Yves here. This article gives a vivid, albeit small frame, picture of how the increase in migrants under the Biden Administration has led to a great deal of localized friction and umbrage. Yours truly is not a fan of substantially uncontrolled immigration; there needs to be government planning and funding for interim housing, assimilation (including language training), and job placements. This is not just for the benefit of communities but for the migrants themselves; you can see below in generally migrant-friendly New York how some migrant families are going hungry.
By Gwynne Hogan. Originally published at THE CITY on Dec. 22, 2023
Security camera footage shows migrants soliciting homes in Brooklyn for financial help. Credit: Courtesy of David Fitzgerald
Residents are sharing anecdotes and images on Nextdoor and Facebook groups, describing migrant families begging for change near the Kings Plaza Mall, the nearest commercial hub to the shelter, where city buses drop off and pick migrants up. Other residents have described them going door-to-door on residential streets asking for clothing, food or money.
Some, like David Fitzgerald, 62, an Irish immigrant who’s lived for the past two decades in Marine Park, are outraged. He said groups of families had knocked on his door several times over the past few weeks.
“We had a nice, close, neighborhood group of people, now we have a literal invasion of people knocking on doors begging, asking for money,” he said. One of the fathers used an app on his phone to translate into English that he was Venezuelan and he needed money and clothing.
“There’s a lot of retired people here, a lot of families here. They’re at the stage of their lives where they like peace and quiet. This is the opposite,” he said. “We’re not liking what we see.”
Neighbors are airing their grievances in a Facebook group called “STOP FLOYD BENNETT ILLEGAL MIGRANTS.” Posts in the group in recent weeks have urged residents not to “GIVE IN TO THE PANHANDLERS” or to report them to 311. One post seeking donations for families at Floyd Bennett elicited 198 comments ranging from “This is an INVASION” to “HOLY SHIT! It is Christmas week. Mary and Joseph were refugees.”
Reflecting an area of Brooklyn where Donald Trump won the majority of votes in both 2016 and 2020, some posters have evoked the “great replacement,” the far-right conspiracy theory that nonwhite immigrants are being brought in to replace white voters. They’ve fretted about the value of their homes dropping and called on each other to arm themselves.
Bren Lee, 42, the administrator of the Stop Floyd Bennett Facebook group said she’d had to kick people out for saying things she thought explicitly advocating for violence. But Lee maintains that a recent post in which someone advised “get your guns” doesn’t qualify.
“I mean, ‘Get your guns’ is not advocating for violence. It’s just saying, ‘Be prepared, right?’” she told THE CITY.
“We had 500 families there and nobody really saw any of them. But now that there’s 1,700 people in there and they’ve noticed a big change in the neighborhood,” Lee said. “A lot of people are concerned.”
Several residents of the shelters who spoke with THE CITY described getting meals like cold eggs for breakfast and cold hamburgers for lunch, and that the children often went hungry. One migrant mother of three from Venezuela said she’d resorted to panhandling by the bus stop to buy food for her three children.
“Sometimes I’ve had to go beg, to buy bread and other things,” she said, near tears. She said she’d more recently connected with a church that was giving her peanut butter, milk, and bread, and hadn’t been begging since. “What are we going to do, we can’t ask for more.”
Adam Shrier, a spokesperson for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which oversees the shelter, said they provide three meals a day, including offerings of bagels, corn muffins, and hard boiled eggs for breakfast, and chicken gyro and buffalo chicken sandwiches for lunch, and rotisserie chicken, or hot dogs for dinner, among various options.
‘That Place Should Not Exist’
The shelter, now housing around 1,700 migrant parents and children, consists of four massive tents on an abandoned federal airfield, a 20-minute walk to the nearest bus stop across a blustery field. Buses on Flatbush Avenue take residents to schools and other destinations in the area — including suburban-style neighborhoods in Brooklyn and in the Rockaways in Queens.
Migrants are also finding friends in nearby communities, where ad hoc groups of neighbors are rallying around the new arrivals and coordinating through WhatsApp as well as with teachers and parents at schools that have taken on new students. Nearly daily, cars pull into parking lots adjacent to the shelter, offering donated hauls of warm clothing, winter boots and strollers.
“Right now, what most people have been asking for is pants and shoes. That’s the top need,” said Ariana Hellerman, 42, with the Queens group Rockaway Women for Progress, who started chatting up families who were riding the Q35 bus and began bringing supplies soon after.
