The lack of social safety net, decline of publicly accessible assistance in healthcare and education, and the unpredictability of immigration enforcement has led to an increase in emigrants from the United States back to Latin America and Asia.

To give a personal anecdote: I was helping a woman apply for advanced parole, which is an immigration action that allows for someone who entered the United States illegally to re-enter in the future, provided certain qualifications were met. In the irony of ironies, she had spent the last several years saving enough money to go back home (and to pay her respects to one of her parents who had just passed), and wanted to preserve the option of coming back the the United States, if possible.

After reviewing the details of her immigration history, I advised her that she was unlikely to be granted this parole, and that if she left she would be unlikely to be allowed to re-enter.

My translation of her Spanish is poor, but the essence was, “If I’m going to struggle, I want to do it where I have friends and family whom I can help, and who can help me. There is no help here.”

She left without parole, effectively banning herself from the United States, and based on the message she sent me the following Easter, it seems to be without regret.

To borrow your words, I think “[o]nly an extremely naive and privileged person would even pretend” that poverty in the United States has a superior character to poverty elsewhere.