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It is an unprecedented time in a nation’s political history. A neophyte politician — a man famous for lowbrow TV antics who has never held political office — is vying to become president. He feeds on simmering discontent about the corruption of the political establishment and mainstream politicians. Backed by extreme right-wing elements, he makes vague promises and trumpets his lack of political experience as a reason to vote for him. His competition is a former first lady married to a left-leaning ex-president. She is an altogether polarizing figure considered by a large portion of the electorate to be deeply corrupt.

Surprising all the pundits, he rides a wave of populist anger to victory.

Sound familiar? Yes, but it is also the story of Guatemala’s 2015 presidential election. The politician is a man named Jimmy Morales, a clownish talk-show comedian who ran on the ticket of an extreme right-wing political party called the National Convergence Front. His oft-repeated campaign slogan was “Neither corrupt nor a thief.”

Support for Mr. Morales, like that for Donald Trump, was based in part on voters’ frustration with a political establishment they hold responsible for a blatantly unfair status quo. But unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Morales won a landslide victory against his opponent, Sandra Torres, getting nearly 70 percent of the runoff vote.

At first glance, the uncanny parallels between President Morales’s and President Trump’s victories may seem mere coincidence. In many ways, the two nations could not be more distinct. Guatemala has long been one of the Western Hemisphere’s most unequal societies, and for generations the American dream has lured hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans seeking to escape poverty and insecurity.

And yet in the United States, the promise of a better future that animates the American dream — not only for poor migrants but also for American working-class families — has been in retreat for decades. Since the 1970s, the gap between rich and poor has widened inexorably. And now, the aspirations of right-wing United States lawmakers may portend even deeper and more disturbing convergences between Central American nightmares and the fading American dream.

Guatemala’s spectacular levels of inequality have been long in the making. For 100 years, a tiny oligarchic elite has fought ferociously to keep hold of the reins of power and monopolize the nation’s export economy. Through both military oppression and manipulation of a weak democratic system, it has continually beat back efforts at reform from below. As a result, today Guatemala has the 12th-highest level of income inequality in the world, with some studies indicating that 5 percent of Guatemalans own or control 85 percent of the national wealth. This elite has also labored to keep the Guatemalan state weak and incapable of interfering in its business interests. In this, it has been incredibly successful. Guatemala has one of the lowest income tax rates in the hemisphere, and some of the weakest financial, environmental and workplace oversight laws.

The consequences of the elite’s success have been dire for the rest of the country, offering a cautionary tale for those who believe that gutting public institutions could ever make for a more equitable society. Lack of funding for public education ensures that Guatemala remains one of the most illiterate countries in the Americas, and failing health care and social security systems undercut what scant social safety nets exist for the poor. Meanwhile, a sliver of a middle class clings to its precarious perch between the superwealthy superminority and a sea of abject poverty. More than 50 percent of Guatemalans live beneath the poverty line, and social mobility is virtually nonexistent, which is one reason so many poor Guatemalans risk the dangerous journey to the United States.

However, the social and economic conditions in the United States that made the American dream possible have long been eroding. Working-class wages have remained stagnant for 30 years while more and more wealth is controlled by the top 1 percent, putting income inequality in the United States at its highest levels since the 1920s. Institutions that make social mobility possible, like affordable higher education, and those that protect lower-income families, like welfare programs, have undergone drastic cutbacks over the past 30 years, forcing poor families to shoulder more debt and lower their horizons. Even as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, deepening tax breaks for the rich have ensured that they can pay a smaller percentage of their wealth into public coffers than do members of the increasingly beleaguered middle class.

And now, by accelerating the destruction of national institutions and fortifying the elite, right-wing politicians in the United States appear hellbent on restructuring American society to match ever more closely the Guatemalan blueprint. As President Trump blusters about his “big beautiful wall” to keep out poor migrants, Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation to neuter financial-oversight laws on banking, gut environmental protection standards, eliminate the Department of Education and roll back health care affordability. They call for further easing of the tax burden on the rich and major corporate tax cuts to make the United States more competitive in the global race to the bottom.

