Nancy San Fran NanPelosi
Congresswoman-for-Life from the San Francisco Bay Area, born into a family of professional politicians. Formerly Speaker of the House, but it's not her fault they lost. Really. Noted for her heavily botoxed grimace...
and Honduras first lady Ana Garcia de Hernandez are making separate tours of the south Texas border, where most of the 52,000 unaccompanied undocumented Democrat children have crossed this year.
But while the political debate has focused on U.S. immigration enforcement, a key economic factor has been lost in the clamor. Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, which are supplying three-quarters of the latest cross-border flood, are bucking a trend in Latin America toward stronger local economies based on sound reforms and security.
Those three Central American countries are dependent on their diaspora to prop up their own woeful economies. Immigrants send back billions of dollars to their families. Remittances have risen to 16.5% of El Salvador's GDP, 15.7% of Honduras' and 10% of Guatemala's, according to World Bank data. Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia rely on remittances for 4.1% to 9.7% of GDP.
But the figure drops precipitously for every other country in Latin America. Mexico, with the largest immigrant population in the U.S. with as many as 13 million people, now relies on remittances for just 2% of GDP.