Educational Resource
Economic Instability and the Migrant Family (2010)
Systemic poverty, economic instability, and a lack of viable employment are fundamental, root causes of unregulated migration. According to the International Labor Organization, close to 550 million workers around the world live on less than one U.S. dollar a day, while almost half of the world’s 2.8 billion workers earn less than two dollars daily. Endemic poverty affects many in our own hemisphere. In the past fifteen years Mexico has lost more than two million agricultural jobs, and in the last twenty years the Mexican minimum wage has decreased by 70 percent in real terms. The CIA reports that 84 percent of Haitians live under the poverty line, with 54 percent in abject poverty. Such conditions stifle human flourishing by dramatically limiting opportunity and creating an environment in which the God-given gifts that we are all called to actualize can only atrophy. It should come as little surprise that in such circumstances people often seek a better life elsewhere, through both legal and illegal means.