As emigration from Guatemala has reached historic levels, a fractious political debate has unfolded in the U.S. over how to stop thousands of people from travelling north each month. The causes of migration are often complex but identifiable: rampant gang violence in urban areas and extreme poverty in the countryside, exacerbated by climate change. Another, less obvious factor is psychological. With increasing numbers of people leaving, it’s become harder for others to justify staying behind. “There’s a point at which people start to lose hope,” Joy Olson, a human-rights advocate with deep experience in the region, told me. “That’s the most difficult-to-measure problem. If people don’t see a future where they are, and they see it somewhere else, they’re going to go for it.” The casas de remesa dotting the landscape in the western highlands are a daily reminder to the residents who remain that opportunity lies elsewhere. “Migration generates more migration,” Lizbeth Gramajo Bauer, a Guatemalan anthropologist at the Rafael Landívar University, told me recently. In 2017, she published a paper with the sociologist José Luis Rocha Gómez about their immigration research in the western highlands. “Remittances and the investments that stem from them create a sense of privation among those who don’t receive them,” they wrote. People who live in areas of high migration in the western highlands, the two concluded, are more likely to emigrate themselves.

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

One afternoon, in the city of Quetzaltenango, I had lunch with Willy Barreno, a forty-six-year-old who lived in the U.S. for fourteen years before he returned to Guatemala, in 2010. Barreno is a chef by trade and had worked in the prepared-foods section of Whole Foods, first in New Mexico and later in Texas, Wisconsin, and Illinois. In Quetzaltenango, he runs a group called DESGUA, which helps deportees from the U.S. acclimate to life in Guatemala after many years away. “The problem is that so many people see all these signs of success in the U.S.,” he said. “Only the signs of success get communicated back to Guatemala, never the hardships of being an undocumented immigrant in America.” He pulled out his phone to show me the Facebook profile of someone he knew who’d moved to the U.S. from Guatemala. We scrolled to a photo of the man smiling broadly, with designer jeans and gelled hair, standing in front of a shiny red car. “I don’t know if that car is even his,” Barreno said. “A lot of people on Facebook pose in front of property that isn’t theirs, just to show that they’re doing well, that their whole trip to the U.S. was worth it. These photos are what Guatemalans end up seeing.” A sense of shame keeps migrants from talking about their struggles, he added.“What people here don’t know is that the immigrant experience in the U.S. is solitary. You deal with racism, and constant work.”