Pardee-CFLP-Remittances-TF-Report

versity of California, Los Angeles North American Integration and DevelopmentCenter (UCLA NAID) has identified “vicious cycles” across migration corridorsbetween the U.S. and El Salvador, which influence the opportunities availablefor human development in these places. The present vicious cycle is characterizedby undocumented migration, lack of rights, financial exclusion, distortedcash-based economies, and external dependence, contributing to increasinginequality within the migrant sending and receiving areas (see Figure 2). Thecombination of the UNDP and NAID Center research has opened the door forincreasing transnational research and policy discourses that are taking shapetoday to address how the process of migration and remittances affects humandevelopment across borders (UNDP El Salvador 2014). One of these initiativesincludes the NAID Center searchable, online GIS tool for tracking village-by-village,zip code-by-zip code migration corridors between the U.S. and El Salvador(GIS database). Using this tool, we’ve identified very dense micro-corridors ofmigration linking very particular micro-geographies across borders. We arealso using these approaches to track the ways in which inequalities in accessto human development opportunities in El Salvador are linked to inequalityof human development capabilities in the U.S. Our initial findings reveal deepinterdependencies between village economies in El Salvador with key zip codesin the U.S. 55 For example, 60% of the people from the town of Ahuachapán live in northern Boston zip codes, and the remittancesthat these migrants send back amount to roughly the equivalent of 40% of local GDP, providing a strong(if artificial subsidy to local economic activity). Remittances in receiving households, however, can represent up to90% of income, making them extremely vulnerable to dynamics in the U.S. To more fully measure and understandhow strong these dynamics are we will still need to conduct extensive surveying of binational households withdetailed budget and expenditure portfolios of how the transnational families live in both the U.S. and El Salvador.100 A Pardee Center Task Force Report | October 2013