How much in foreign aid are we giving these countries and what are they doing with it? Time to start using the power of the purse and cut off the politician pocket filling foreign aid to these corrupt governments.

Remittance Surge Indicator Of Unlivable Conditions


05/15/2015 06:58 PM ET

A man leaves a Western Union agency in Havana, Cuba. AP View Enlarged Image

Immigration: The IDB reports a record-high $65 billion in remittances to Latin America in 2014. It's a lagging indicator of the border surge. But it's a leading indicator for how Latin states fail to make their nations livable.

Based on the chirpy tone of the Inter-American Development Bank's latest report, you'd think that the record-high $65.4 billion in remittances received in Latin America and the Caribbean this year, the bulk of which went to Mexico and Central America, were a good thing. Words like "recovery," "significant growth" and "improved" were prominent.

The word to describe what these cash-sendings from immigrants really mean was left out: misery. People leave for a foreign land because the socialist conditions are so intolerable back home.

The facts tell the story: Remittances to Mexico rose 8% from a year earlier and 7.4% to Central America. Mexico hauled in $24 billion in 2014, a third of the total for all of Latin America. Guatemala took in $5.5 billion, up 8.6%; El Salvador gained $4.2 billion, up 6.7%; and Honduras received $3.35 billion, an 8.8% spike. IDB forecasts further gains this year.

It may well be a result of last year's border surge, which the Obama administration encouraged and which led to tens of thousands of Central American illegals flooding into the U.S. IDB estimates that as of December 2014, 21.8 million Latin American migrants were in the U.S., a 6.3% rise over 2013.

IDB data suggest that those coming are overwhelmingly illegals. Just 45.1% of Mexican migrants never completed high school, and only 25% had high-school diplomas. Among Central Americans, the figures are 57.9% and 24.3%, respectively. Large majorities of both groups came from single-parent families — the Central Americans in particular.

That's a picture of the U.S. importing both the poverty and dependency that come with illegal immigration.

Of course, the Obama administration wants to beef up its Democratic voter base. But the Latin American states that economically benefit from these remittances get their cynical prize, too — a way of defusing potentially explosive social pressures.

It lets local Latin American leaders devalue their local currencies and ignore inflation. As long as the remittances flow, they won't need to make badly needed free-market reforms.This is the deep cynicism of those who pretend to care about illegal immigrants but benefit from their misery.

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