$120 Billion: The Money Central American Immigrants Have Sent Back Home

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump had a damn fine idea. Instead of waiting around for Mexico to write us a check to pay for the border wall – a scenario that even he admitted was unlikely to happen – he would consider targeting the remittance payments that immigrants send back home to their families.

Trump was talking specifically about Mexican immigrants at the time, but as we know from watching the border crisis unfold during his presidency, aliens from our immediate south are not the major problem anymore. The real crisis is coming from immigrants traveling from Central America. But the solution remains a good one – especially when you get a look at just how much these people are sending back to their home countries.

From The Daily Caller:

Foreign nationals from three Central American countries that send some of the highest numbers of illegal immigrants to the U.S. are sending back a record amount of money to their home countries.

Immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras sent back a record $120 billion in remittances this decade, according to an immigration expert who spoke to the Washington Examiner using U.N. and Latin American banking statistics. The numbers are expected to keep rising, with immigrants from these three nations having sent $17 billion in 2018 alone, and Central American bank data indicates that the trend will keeping going.

“The sums of money involved are huge, particularly as a share of GDP and personal income in the Central American countries,” Jessica Vaughan, an immigration expert with the Center for Immigration Studies, said to the Examiner. “It offers a big clue as to why these countries are giving only token efforts to stem the tide of migrants to the United States, especially El Salvador and Honduras.”

At this point in the game, Democrats in the House are so dead set in opposing everything Trump does on illegal immigration that they are unlikely to go along with any attempt to tax or otherwise confiscate a portion of these remittances. Therefore, just as Vaughan says, these countries where hundreds of thousands of immigrants are coming from will not give us the proper support.

The only solution is for Trump to turn this exact subject into a campaign trail issue, and tell the American people exactly what the problem is. Polls show that the public is far more on Trump’s side of the immigration issue than the Democrats. It’s time to expose them as the obstructionist extremists that they are.