Twenty-One Billion Dollars of Homesickness

The largest export of the Republic of Guatemala is not coffee, apparel, sugar, or cardamom. It is labour, shipped north, and the proceeds return twelve times a year in amounts that the Banco de Guatemala records to the dollar and the Congress discusses to the minute.

Twenty-one and a half billion dollars in the last twelve months.† More than every container that left Puerto Quetzal and Santo Tomás combined. Enough to cover the trade deficit, steady the quetzal, and fund the consumption of some two million households. An industry of this size elsewhere would have a ministry, a lobby, and a chapter in every economics textbook. Here it has a line in the balance of payments and a Western Union on every corner.

We treat remittances as weather. They are infrastructure.

What is examined too little is the price. Each dollar arrives net of a fee, a spread, and a family. The fee is falling; the spread is not; the family does not appear in any statistic. And the macroeconomic bargain — a strong quetzal that makes imports cheap and exports dear — is a subsidy from the diaspora to the importer, paid without a vote.

We do not propose to reduce the flow. We propose to count it properly, tax it never, and ask what a country does with its largest industry when that industry is homesickness.

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† Sample figures; not independently verified.