Hellerman said she was disturbed by some of the reactions of her neighbors, but not surprised.
“The word on the street in Rockaway is they’re gonna break into our houses,” she said. “There’s just these fear tactics, because they’re people of color they’re going to try to steal from us.”
Carrie Gleason, 45, a parent of a fifth grader at P.S. 315 in Midwood, Brooklyn, where some of the Floyd Bennett children are enrolled, said the parents have sprung into acting to help the newcomers.
“Yesterday I bought cough medicine because all the kids have coughs that won’t go away,” she said. “The kids are sick and the school is saying, ‘Bring the kids no matter what, because it’s healthier for them to be at the school nurse than in a tent.’”
Heavy winds and rains rattled the tent shelters earlier this week, keeping terrified families up all night. With families already on edge, the storm reignited concerns for many about the difficult-to-access shelter and prompted many to beg staff to be relocated.
Gleason said that while Brooklynites across the political spectrum have starkly different attitudes towards migrants, both sides think the shelter is a bad idea.
“There’s the people who hate immigrants that are protesting and then there’s the people who are welcoming of everybody in our community, and also agree, that place should not exist,” Gleason said. “It’s an absolutely inhumane situation.”
Nobody Thinks It’s Ideal
Mayor Eric Adams warned for months that without meaningful relief from the federal government New Yorkers should expect the arrival of migrants to permeate every corner of the city. “This is going to come to a neighborhood near you,” Adams warned at a town hall meeting in September, where he added, “this issue will destroy New York City.” A recent Quinnepiac poll found that 62% of New York voters agreed with the mayor’s assessment.
Of more than 66,000 migrants living in city shelters at the end of November, more than 51,000 were parents and children, most of whom are living in hotel rooms across hundreds of emergency shelters. But as the city said it had run out of hotel rooms, officials began plotting a new type of shelter for families, large tents subdivided using thin plastic and metal barriers.
Homeless advocates laid out a litany of concerns. City officials agreed they didn’t want to place families with children there either, but after months of begging for help from the state and federal government, for other locations outside of New York City, or greater efforts to resettle families across the state, or country, Floyd Bennett Field was all they’d been offered.
“Nobody from the city thinks having families with children living out at Floyd Bennett Field is ideal,” Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said, in a video posted to X following Monday’s storm.
“This is what was given to us by the state by the federal government,” he added. “The team has done incredible work to make it work out here.”
‘Anywhere Else’
While the airfields were the site of several demonstrations before the tent shelters opened, activists said they put the protests on hold once families started moving in.
“The optics are horrible,” said Curtis Sliwa, the Republican who lost to Adams in the 2021 mayoral race. Sliwa has rallied with neighbors against migrant shelters at locations across the city, but said he cautioned people against rallying at Floyd Bennett once people were living there. “These are women and children who need to be cared for,” he said.
But that detente may be coming to an end. Sliwa visited Marine Park Tuesday, touring the area to talk to residents and businesses about the reports of panhandling.
Even some of those organizing against the shelter have wrestled with the dire human reality of the situation. Lee, the administrator of the divisive Facebook group, said she saw a small boy wearing a coat sized for a child twice his age, and her first impulse was to take the family back to her house to find him a coat that fit. But she’d stopped herself.
“Are we enabling this behavior? Are our business is gonna go? Are our houses gonna depreciate in value? What’s going to be the consequences of doing that?” she wondered.
Lee, who is Puerto Rican and speaks Spanish, said she’d had another conversation with a family about the food at the shelter that had given her pause: “Maybe they aren’t getting enough food in the tents?” she said she had wondered.
Gleason said every family she’s talked to are desperate to leave Floyd Bennett Field, looking for rooms to rent and trying to find jobs, no matter how many jackets volunteers drop off.
“Nobody wants to be there at all,” Gleason said. “They’re desperate to be anywhere else.”
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Labor must be crushed, no matter the humanitarian costs.
Wait until Biden gives the adults and kids a school work permit.
That’ll shut out those uppity Americans that expect liveable wages, holidays, days off, privacy and overtime. Lean Spanish or forget working in most businesses from now on. Welfare will be means tested with a limited pool of money and preferences given to recent arrivals.
Next step, give all of them the right to vote in local elections, as handwringing humanitarians demand, then drivers licenses with automatic voter registration. Need a Biden reelection for that to happen.
