How could family reunification feed youth into gangs, even if both immigrant parents are working?

Middlebury's David Stoll published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the costs and benefits of immigration between Guatemala and the United States last week which I commented on here. He brought up some good points on the downside to remittances and family reunification that often go unmentioned in the press but that are part of the academic conversation that has been taking place. He sent along some comments to my questions which he has generously allowed me to share with you.

Mike, thanks for your observations.  You ask, how could family reunification feed youth into gangs, even if both immigrant parents are working?

My reference to downward mobility could have used a bit more explanation.

The best ethnography I’ve seen on this point is Robert Smith's Mexican New York.  It’s about a Mexican migration stream, from Puebla to the Bronx, with far more legal status than the Guatemalans with whom I work.

While a stateside working couple’s son is still in Mexico, being cared for by his grandparents and receiving remittances in Mexico, he’s at the top of the consumption pyramid for the small town where he lives.  Once reunited with his parents in the Bronx, he’s living in a leaky basement with parents who are too busy working to make ends meet for anything else.  And of course their meager wages-even two wages in New York's heavily informalized service economy- have very little purchasing power.  So that’s downward mobility in terms of what his parents’ wages can buy. Then there's the problem of how the little guy makes it down the street without being challenged by other young neighborhood males.

As for humanitarian advocacy, my objection is that it can be extended to most of the population of the Third World.  If "57,000 helpless children" (to quote the NYT editorial board yesterday) each deserve a lawyer, a court hearing, time to prepare their case, and therefore provisional legal status in the U.S., then so does every other under-18er in Central America whose parents can pay to get him to the U.S. border.   This amounts to a humanitarian rationale for opening the U.S. labor market to any family who is sufficiently desperate or bold to borrow the money needed to pay human smugglers.

This is not to deny the existence of genuine refugees from gang violence who need our help. But how to pick them out of the surge of youth labor migration which, as far as I can see, probably constitute the bulk of the youth surge.

I'd like to thank David for the comments.