Immigration's Impact on El Salvador by Robert Inglis Robert volunteered in El Salvador during the summer of 2005 as part of Yale's Reach Out Program.

The neighbors must have known something was up when Maria started making tamales - hundreds of them, far more than her family could eat, even with her sister and mother and grandparents visiting for the weekend. They must have grown even more suspicious when instead of selling the extra tamales, she started giving them away, sending her daughters around their village in southeastern El Salvador with full plastic grocery bags dangling from their bike handles. A few of her closest friends found out for sure when she starting giving them more valuable things, like her husband's chainsaw, worth several months of peasant's labor: she was leaving for America, and she wasn't coming back.

Still, the vast majority of the people that knew Maria didn't get to say goodbye to her before she left in the middle of the night to start her journey north. Even with a reputable smuggler, a would-be illegal immigrant to the US stands a reasonable chance of being caught and deported, and there's a stigma in El Salvador against those who try to leave but fail. For this reason, even the most long-term of departures are almost always hasty and secret, like Maria's. One day the emigrants are in their home villages, carrying out their ordinary lives; the next day they're gone.

The world of undocumented migration is a shadowy one, particularly for those of us who are native-born Americans. Most of us, for reasons of language and class barriers, don't often get to talk with the "illegals" who mop our floors and build our houses and pick our vegetables. But for all we don't know about immigrants' experiences once they get to America, we know even less about what their lives were like before they came.

I spent eight weeks in El Salvador this past summer, most of it in a small village called San Hilario in the country's rural southeast. I went there on a Yale fellowship with the purpose of teaching English and history to a group of high-school kids. But I also hoped, while there, to learn something about immigration from the viewpoint of those on the other side of the border fence - to find out how people make the decision to migrate, and what effects this decision has on the families and communities they live behind.

It turns out I'd come to the right place. El Salvador is a tiny country of about 6.7 million residents, but there are more than two million Salvadorans living in the United States. Many of them immigrated in the 1980's, during the country's brutal decade-long civil war. But more are leaving every day, pushed by grinding poverty and pulled by the promise of steady low-end jobs in the United States.

The region I was in, hard-hit by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and a powerful earthquake in 2001, has seen particularly high levels of emigration in recent years. Which meant that it provided me a unique window into immigrant-sending Latin America, a place to see the home-country effects of immigration in their most concentrated form.

Those effects, I discovered, are decidedly mixed. On the one hand, emigration has been an economic boon to the most desperately poor Salvadorans. El Salvador received more than five billion dollars of remittances last year, a figure that represents an astonishing 16% of its GDP. The majority of these remittances were small transfers between family members, used by the recipients to pay for basic needs such as food, clothing and healthcare. As a source of foreign aid, remittances dwarf the $125 million that El Salvador received in 2004 in official development assistance. But on the other hand, mass emigration splits up families and disrupts close-knit communities - communities like the village a few miles from where I was staying that cared so much about staying together that during the civil war it fled to Panama as one several-hundred-person group. There's a tearing of the social fabric that results when the all the best and brightest twenty-and-thirty-somethings have gone away, and the ambition of every high school student is to follow them.

Of course, El Salvador isn't the only country affected by this great untracked movement of people. Latin American immigration, and what to do about it, is one of the hottest political issues in the United States today. There are currently about 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States - more than three percent of the country's total population. Some critics say these immigrants take jobs from American citizens, especially those who are poor and unskilled. Others say they provide low-price labor that is necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy.

For the past ten years, American politicians on both sides of the debate have sought to reduce illegal immigration through stricter border enforcement. Since 1994, when President Clinton announced get-tough Operation Gatekeeper, the number of Border Patrol agents has more than doubled and the agency's funding has more than quadrupled, to $6.7 billion in President Bush's proposed FY 2006 budget. Much of this money has gone into building high-security fences in formerly-popular urban crossing zones like El Paso and San Diego.

But illegal immigration, by all accounts, has not gone down. Instead, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that the number of illegal southwest border crossings increased from 260,000 a year in the early 1990s to 485,000 in 2004. Illegal traffic has simply been redirected away from major population centers into remote and hard-to-police areas like the Arizona desert.

What this means is that it's now much more dangerous to sneak across the border. Each year, several hundred would-be immigrants die out in the wilderness from heatstroke and dehydration, a total of more than two thousand since the Border Patrol started counting in 1998. And the financial cost of a border crossing has risen as well. Before the big crackdown of the 1990s, the services of a coyote, or immigrant smuggler, cost about $300. And the trip was easy enough that many immigrants were able to bypass the coyotes altogether and make the trip on their own. Now it's nearly impossible to cross without the aid of a professional, and the price has skyrocketed to more than $2,500 for the trip between northern Mexico and the US.

