By Gustavo González
QUITO, Jul 27 (IPS) - Emigrant remittances sent to Latin America and the Caribbean totalled a whopping 25 billion dollars in 2002. But the money wired to families back home ''helps build houses, but breaks up families,''said an Italian nun who has been working in Machala, a city on Ecuador's southern coast, for over a decade.
Speaking at a panel in the first Social Forum of the Americas in the Ecuadorian capital, Adriana Palli said the negative impact of emigration overshadows the positive effects, despite the large flows of remittances that it generates.
''Machala is a city rich in natural resources, but which lives in utmost poverty,'' she said. ''Those who go abroad are young people of working age, who leave their children in the hands of grandparents who are unable to care for them properly, and many of those children later swell the ranks of juvenile delinquency.''
Activists at this week's Social Forum suggested that the first-ever Americas-wide conference of migrants be held at the World Social Forum (WSF) in January 2005, which will return to the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre after this year's edition, which was held in Mumbai, India.
Oscar Chacón, a leader of the Salvadoran immigrant community in the United States, said in Monday's panel that a continent-wide dialogue is needed to tackle the phenomenon of migration flows, which move not only towards the North, but between countries of Latin America as well.
Organising communities of migrants, the impact of migration, and demands that governments and the international community take action to deal with the phenomenon were discussed in the panel on 'Poverty, Migration, Remittances and Development' held at the Simón Bolívar Andean University in Quito.
The panel was organised by the U.S.-based Enlaces América, an organisation that ''facilitates the empowerment of transnational communities in their commitment to building an equitable, sustainable, and dignified way of life'' and ''supports the development of Latino immigrant-led organisations as national and regional leaders in the Americas.''
With a broad agenda opposed to globalisation in its current shape and aimed at coming up with alternatives, the hemispheric Social Forum opened Sunday and runs through Friday in the Ecuadorian capital, with the participation of 8,000 activists (the organisers had hoped for 10,000).
This week's gathering forms part of the WSF, held annually as a kind of counterpoint to the World Economic Forum (WEF) of the global economic and political elite in Switzerland. The WSF slogan is ''Another World Is Possible''.
According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), there are around 20 million Latin Americans living outside of their countries of origin, as a result of migration flows, which were particularly intense in the 1990s. Nearly two-thirds of those migrants live in the United States, but there are also large communities of Latin Americans seeking a better life in Europe, especially Spain.
Migration flows are also seen within the region, with significant contingents, for example, of Bolivians in Argentina, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica and Peruvians in Chile, the panelists noted. ECLAC reports that people from Latin America and the Caribbean who emigrated to industrialised countries send their families back home an average of 200 dollars a month, while remittances to the region totalled 25 billion dollars in 2002.
Dominican immigrant Jesús García, with Enlaces América, said governments of industrialised as well as developing nations must understand that migration does not contribute to improving living conditions or to fighting poverty in the migrants' countries of origin.
García said the United Nations should promote assistance and investment in the least developed countries to help bring about development that would curb emigration.
García and other panelists agreed that poor countries will not achieve development by following ''neo-liberal'', free-market economic policies. ''We need a model that produces growth, redistribution of wealth and environmental sustainability,'' he said.
But Dimas Orejuela, a young Colombian activist from the town of Huapi, on the Pacific coast, said the roots of today's migration-related problems go back further than the economic models imposed in the region in the second half of the 20th century.
''Native peoples were the first victims of European migration, a phenomenon that dates back to 1500. African peoples then became forced migrants brought to our countries by kidnapping and exploitation,'' said Orejuela, a mulatto (mixed-race) university student.
Both indigenous peoples as well as people of African descent in Latin America have come up with forms of resistance and alternative forms of development that should be taken into consideration, above and beyond the ''anti-establishment discourse of some post-modern intellectuals,'' he added.
''In Colombia's Pacific coastal region, the state is totally absent,'' said Orejuela. ''The communities there live according to a subsistence model that is respectful of the environment. Perhaps we have the solution in our hands.''
Milagros Batista from the Dominican Republic said the accent should be put on work in small communities, addressing their problems to create hubs of local development -- a task in which education and the exercise of rights are indispensable, she said.
In her Caribbean island nation, Batista works with 250 women who have been the victims of domestic abuse, coordinating her efforts with 11 schools that the women are attending to complete their education.
Chacón said an Americas-wide summit of migrants should not only provide a forum for sharing ideas and experiences, but should also pressure the governments of Latin America and the United States to search for real solutions to the phenomenon. The Salvadoran activist pointed out that neither the U.S. government nor Congress are keen on introducing changes to U.S. immigration laws. ''They have not realised that we immigrants are the prototype of the global citizen, because we work and pay taxes in one country and invest in another,'' he said.
But García said there is a vast movement in the United States today advocating reform of immigration law.
Another positive development cited by the Dominican activist was that the U.S. labour movement no longer sees immigrants as enemies, but as allies -- a change he said was linked to the implementation of free trade treaties, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has joined Canada, Mexico and the United States since 1994.