Spanish lesson for doorbell ringers:
“Vuelve a su pais.” Go back to your own country.
“Pida un vuelo a casa” Ask for a plane ticket to go home.
“Aprende Ingles, naturalizca, tal vez le doy limosnas” Learn English, become a citizen, then maybe I will give you charity.
Please correct me if I’m mis-representing the facts. Aren’t there some Republican govs sending migrants to NY? Aren’t the Republicans in congress stopping any funding for helping existing asylum seekers out until the border is fully militarized? Aren’t the Republicans in NY state blocking the funds to help the existing migrants in NY City?
Judging by the comments in the article it seems to me the obvious way to get help for the migrants already here is to have them “temporarily” housed in bright red areas of the city.
It baffles me that Americans continue to support and vote for unlimited immigration. I suppose the elites want wages to be driven down even lower than they already are
There has to be some reason for the recent increases in migration. My money is on the post covid increase in labor bargaining power, and a consequent campaign by employers to get governments to increase migration.
The part that eludes me is the logistics of the human trafficking operations. How do you pay and organised for so many people to be moved across the world if they have so little money? There is a scandal behind all this I am certain.
When I was representing asylum applicants they were rarely the poorest of the poor. They or their families could raise several thousand dollars to pay a “businessman” who could make arrangements to get them out of harm’s way.
Spot-on. In my experience, these folks are “middle-class” families in their home countries, who for whatever reason decided that their ability to rise economically was “blocked” due to a lack of “connections” at home. The causes are exploding populations and government corruption.
They also didn’t simply walk with 2 or 3 little kids to NYC. They were able to raise a substantial bit of cash and probably accomplished several legs of their migration via airline. It’s important to take note that these migrants are not campesinos shuffling along in huraches hoping to bend-over and hoe our broccoli and pick our lettuce. They come to the cities in search of the comfortable lifestyle that America once offered, that is being snatched from under their noses by legal immigrants from India, China, and “Ukraine.”
I have found that both American political parties suffer from what I label Paternalistic Racism toward these migrants. The totalitarian elite does little to discourage their migration, but even less to integrate them into society. The migrants are seen as both compliant cheap labor to be exploited and as easily-pitched NGO grifts. However, as the companion posting today shows, chaos sown by U.S. counter-insurgency projects in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela are going to continue to sustain the displacement of the middle class from those countries northward.
Indeed. Over 2023 I’ve seen several instances of groups of 40+ boarding at Tucson airport for Dallas, clutching their paperwork folders. They do not emit the “baffled with airport experience” vibe, fairly relaxed. Significant over-representation of young mothers with well-behaved (quiet) children, and sub-groups of ~dozen non-Spanish speaking very dark men. All presumably en route beyond DFW to sponsors.
Same here. Local paper interviewed some of the asylum seekers that were temporarily housed in a local basketball arena. They are by and large not the most desperate, hand to mouth, poorest of the poor, but tend to be upper middle class professionals in their own countries – doctors, professors, etc. according to their own testimonies.
In recent years we have had a huge boom in hotel building designed for wealthy tourists in an area where the local population isn’t large enough to staff all these big, new corporate enterprises with the cheap labor necessary to cook, clean rooms, etc. Then hundreds of “asylums seekers” show up and the state is doing its best to fast track them for housing and jobs – what a coinky-dink!
Now the PMC tourists coming to my city can have former PMCs from foreign countries clean up their messes for them. Must make them feel great.
I am incredulous. Are you suggesting middle class people anywhere will give up their lives to panhandle in the United States? This flies in the face of all logic and historical precedent.
While skeptism may be warranted, if this was true theres no reason to think they would panhandle there whole lives.
Once an NGO gets them set up with housing and the basics they’re presumably able to join the workforce.
Do try to read the entire comment before responding.
The migrants described here didn’t come in order to panhandle, they have been forced to resort to panhandling due to the impossibility of finding employment when priority is given to legal immigrants from South and East Asia and war refugees from Ukraine, along with having unrealistic expectations of support from government and NGO’s.
Perhaps they are fleeing our foreign policy. I’ve lately noticed increasing numbers of people who appear to be Russian or Ukrainian (and presumably the latter) at our European owned Lidl. Some of them seem anything but indigent.
I am not sure about the pull factors but do a bit of work on the push factors using data from DHS and other sources.
