By the end of 2022, at least 1 million Nicaraguan households will adjust the payment of the basic basket through remittances, largely as a result of the mass exodus of citizens who emigrate mainly to the United States, estimates Manuel Orozco, Director, Program of Migration, Remittances and Development of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.
According to data officers From the Central Bank of Nicaragua, from January to June the country received a total of 1,396 million dollars in remittances, 35.5% more than in the same period of the previous year.
And these data coincide with those of the fiscal year 2022 of the Office of Customs and Border Protection of the United States (CBP for its acronym in English) that registered a record of 2.7 million migrant detentions, 164,600 of these Nicaraguans.
Orozco comments to the voice of america that remittances in Nicaragua already represent 60% of the total household income that depends on remittances and that the minimum wage in the Central American country is between 200 and 300 dollars per month and is not enough to pay for the basic basket whose cost ranges the 510 dollars and the cost of living is around 1,000 dollars.
“This money helps people not only buy food, but also subsidize important things such as internet data or pay for electricity, which is one of the most expensive in Central America, and is around an average of 40 dollars per household,” says the expert.
The other side of remittances
Although the indicators represent a relief to the finances of Nicaraguans that are still in the country, in the medium and long term this will have its consequences, warns the economist and former deputy Enrique Sáenz.
Although remittances are “a lifeline and a social mattress” that allow people to cope with the cost of living, underemployment and unemployment, on the other hand “it is a tragedy” because in this population that generates economic resources that migrated “skilled labor goes”.
“There are people who invested, families who invested, but also the State, Nicaraguans with their taxes, invested in professionals and technicians in all branches… you are losing workforce. Your productive capacity for the short and medium term, but above all for the medium and long term, you are losing it and you are losing it forever”.
On the other hand, Saénz warns of an alteration “in what is called the demographic structure of the country.”
“If you lose around 7 or 8% of the population, this places us at the level of Afghanistan, Syria, without having a war and without a natural catastrophe. Here the catastrophe is Ortega’s permanence in power, that you lose 8% of the population in that pyramid and it is the structure of people from 15 to 40 years old, that is a cost that you are going to spend paying for decades definitely”.
The government of President Ortega has blamed US sanctions for Nicaraguan migration. “Keep imposing sanctions and they will have more migrants,” the president stressed at the end of October.
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