Remittances as Rents in a Guatemalan Town: Debt, Asylum, the U.S. Job Market, and Vulnerability to Human Trafficking

• Author: David Stoll
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211061880
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Other Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211061880

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 168–185

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211061880

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

168

Remittances as Rents in a Guatemalan Town

Debt, Asylum, the U.S. Job Market, and Vulnerability to

Human Trafficking

by

David Stoll

Exporting labor to the United States has become the principal industry of Guatemala,

El Salvador, and Honduras. Central Americans have been moving to the United States in

large numbers since the 1980s, but how they gain entry has shifted thanks to the interplay

between the migration industry and border enforcement. Many Guatemalans, Hondurans,

and Salvadorans are paying smugglers to deliver them to U.S. border agents so they can

apply for asylum. The Trump administration’s harsh reactions have energized asylum

advocates, who argue that applicants are fleeing dislocation by neoliberal capitalism.

Migrant households in the Ixil Maya municipio of Nebaj, Guatemala, express an optimis-

tic interpretation of this situation that they call their American Dream. Their wish for

high wages in the United States can be seen as the latest in a series of “hope machines”

that interpret disadvantageous relations of exchange as the path to a better future. Such

hopes are based on the irrefutable buying power of the dollar, but migrant remittances to

their families conceal the extraction of rents. U.S. asylum advocates understandably stress

that the most important challenge facing irregular immigrants is their legal status.

However, with or without legal status, the underlying issue for migrants will continue to

be their position in the U.S. job market, because this generates household indebtedness that

increases vulnerability to human trafficking.

La exportación de mano de obra a los Estados Unidos se ha convertido en la principal

industria de Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras. Los centroamericanos se han estado

mudando a los Estados Unidos en grandes cantidades desde la década de 1980, pero la

forma en la que obtienen la entrada ha cambiado gracias a la interacción entre la industria

de la migración y la industria de la deportación. Muchos guatemaltecos, hondureños y

salvadoreños pagan a coyotes para que los entreguen a agentes fronterizos de Estados

Unidos, pudiendo así puedan solicitar asilo. Las duras reacciones de la administración

Trump han energizado a los defensores del asilo, quienes argumentan que los solicitantes

están huyendo de la dislocación causada por el capitalismo neoliberal. Los migrantes en el

municipio ixil maya de Nebaj, Guatemala, tienen una interpretación optimista de esta

situación, la cual llaman su Sueño americano. Su deseo de salarios altos en Los Estados

Unidos puede ser visto como la última en una serie de “máquinas de esperanza” que

interpretan las desventajosas relaciones de intercambio como el camino hacia un futuro

mejor. Dichas esperanzas se basan en el irrefutable poder adquisitivo del dólar, pero las

remesas de los migrantes a sus familias ocultan la extracción de rentas. Los defensores del

asilo en Estados Unidos enfatizan, comprensiblemente, que el desafío más importante que

enfrentan los inmigrantes irregulares es su estatus legal. Sin embargo, con o sin estatus

David Stoll teaches anthropology at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is the author of El Norte

or Bust! How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town

(2012).

1061880LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211061880Latin American PerspectivesStoll / Remittances as Rents in Guatemala

research-article2021

Stoll / REMITTANCES AS RENTS IN GUATEMALA 169

legal, el problema subyacente para los migrantes seguirá siendo su posición en el mercado

laboral estadunidense, ya que esto genera el endeudamiento de los hogares e incrementa

su vulnerabilidad a la trata de personas.

Keywords: Migrants, Remittances, Border enforcement, Asylum advocacy, Human

trafficking, Guatemala

In the first eight months of fiscal year 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland

Security arrested 1.8 percent of the population of Honduras, 1.3 percent of the

population of Guatemala, and .9 percent of the population of El Salvador. Of

the 607,774 persons from these countries taken into custody at the U.S.-Mexican

border for all of 2019, 81 percent were either family units or minors (Nowrasteh,

2019). According to asylum advocates, many were refugees fleeing from mur-

derous street gangs, corrupt police, domestic violence, climate change, and

neoliberal capitalism. Migrants themselves tell of harrowing experiences, but

their most common theme is economic—that they have no hope of a livelihood

except in the United States. If they are fleeing neoliberal capitalism, then they

are fleeing from its periphery to its core, and their remittances have become

crucial to sustaining the neoliberal model. In 2018, Guatemala, El Salvador, and

Honduras received a total of US$19.5 billion in remittances, mainly from the

United States. From all their other exports combined—agricultural, extractive,

and manufacturing—they received a total of US$20.1 billion (Dialogue, 2019;

Workman, 2019). Exporting labor to the United States has become Central

America’s principal industry.

In this state of dependency, migration scholars argue, the U.S.-Mexican bor-

der has become a “state of exception” in which the two governments routinely

violate the rights of undocumented border crossers and residents (De Leon,

2015: 27–28; Diaz-Barriga and Dorsey, 2015). Thus, for example, border harden-

ing diverts migrants to dangerous terrain where some 400 die each year

(Romero and Dickerson, 2019). Yet if this is a state of exception, migrants hope

that it will be their corridor to higher wages and social entitlements. In the

Guatemalan town where I interview migrants, many take out large loans to pay

smugglers to deliver them to U.S. border agents. As of 2019, despite the frantic

blockades of the Trump administration, many Nebaj migrants still seemed to

be winning quick release into the U.S. labor market.

In this essay, I will analyze migration from the Guatemalan municipio of

Nebaj as the latest in a series of “hope machines” guiding the responses of

Nebajenses to the hardships and opportunities of neoliberal capitalism. I derive

the idea of the hope machine from three sources. The first is James Ferguson’s

(1994) “anti-politics machine,” a term that he applied to the international devel-

opment apparatus. The second is Edward Fischer and Peter Benson’s (2006)

ethnography of the social production of desire, including the pervasive aspira-

tion of Mayan peasants to superar (overcome adversity and prosper). The third

is Daniel Reichman’s (2011) ethnography of a Honduran coffee-producing

town and how it has redefined itself in terms of the competing moral projects

of social justice, evangelical Protestantism, and migration to the United States.