ESSAY 6
Laura Elizabeth Pohl/Bread for the World
Development Assistance: A Key Part of the
Immigration Puzzle
Development agencies are beginning to recognize the importance of
programs that ease migration pressures and assist farmers like Mario
Espinosa, shown on his land in Chiapas, Mexico.
SNAPSHOT
• Undocumented immigrants frequently leave their families behind,
go into debt to pay for difficult journeys, risk being victimized
by organized gangs or dying of dehydration in the desert while
attempting to cross the U.S. border, and are confined to lowpaying work because they do not have the legal right to work
here.
• Unauthorized immigrants, arriving from rural communities in
Mexico and Central America, are primarily healthy people in their
teens, twenties, or thirties. Yet poverty combined with lack of
economic opportunity at home lead them to see migration to the
United States as their best option.
• U.S. immigration has both domestic and international
dimensions. To make the best decisions on immigration
policies, we need to consider how the U.S. assistance going
to immigrants’ home countries can best contribute to lasting
improvements in rural economies and living conditions.
Development agencies are beginning to incorporate into their
Latin American projects the easing of pressures to migrate.
This resource, Development Works, focuses
on effective international development assistance and why Americans should support it.
At first glance, immigration may seem like a
completely unrelated topic, since people tend
to think of it mainly in terms of its impact
inside the United States. For most of us, immigration is less about international policy
than about hot-button national, state, and
local political questions. The reality is that it
is both a domestic and an international issue.
To make the best decisions as a nation on the
complex questions of immigration policy, we
need to see both dimensions. The crux of the
missing international half is “Why do immigrants leave their home country and come to
the United States?”
The common description of the United
States as a “nation of immigrants” is, of course,
quite accurate. From the time impoverished
people in England paid for a fresh start in the
American colonies by working as indentured
servants, the country has been shaped by the
waves of immigration that gave us the population mix we have today. Throughout U.S.
history, immigrants have made long, sometimes dangerous journeys here for a variety
of reasons. Some were brought here against
their will (e.g., during the Atlantic slave trade
in the 1700s), while others sought to escape
hunger (e.g., during the Irish potato famine
www.bread.org/institute
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Development Works 33