Why so many make the journey to U.S.

Twenty-five years ago my wife helped start a program in El Salvador to keep promising children from desperately poor families in school. It has had its ups and downs, but she and a handful of dedicated “Friends of the Children of El Salvador” (FOCES) have managed to preserve the lifeline of hope this program represents.

Through the years the families of over 100 elementary and high school age Salvadoran kids have received small monthly support stipends in return for not pulling their children out of school to go to work to help keep the family afloat financially. Dozens have finished high school, and several have completed work on college degrees, while 42 others are currently in the pipeline.

It doesn’t always work; kids have dropped out of the program because their families decided the earnings of the child in a cane field, a fishing boat or selling coconuts were needed more than the $70 monthly FOCES stipend. Others stopped going to school because gang threats or intimidation made it too dangerous to continue.

And, occasionally, despite the goal to help these students remain in their home country after graduation, there have been a few becarios — scholarship recipients — or parents or siblings who made the perilous choice of “heading al Norte” and entering the U.S. without documents.

This August, a delegation of eight FOCES supporters spent a week with the becarios in San Salvador and in their villages in the Department of La Paz along the coast in the middle of the sugar cane growing region. We were there to provide some emotional and educational support to this next generation of Salvadoran community leaders and their parents, as well as to have our own commitment to this program re-stoked.

As usual, we received much more than we gave. The seeds of hope planted among Salvadoran campesinos and watered by the blood of so many Salvadoran martyrs continue to bear fruit — and to inspire us as well as the poor they championed. As St. Oscar Romero said, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.” And he was right. But the obstacles they face are enormous.

I’d like to share what I learned about the pressure for Salvadorans to leave their homes and families and start walking toward the United States, despite all the evidence that few make it. They know the bleak prospects yet decide to take the risky bet. Now that I understand better what their life is like, I don’t know I wouldn’t make the same choice.

Violence from gangs is perhaps the easiest obstacle to understand. The police, courts and institutions are corrupt, so justice is a rare commodity. Survival means that paying the weekly “insurance” payments gangs demand is wise, even if the family goes hungry as a result.

But just as vicious are the other predators they face: corporate agribusiness owners of the cane fields are steadily mechanizing cane cutting, eliminating the most dependable seasonal jobs; their use of RoundUp in the cane fields causes kidney disease in epidemic proportions; the two-year drought brought about by global warming has again left failed corn crops and dropped water levels in wells.

Even when they choose to leave, preying on the poor doesn’t end: the surest way to negotiate the trip north is to hire a skilled coyote. But the going rate now is as much as $7,000 per person. For families that earn $500 a month at most, $7,000 is unimaginable. There are two ways to come up with it: a relative in the United States might send it — rare — or you mortgage your land and house to a bank if your credit is good, but more commonly to a money lender.

The theory is you pay off the note with earnings when you get to the U.S. The reality is that asylum seekers aren’t allowed to work and undocumented border crossers are subject to deportation. In both cases the land and house, the family’s only asset, is lost forever.

The next time someone asks, “Why do so many of these immigrants keep coming?” let them know the vast majority are being squeezed out by violence, poverty, the global climate crisis and corrupt governmental and economic systems that no longer need them or their labor. I’d leave, too.