Hard Times in the Highlands: Migration & COVID-19
As within most of the communities we work with, migration out of Chiucutama, Guatemala, to the United States is common. Chiucutama’s community leader, Miguel, recently spoke with us about 12 different cases of migration.
This community struggles with consistent and clean water access, food security, and lacks an economic infrastructure to effectively support itself. Community members, when faced with this lack of access to the resources needed for a healthy and stable life, look to migration as a last-resort option. However, the decision to leave behind family and the only community they’ve ever known is actually the easy part of the process. The next steps include paying around 12,000 dollars to a coyote, or smuggler, to help them cross the border. This payment indebts both the individual crossing the border and their family back at home for the next several years.
Paying off this debt is an overwhelming and at times insurmountable hurdle in the best of times, but COVID-19 has made it nearly impossible for many families. Migrants come to the US expecting to take on work and gradually pay off their debt over several years, but unemployment related to COVID-19 has been highest among Latino and immigrant populations, according to Salud America. Furthermore, according to Quartz, three in four non-citizen immigrants work in industries that lost jobs in March, with the largest industry being accommodation and food services. The direness of this situation is only intensified by the fact that if a migrant can find work, they are more likely to be placed in a job where they are exposed to COVID-19 and are also unlikely to have health insurance, according to NPR.
Beyond paying off their debt, many Guatemalan migrants now cannot afford to send remittances back to their families. Remittances are sums of money sent by a migrant or immigrant back to their family in their home country, and they are a major contributor to the Guatemalan economy. In 2017, remittances from the United States accounted for 10% of Guatemala’s GDP according to the Migration Policy Institute. In Indigenous towns where all adults contribute financially to projects that support the community (such as water pumps or paving a road), this loss of income disrupts a delicate equilibrium and halts further development.
At Highland Support Project, we are concerned as to how Indigenous families will continue to pay off migration debts if remittances are unavailable due to COVID-19. However, we also aim to keep our scope wide enough to focus on what is pushing Guatemalan people to leave home in the first place. We understand the desire to leave a village where it is an uphill battle just to have a healthy quality of life and feed your family. With that in mind, we want to not just address the migrants as a result of the problem, but look at the problem itself.
Our mission is: “HSP fosters agency and empowers indigenous communities by providing opportunities for education, community organization, supporting social entrepreneurs, and addressing health and poverty in the face of shifting political arenas and environmental changes.” We don’t want to provide temporary projects that create dependence on our aid, but long-term solutions that can be sustained independently by these communities. COVID-19 in some ways is just the latest challenge to their sociopolitical environment, and we are actively working to adapt our projects to help communities come out stronger.