From Central America, there was rapid growth in the number of migrants and particularly families, during the 2010s. There is a significant correlation between areas with high outmigration rates during that period and magnitude of long-term (decadal) changes to climatic conditions relevant to agriculture. As stated below, some fair amount of capital is needed to undertake the journey and regional population centers tend to have higher outmigration rates than seen in surrounding rural areas which are poorer. Some people can mortgage their land to pay coyotes but many do not own and so cannot. The impact of Hurricanes Eta and Iota in the fall of 2020 led to much internal displacement and likely prompted more to migrate internationally as well.
I was never consulted. Unlimited immigration like too much of anything you can imagine is going to be harmful in some way. Had we sensible people within the DC Bubble, were they attending to the general interest and general welfare, if they actually paid attention to anything but their personal and factional affairs, there would have been a reasonable immigration on policy and the means to administer and enforce it long ago.
Really? I don’t see any evidence that we “vote” for unlimited migration. US voters have very little affect on policy in the first place. What do we think this is? A democracy or something?
The Biden liberalization is not likely to be about labor. It is about assuring a Democratic majority since some of these migrants are expected to become citizens (their children born here will be) and they are assumed to vote overwhelmingly Democrat.
It could be a combination of both, as the US has always used immigrants for cannon-fodder, exploitable labor and scapegoats.
It also is a very good way to emotionally manipulate the public and get them to fight among themselves: The headline narrative: The Ds want unlimited migration and “open borders” while the Rs want to militarize the border, build walls and protect us from “hordes of dirty, disease-ridden, criminals” who will “poison the blood” of our great country. That’s how narrow the discourse is framed.
That seems to be the republican take on it, although recent history shows immigrant votes shifting republican over time.
“What was the theme of Gangs of New York, Alex?”
No one ever addresses *why* there’s so much immigration. https://venezuelanalysis.com/interviews/venezuelan-children-under-the-us-blockade-a-conversation-with-anahi-arizmendi/
Is NYC running any public service ads to try to advise residents to connect the dots. With everything going on with ICE and other immigation enforcement agencies, the last encounter these familiies want it with the police. It is highly doubtful that they are going to commit crimes, and of course the begging is most likely more traumatic for the families than those who are experiencing the inconvenience.
It is interesting to hear the reasoning behind denying assistance or even compasion for the migrants. It is like Ayn Rand talking points. Of course most of us don’t know what to do or how to solve this, but we should demand of our leadership to get to work on this.
Until we start to tax the uber-wealthy, we are not going to be able to grapple with our societal problems that are increasing exponentially by the day…
Until we change our foreign policy we are not going to be able to grapple with our societal problems that are increasing exponentially by the day….
^^^^^^ This is exactly what I was about to say. Nothing will ever change until we stop being horrible around the world and create all of these refugees in the first place.
Why not simply change the border policy?
Giving directly to panhandlers is a luxury those well off can afford to ease there conscious.
Even if you are already giving tens of thousands of dollars to charitable causes, unless you have subjugated yourself to poverty and are donating 90+ percent of your income, you could have easily donated 1 more jacket to help. Given that, per the article, what’s so special about that one little boy wearing the wrong size jacket other then you happened to encounter him? There are tens of thousands more of him in the NYC area alone and hundreds of millions more throughout the globe.
I’m all for compassion and donate a decent chunk of my income to charitable causes every year. However, I have a rule that I do not donate to panhandlers. Charities are in a much better position to stretch my dollar further and make sure the money is going to those most in need
So a jacket exchange solves everything? Progressives who love immigration should pay for it out of their own pockets. Same for those who support Ukraine or Israel. Don’t use Americans hard paid taxes for foreigners.
America First is looking better and better, I don’t care if it’s racist, anti-semetic or whatever invented bullshit words in leu of arguments gets thrown at us.
You’re a racist!
So?
Your a White Nationalist!
Honorary, I’m sure, since I am brown.
Your anti semitic!
So?
All a part of class warfare.
“Brooklyn neighborhoods that voted for Trump” raises a couple of questions. Were immigrant camps placed only in republican-leaning neighborhoods? Were they also placed in democrat-leaning neighborhoods, but those are welcoming the newcomers?
