Once, I met a man in a rural community outside Guatemala City who had worked as a sushi chef in the United States, where he learned to speak English and even a bit of Japanese. After being arrested during a workplace raid and deported, he dreamed of opening his own restaurant in Guatemala. But his confidence had run up against a hard reality: Back home, there was no clear path to turn his newfound skills into a living. Instead, he was struggling to find work.
As a researcher of returnees to Mexico and Central America, I’ve talked to countless migrants who felt adrift once they got back home. They are often met with suspicion. Employers hesitate to hire them. Communities treat them as outsiders. Governments offer little support. For many struggling families, they represent one more mouth to feed. Gangs target them for extortion or abduction.
As part of the Trump administration’s intensified immigration enforcement, deportation flights now arrive almost daily in Guatemala City, at a military base next to La Aurora International Airport. Hundreds of migrants each week return to a country that, until recently, had no coordinated system in place to receive them. Nearly 23,000 Guatemalans were deported between January and July this year. Many had lived in the United States for much of their adult lives.
The sheer volume of people returning has quickly forced the government to reconsider its approach. The country’s Plan Retorno al Hogar, or Return Home Plan, which started in February, is now connecting deportees to jobs that take advantage of their language abilities and work experience, and providing identification documents and mental health support to help them cope with the trauma of deportation. It’s a step in the right direction.
As the United States shuts its doors to migrants, countries in Central America should embrace them. Returnees bring fluency in English and expertise in critical fields such as construction, hospitality, food service and landscaping, and many embody the resilient, can-do mentality that is a hallmark of the American ethos. With the right support, their drive, talent and knowledge can be harnessed to build up new industries and strengthen economies back home.
In Guatemala, sustainable tourism could offer one way forward. The country’s tourism sector represents only about 5 percent of G.D.P., compared with nearly 40 percent in Belize and about 9 percent in Costa Rica. And yet the country has everything its neighbors have to draw tourists in: Mayan ruins, colonial-era cities, majestic rainforests, smoking volcanoes and good surf. As the country seeks to attract more travelers, it has a chance to rethink how returning migrants might contribute to this expanding industry.
When I visited Guatemala in late January, the government was grappling with the sudden reset in U.S.-Guatemala relations and how to address the anticipated flood of returning migrants. A solution I proposed to government officials and others during that trip was to link migrant reintegration with the development of a sustainable-tourism industry.
The idea was met with enthusiasm: Business leaders saw it as a path to securing government investment in roads, bridges and airports. Indigenous leaders viewed it as an opportunity to showcase their entrepreneurship, share their culture and give young people a reason to stay. Immigrant advocates envisioned a chance to reduce the stigma faced by deportees.
Later, I interviewed Guatemalans living in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia about whether they would consider leaving the United States and what kind of work they might do if they did. They said they would relish the opportunity to return and use their know-how. One man told me, “I would return for sure, if I had the chance to build something real at home.” They talked about building eco-lodges, opening fusion restaurants and manicuring the lawns of newly opened hotels.
To be sure, Guatemala faces daunting challenges that go far beyond reintegrating returnees. The country’s infrastructure is crumbling. Poverty is widespread. Credit is hard to come by. Many people lack formal land titles, making it nearly impossible to develop their property. Organized crime remains a persistent threat. Hotels can’t fill rooms if tourists are too afraid to visit. Entrepreneurs can’t open restaurants if gangs are waiting outside to extort them.
For decades, migration to the United States served as a kind of escape valve from those problems, offering Guatemalans the safety and opportunity they couldn’t find at home. Now, as more people return, linking reintegration to sustainable tourism may stand out as one way to deliver both economic opportunity and basic security that Guatemalan citizens have long been denied.
If Guatemala succeeds, it could offer a model for the region. El Salvador and Honduras are also grappling with waves of return migration and have begun their own modest initiatives — job fairs in El Salvador, small-business grants in Honduras. Tourism already figures into both nations’ economic strategies: El Salvador is betting on surfing, Honduras on its Bay Islands. But none — including, so far, Guatemala — have formally integrated deportees into these efforts. Guatemala has a chance to lead, showing how returnees can help drive growth in a sector with real potential across Central America.
This is an idea Washington could get behind. Supporting effective ways for returning migrants to get meaningfully plugged into local growth industries will help tackle the drivers of migration at their source and create incentives for immigrants to go back voluntarily. The Trump administration has already promoted “self-deportation,” even offering free flights and stipends to encourage immigrants to leave. A coherent strategy for returnees in their home countries would achieve the same objective, but in a way that produces durable results, rather than quick fixes.
Deportation is America’s loss and Central America’s gain: By expelling the backbone of its labor force, the United States is giving others the chance to turn that strength into their own.
In Central America, return migration is a fact of life. Every flight that lands in Guatemala City, San Salvador or Tegucigalpa is bringing home not outsiders, but compatriots whose experience abroad has given them skills, vision and global connections. Central America can choose to waste them — or to harness their ambition and expertise to transform the region from a place people flee into a destination the world seeks out.
Anita Isaacs is a professor of political science at Haverford College.
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