Another Embarrassing Statistic

Yesterday, with the arrival of three flights that raised the number of deportees to 50,234, the number of deportees from the United States surpassed 50,000. This is one of the most shameful pieces of information, especially because it [deportation] has become an infamous practice against a group of human beings who are just trying to change the deplorable conditions in their lives, which they do not only look upon frustrated, but as something through which they can start a new journey.

Since 2007, when the deportations reached 23,062, this figure has not stopped its steady growth. With the deportations registered yesterday, they have far surpassed the initial percentages of 10 percent; they are now at 25 percent, compared with just the previous year, when 40,647 people were deported from that country, but that doubles with a comfortable lead when compared with the information from six years ago, when this started, with only Guatemalans being counted.

If we just add up the deportations of the last three years, we get the unimaginable quantity of almost 120,000 Guatemalans thrown out of the United States. This is in line with the hardening of immigration policies since Barack Obama assumed that country’s presidency, as well as the rigidity of the legislation that drove the Republican Party, whose representatives had, for the most part, become reluctant to discuss immigration reform to give legal status to millions of persons without documents.

Nor should it be forgotten that, along with the hardening of immigration measures, a shameful business that survives on capturing and imprisoning undocumented aliens has grown in that country, as some American mass media have recently reported: These have shown that the privatization and supplying of prisons has become a juicy enterprise for many businesses, which have received profitable benefits from constructing prisons to rent and lock up anyone who does not have legal documents.

On both sides of the border, the migration of Guatemalans has always been a multibillion dollar business each year. The nightmare starts here, when those who wish to escape their misery get into unimaginable debt with loan sharks, who remain with the last of their belongings in exchange for a handful of quetzals, all of which gets complicated when the search for a dream turns into a horrendous nightmare when they are deported because they must face a hostile outlook in their own homeland.

In the face of such impactful drama, it is pathetic that politicians are so inapt that they appear oblivious to the drama affecting millions of people, without taking discerning actions to look for solutions that may be beneficial to both nations, especially when the origin of the problem is the healthy intent to change — however small a part of it, it may nevertheless be — the very poor conditions of life that condemn these people to levels of intolerable poverty and that call out for reform.