Immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras sent back a record $120 billion in remittances in a decade. In 2018 alone, some $17 billion was sent and Central American bank data indicates that the trend will continue.
An immigration expert who spoke to the Washington Examiner using UN and Latin American banking statistics, expect the numbers to keep rising.
The enormous amount linked to the remittances play a significant role in the Central American economies. It has also acted as an incentive for such governments to not seek reform.
“The sums of money involved are huge, particularly as a share of GDP and personal income in the Central American countries,” says an immigration expert with the Center for Immigration Studies. “It offers a big clue as to why these countries are giving only token efforts to stem the tide of migrants to the United States, especially El Salvador and Honduras.”
Remittances to Honduras and El Salvador make up over 20 percent of their economies, while over 90 percent of remittances sent to these countries come from the US.
One proposal that was rejected by the US Congress would have taxed these payments at seven percent. If such a tax was levied on the $138 billion all immigrants sent in remittances in 2016, the revenue could fund President Donald Trump’s border wall within three years’ time.
Moreover, a Border Patrol Chief told a congressional committee in February, said the influx of Central American migrants and unaccompanied children has strained the agency’s resources.
The American Bar Association has warned of a looming “crisis” over the unprecedented surge in the number of immigration cases clogging up courts. In a new 176-page report, the ABA said that the backlog in immigration courts was already over 1 million.
“Today the immigration courts are facing an existential crisis. In light of the fundamentally changed nature of the threat to the immigration court system, the overall conclusion … is that the current system is irredeemably dysfunctional and on the brink of collapse,” said the report.