The United States is still a beacon for Central Americans desperate for a better life. Last July, I spoke with a 20-year-old Guatemalan man named Wilmer who was traveling through Mexico and looking to cross into the United States. “For poor people like me, my country is like a cage with no way out,” Wilmer said as he waited with dozens of other Central Americans to hop a northbound freight train. “And we all know that this journey is dangerous. We might fail, we might even die. But at least there’s some hope at the end of it.”

For now, the American dream is alive and kicking. How terrifying, though, to imagine a future in which the hope that the United States has come to represent for poor Central Americans is extinguished, not because of some “big beautiful wall” but because entrenched inequality has made it a monstrous doppelgänger of their own societies.

Anthony W. Fontes is a postdoctoral fellow

at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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The American Dream Meets a Central American Nightmare,
NYT,
April 4, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/
opinion/the-american-dream-
meets-a-central-american-nightmare.html

Don’t Shut the Golden Door

June 19, 2012

The New York Times

By JOHN M. MacDONALD

and ROBERT J. SAMPSON

IMMIGRATION is in the headlines again, with President Obama’s decision last week to stop deporting young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, and the Supreme Court’s approaching decision on the constitutionality of Arizona’s crackdown on undocumented migrants.

But too much of the public debate has focused on the legality of immigration without considering a more fundamental question: What effects has mass immigration had on American society?

As a result of the 1965 immigration act, which opened the door widely to non-European immigrants, 40 million foreign-born immigrants now live in the United States. They make up 13 percent of the population, the largest such proportion since the 1920s. More than half of these migrants are from Latin America and the Caribbean, although a study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center found that Asians overtook Hispanics in 2009 as the fastest-growing group of immigrants.

For the May issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, we commissioned some of the most meticulous research done to date about the effects of immigration on a cross section of American communities — urban, suburban and rural.

The scholars who participated were in remarkable agreement: while new immigrants are poorer than the general population and face considerable hardship, there is no evidence that they have reshaped the social fabric in harmful ways.

America is neither less safe because of immigration nor is it worse off economically. In fact, in the regions where immigrants have settled in the past two decades, crime has gone down, cities have grown, poor urban neighborhoods have been rebuilt, and small towns that were once on life support are springing back.

Scholars can’t say for sure that immigration caused these positive developments, but we know enough to debunk the notion that immigrants worsen social ills.

For example, in rural counties that experienced an influx of immigrants in the 1980s and ’90s, crime rates dropped by more than they did in rural counties that did not see high immigrant growth. Higher immigration was associated with reductions in homicide rates for white, black and Latino victims. In both Hazleton, Pa., which has a recent history of hostility toward immigration, and St. James, Minn., a much more welcoming community, migrants have also bolstered dwindling populations and helped to reverse economic decline.

In large gateway cities, immigration has been associated not only with a decrease in crime but also with economic revitalization and reductions in concentrated poverty. Data from the 2005 American Community Survey showed, for example, that the income of blacks in the New York City borough of Queens surpassed that of whites for the first time, a development driven largely by immigration from the West Indies.

Scholars found that immigrant youths in Los Angeles were involved in less crime and violence than their native-born peers in similar economic circumstances. Research also has shown that an increase in immigration in cities like San Antonio and Miami did not produce an increase in the homicide rate. Furthermore, social scientists found that people in immigrant communities in New York were less cynical about the law than were people in less diverse communities; they were also more likely to indicate that they would cooperate with the police.

If migration has had such beneficial effects, why, then, has there been such a persistent backlash?

Part of the answer surely lies in the social changes — language, political attitudes, religious mores — that immigrants bring, in addition to the effects of the recession. The leveling-off of migration, especially from Mexico, may bring a sense of relief to opponents of these social changes, but if the new research is any guide, the consequences of the slowdown may be the opposite of what the critics intend.

Comprehensive immigration reform — last attempted during the second term of President George W. Bush — should be a priority for whoever wins in November. Mr. Obama’s decision to exempt undocumented children who were brought to the United States by their parents from harsh deportation rules is an overdue, but welcome, first step.

Establishing a clear path to citizenship for undocumented adults, creating a more permissive guest-worker program, reducing unwarranted police stops of immigrants and preserving families rather than separating them through deportation are controversial ideas, but they deserve a hearing.