What comes after deportation?
L
ast December, two friends, one from Guatemala and one from the United States, were chatting in a café in Guatemala City when a security guard overheard them speaking in English and struck up a conversation. He told the story of how he had migrated without documentation to Chicago from his native Guatemala. He was able to secure a job working as a cook, and earned enough to support his family back home. However, after years of building a life in the United States, the man was deported back to Guatemala. Unable to prove his work experience and stigmatized for his status as a deportado, the man had difficulty finding work until he contacted a friend of his who owned a store and gave him the job he has today. Were it not for the con-
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John Bengtson, Javier Monterroso Montenegro, Joseph Long, Sam Chase.
nection he had to the shop owner, the man would likely be unemployed. Like many deported migrant workers, he faced legal issues and social scorn that compounded the conditions that drove him to leave in the first place. What happens after a migrant worker is deported? When the topic of undocumented immigration is brought up in political discussions within the United States, much of the discourse is rooted in national self-interest, focused on concerns such as “securing the borders”, or “ensuring a path to citizenship”. Emphasis is placed on what to do with migrant workers who cross the border rather than why they are there in the first place. It is even rarer-even among circles within the United States who investigate the issue of undocumented immigration-
--that consideration is given to the prospects of those are deported when they arrive back in their country of origin. It is an issue that has been largely ignored at the cost of the livelihood of thousands of deported migrants every year; the circumstances awaiting deported workers perpetuate the very processes of poverty, inequality and unemployment they sought to escape. The process of immigration between the United States and Guatemala is a vicious cycle. To begin, Guatemala is one of the world’s most unequal nations: 11th from the bottom in Gini index. Roughly half of its people live under the poverty line, and underemployment is a constant issue. On the other hand, immigration to the United States presents supposed prospects of relatively high-paying, low-skill jobs