But for Salvadorans, and those from other nations in Central America, the cost is much higher. Responding to US pressure, Mexico has tightened its own immigration policies, which means that Central American immigrants must now pay to be smuggled from Guatemala into southern Mexico, transported in secret across the country to the north, and finally smuggled into the US. The going rate for this journey, according to those I interviewed, is $6,500-$7,000. That's more than El Salvador's GDP per capita, and far more than a year's wages for the poor farmers that I lived with over the summer.

I was pretty well-versed in the big-picture economics of immigration - rural poverty, America's need for service workers, remittances, even the smuggling industry - before I left home. But it wasn't until after I'd been in El Salvador three weeks that I really started to understand how these economic factors - and the US policies that shape them - play out in the lives and life decisions of rural Central Americans. The NGO I was working for had stationed two other college-age volunteers in Ciudad Romero, a small village about an hour's journey from where I was living. One day when I was visiting Romero to use the computers at the local school, I got to talking with them about how I wanted to find out more about immigration. One of them told me that she was living with a woman whose husband had gone to the United States. She invited me to come over for dinner so that I could ask the family some questions about their experience. I accepted her offer.

From the moment I showed up at their front gate a few days later, I could tell I was visiting a family that was getting money from abroad. For starters, it was an actual gate, in a chain link fence, rather than the normal loose section in a two-strand barbed wire perimeter. On the other side of the swept dirt yard sat the house, made of cinder blocks like the rest of the houses in Romero, but with four rooms rather than the usual two. One of the rooms was a modern kitchen with a gas stove, a microwave, and an old refrigerator. This, in a hot country where most peasant women still cook noonday meals over open fires.

We ate dinner quickly and cleared the kitchen table to put my tape recorder on it. Then we sat down to start the interview: me and the two other volunteers across from the woman, Isabel, and her two children, Carlos and Lucia. I asked Isabel a few preliminary questions about her husband: when he had first left, when he had last come back, where he was, what kind of work he had. Then, wanting to finish with the kids first so that they could leave, I asked them to tell me about talking on the phone with their dad and their memories of his trips home. They didn't answer me, but Isabel volunteered that Lucia - who's ten - is always talkative when her dad calls, while Carlos - a somewhat awkward thirteen-year-old - never says anything except "si" or "no."

Wanting to coax something out of the kids, I asked them if they'd like to go live with their dad in the States one day. Then I noticed that Carlos had put his head down on the table. I paused for a moment. I couldn't see his face, but I could hear his breathing convulsed by muffled sobs. Soon his mom and sister had their heads on the table, too. The other volunteers and I sat there, silent. Then we got up, switched off the tape player, and left. Later that evening, we brought the kids a few quarter's worth of cookies from the corner store. I guess we figured it was something.

The next day I went to talk with Anna Von Essen, a former long-term volunteer in Ciudad Romero who had come back for a couple-week visit. She's a good friend of Isabel, and she helped fill in the rest of the story. Isabel's husband, Anna told me, left for the United States in 1997. And while he called every week and sent money regularly, for a long time he didn't come back. It turns out that he had fallen in love with another woman - a Cuban immigrant - and had several children with her in the US. Isabel discovered the affair last year, prompting him to return to El Salvador in a last-ditch attempt to mend their relationship. They fought constantly, and after five months he left again. Anna told me that Isabel's story is a common one. Ever since the toughening of US immigration enforcement in the mid-90s, the high price of a coyote and the virtual necessity of using one have made it economically infeasible to cross the border more than once every two or three years. Migrant labor has always involved the separation of families, but now those families are being separated for longer periods than ever before.

Maria's family is the perfect example. Her husband went to the US for the first time in 2001. He found good employment at a landscaping company in Atlanta, and in September of 2003, he paid for her to come join him. She liked it there, and together they decided to move to the States for good. They returned to El Salvador at the end of 2004 to tidy up affairs and say permanent goodbyes. He left after a few months; Maria followed him in July of this past summer. For now they've left their two daughters with Maria's mother-in-law, but in a year they hope to have enough money to pay for their passage with a "secure coyote" that specializes in smuggling unaccompanied children.

I interviewed Maria the night before she left. She seemed confident in the choice she had made. "I love El Salvador," she said, "but there are no opportunities. There are no jobs. There are no places to work. There is nothing left for us to do but immigrate." She told me that she wants her children to go to school in the United States so that they can learn English. She said that she hoped to one day become an American citizen herself. Under current policy that's impossible, unless she returns to El Salvador and goes to the back of a fifteen-year green card line. But I couldn't bring myself to correct her. Already it sounded like she was more patriotic toward her adopted country than I was. Who was I to puncture her enthusiasm for her new home?

