The Honduran migrants chase a more reachable American dream, so as to be able to chase a more unreachable Honduran dream

Sir, Jude Webber writes: The scope of Wilson Flores’ American dream — to send money home to his mother and younger siblings, and eventually to go back to Honduras and open a shop — is modest.” “Honduran migrants chase the American dream” October 31.

It is a sad dream. Even if Flores manages to get into America and get a job, the money he will send home to his mother and younger siblings, will also be helping to finance the permanence in power of the system that made him migrate in the first place, and so he might never be able to go back and realize his Honduran dream.

I was an Executive Director at the World Bank, 2002-04, representing, among other, Honduras. There I did what I could to remind everyone that when compared to the remittances sent home by the Central-American migrants, all other support by donors and multilateral institutions were peanuts. In fact I repeated whenever I could that for instance what the Honduran migrants earned gross in the US, was more than the GDP of Honduras, which should make you wonder sometimes where the real Honduras is.

And I protested loudly when by means of diaspora bonds many tried to capture even more of the migrants’ savings, to finance their governments even more. 

On top of it all, those Honduras migrants had/have much less influence in their homeland than foreigners…and so I frequently argued “No remittances Without Representation.” 

If host nations, like the United States wanted to reduce the flow of migrants, one way positive way would be to help the migrants gain political power in their homelands, so as to help them create the conditions that could allow them to return… and live their Honduran dream. As an absolute minimum the migrants should have a sizable representation in their respective congresses or parliaments.

Down the line, if a majority of the citizens of a nation have migrated, like 51%, and if they suddenly wanted to take back their country by democratic powers, or even with force, would that be classified as foreign intervention, as an intromission into a sovereign’s domains?

Sir, more than a decade later, these sincere concerns I had, are sadly not longer just about my friends from Honduras or El Salvador, they are much closer home; they are about my landsmen the Venezuelans. For a starter what would now be happening in Venezuela, without family remittances?

@PerKurowski