitizing these flows! Come on!

Family Remittances

In recent publications of the World Bank and other multilateral organizations, there has been emphasis on the significance of family remittances for many developing countries, such as El Salvador, where these remittances reached $1,900 million dollars in 2001. This phenomenon has many bankers scrambled, trying to find out ways to attract part of the financial gains that such an influx represents, ranging from transfer services to the issuance of bonds backed by the projections of future remittances.

Likewise, they are studying the impact on a poor country when hundreds of thousands of its workers could be sent to developed countries on a temporary visa, where they could have access to greater remunerations which could even have a greater economic potential than the long-promised agricultural openness and liberalization.

After allowing their markets to be captured by external suppliers, after allowing free flow of resources, after forcing themselves to respect foreign income sources, such as intellectual property rights and patents, and finally, after many of its educated professionals have been captured by better economic gains somewhere else, poor countries, it would seem, have all the reasons to request greater access to global markets for their unskilled workforce.

Nevertheless, during our technical discussions, we should not forget the human aspect of migration, with the enormous incurred sacrifices and the generosity with which immigrants share their income with family members who were left behind. It has been more than 150 years since big groups of Europeans had to emigrate due to famine in their countries, among other reasons. They left their homes knowing that they would not see their parents, siblings, and everything they had known and cherished in their life. Even though today’s emigrants have in general greater possibilities of returning to their home countries, their vicissitudes are not necessarily negligible, since they are frequently victims of rejection and marginalization.

In this sense, all that is left to do is to stand in awe while observing the significant amount of transfers that Salvadorian emigrants, among many others, send to their homes nowadays. These are only one example of family values, traditions, and solidarity that our countries still possess. They might be poor in monetary terms, but thank God these countries are rich in human, family values.

From El Universal, Caracas, August 2003 

http://theamericanunion.blogspot.com/2003/08/family-remittances.html