Besides, there's always the outside chance that the US could carry out an amnesty program. And when it comes to immigration, there are plenty of Salvadorans willing to hang their hopes on outside chances. People like Oscar, my neighbor in San Hilario, who tried last November to make it to the US without a coyote. He got as far as southern Mexico before he was caught and deported. He still doesn't have enough money to pay a smuggler, but he plans on trying again until he makes it. With a three-acre cornfield the main source of income for him, his wife and their three kids, he doesn't have much in the way of options. Or Cristina, Oscar's next-door neighbor, a nineteen-year-old who dreams of becoming a journalist. She works seven days a week as a waitress at a brand-new roadside restaurant. She's waiting and hoping for her cousins in Boston to send her money so that she can make the journey to join them. But during the two months I spent in San Hilario, she kept revising her estimated date of departure further and further into the future. First it was the end of the summer, then October, then finally she said she just wasn't sure.

Only a few times in El Salvador did I come across people who thought that going to the United States was a bad idea. I met one of them, a San Hilario neighbor named Hector, when I walked by his house and noticed that he was watching a Jean Claude Van Damme movie in English. When I stopped in to ask about it, he told me that Jean Claude Van Damme was his favorite actor, and while he was mostly just watching for the fight scenes, he could understand most of the dialogue as well. I asked him how he learned English. He said that he had spent nine years in the United States, but he had come home recently and he wasn't going back. I knew then that I had to do an interview.

It turns out that Hector left El Salvador for New York in 1997, and with the exception of two short trips home stayed there until April of 2005. He progressed from being a day laborer to working as a foreman on a concrete foundation-pouring team. But he missed his wife and children, and figured it was neither safe nor practical to bring them to live with him. Instead, he decided to go back. "I can make twenty dollars an hour in the United States," he told me. "Twenty dollars an hour is a good wage. But it's not so important to me that I make good money. What's more important is that I get to see my children." He pointed across the room to his two teenage daughters and his one three-year-old son. "I can't just send money and hope that all will be well with my children, that they will have a good life back here. I want to see them, hear them when they say 'Papá.' That's the most beautiful thing you can hear, when your children say 'Papá' to you."

But that's easy for Hector to say. He's used the money he made as a New York construction worker to buy fields and plant fruit trees and build himself a relatively sturdy house. His prospects won't be so bad if he stays in San Hilario. There are others, like Oscar, who don't have the option of both living with their families and adequately supporting them. As long as they don't have that option, there will be families divided by the sheer distance between El Salvador and jobs in "The North." As long as US policy doesn't change, they will also be divided by miles of trackless desert and a human-proof border fence.

Over the course of two months in El Salvador and number of conversations with those who were thinking about immigrating, the one thing I never got good at was figuring out when someone was going to leave before I got another chance to talk with them. Which means that in retrospect there are a couple of people that I wish I had asked more questions of before they headed north, several conversations that I wish I had written down. One of these was my conversation with Reyna, the sister of the man whose family I was living with. Her thirteen-year-old son, Nelson, had invited me on a trip to the mountains with the youth group from their Seventh-Day Adventist church. Because they lived in a different town, and because the trip was leaving in the early morning, I spent the night before at their house.

Nelson took the chance to show me his weight set, a collection of old metal bars with lumps of concrete that he had molded onto the ends. He asked me for help with English homework. We finished quickly, but he informed me that he wanted to learn more. We discovered that we both had Bibles with us, mine in English, his in Spanish. So we read Proverbs together. He would read a verse in Spanish, I would read it in English, and then I would comment on the translation.

Later that evening I got to talking with Reyna. She told me about the difficulty, after her husband left her a few years ago, of supporting Martin and his five-year-old brother. She told me she had friends who were encouraging her to immigrate. She asked me what I knew about New Jersey. I told her that if she wanted to go there, she shouldn't pay the extra thousand dollars that coyotes charge to ferry people to the Northeast, but instead take a Greyhound bus from Texas. It sounded like long-term planning, so I was as surprised as my host father when a few weeks later we got a call from his parents saying that Reyna had gone to the US and left her children with them.
Looking back, I remember how, after talking with his mother, I asked Nelson if he too would like to one day live in America. "I hope to," he said, "It is the dream of every Salvadoran to go to the United States."

And now Nelson, like so many other Salvadorans, has been left behind with only that dream.

Sept 2005. Robert Inglis.

All photos by Robert Inglis.