OPEN BORDERS PROMOTE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

By Diya Paul (New York)

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Schneider 2021), the US allocated $866 million to Central America in 2021 to foster the economic development of the region, thereby lessening the dependency on the US via migration. While government aid can increase the overall wealth of a nation, I find another type of aid to be more beneficial to Central America: remittances.

Remittances, or money sent from the citizens to families and communities back home, have significantly raised the standards of living in Central America. The Inter-American Development Bank reports that remittances are already exceeding an average of 12% share of GDP in Central American countries and growing at their fastest rate in history (Harris 2022).

On the other hand, foreign aid has historically proven to have limited effects on the economic development of these countries due to widespread corruption within the governments.

The best way to amplify this successful form of foreign aid is open borders. Open borders will lead to an immigration and remittance boom because of the easy access to the US, immediately increasing the GDP of Central America. One criticism that remittances may receive is that they are only good for individual families. However, immigrants are often willing to give back to their communities. In the documentary Sixth Section (Rivera 2003), for example, an immigrant group living in New York raised weekly donations to support community projects back in their home village. Although the outcomes were not successful in terms of economic growth, a cultural shift towards repurposing remittances into development programs could eventually improve standard of living, create more jobs within nations, and allow them to be economically independent from the US. Other ways to redistribute remittances in-