I think the article wants us to assume that immigrants were located throughout Brooklyn, that they are welcomed in districts that voted for Biden but they are not being cared for in districts that voted for Trump. Perhaps that’s true. Or maybe this is an attempt to deflect heat that blue cities were receiving and their apparent hypocrisy in ignoring problems that border policy has caused red border states.
Just a note or detail accuracy for one of the comments ..Mary and Joseph were refugees..
As Matthew ch. 2 verses 1 to 11 shows, the astrologers did not arrive until 2 years after Jesus birth when Mary and Joseph lived in a house. This is also why Herod killed boys from two years of age and under.
Since Herod died around 1 B.C. they did not remain long in Egypt.
Just a thought: if Mary and Joseph were making the trek nowadays, they would be detained at checkpoints at best, or vaporized by Israeli aerial bombardment at worst.
Herod is likely one of Netenyahu’s heroes, so that tracks.
The four gospels have different accounts, only Mathew and Luke containing the birth story. In Luke, it is a manger. Mark, the first written, and John, the last, skip the birth and lead with the prophetic handoff from the Baptist to Jesus.
Perhaps more on point is the Jewish admonition to be kind to strangers because the Jews had been strangers in Egypt.
Do not confuse Birth Story with Refugee Event. The latter occurred two years later.
irony? early in the piece, DF, an Irish immigrant weighs in:
“Some, like David Fitzgerald, 62, an Irish immigrant who’s lived for the past two decades in Marine Park, are outraged. He said groups of families had knocked on his door several times over the past few weeks.”
chitchatting w/the occasional neighbor who gripes about migrants, I say (in a friendly way)
my grandparents were immigrants – where’s your family from?
spoiler: they did not come over on the (settler colonizer!) Mayflower
Speaking of settler colonizers: if Mary and Joseph were making the trek nowadays, they would be detained at checkpoints at best, or vaporized by Israeli aerial bombardment at worst.
I recall a number of years hearing Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes on CBS justifying the westward march of the United States as nation building. The United States was building an exceptional nation so genocide and ethnic cleansing could be excused. The Israelis are also justifying their own genocide and ethnic cleansing as nation building. The United States and Israel share a common history in this regard, and this is why the United States provides unlimited and unquestioned support to Israel. After all, Israel is a blood brother.
Who is doing the westward march now? Isn’t that your friend Vladimir?
Interesting point. In many ways, the US continued the policies of the British Empire in its own interests. The indigenous were “savages” and “uncivilised” subhumans and the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon invaders justified their policies of genocide. The Israelis say all Palestinians are animals and terrorists, not part of Western Civilisation Inc. Israel was also created initially by the British Empire, the bloody Anglo Saxons again
What about Ukrainians? Do they deserve it?
Of course the Ukrainians don’t deserve it. Blinken, Nuland, Austin, Graham, McConnell, Biden, Clinton, etc are the warmongering ghouls who wanted this conflict and deserve to be on the receiving end of whatever Russia does to protect its own legitimate interests.
Unfortunately life isn’t fair like that.
“Blinken, Nuland, Austin, Graham, McConnell, Biden, Clinton, etc” together with the Ukrainians violated Russias “own legitimate interests”, so the Russians invaded Ukraine, killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and annexed their land. What are those “own legitimate interests” that justified such treatment of Ukraine and it’s people?
Guess you are voting for Trump next year. He knows how to stop this in 24 hours.
All nation-states – all “constitutional republics” within which “democracy flourishes” – are in fact founded on the remains of ethnic cleansing and partial to wholesale population displacement/transfer. In sum, they are all based on genocide, which is the destruction of a people in whole or in part.
“In part” doesn’t mean that a few, or many, still remain. It means that their entire way of life and sense of place is uprooted, usually in the name of “progress” whether religious or secular/scientific/technological.
It’s ultimately financial. Owning, commodifying and offering the world for sale to the rest of us. And controlling the tokens we need to participate.
What a game.
I am not saying this to defend the US or Israel. Just stating a fact.
The US gov. is engaged in funding, supporting and enabling the Genocide of Palestine. It has destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, part of Syria etc. This has caused refugee crises not seen since WWII.
The US has imposed illegal unilateral siege warfare (so-called sanctions) against Venezuela, Cuba etc. and has meddled in the politics of Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua etc. etc. causing death and displacement of hundreds of thousands.
US foreign policy (not to mention financial imperialism) contributes greatly to unprecedented levels of refugees, migrants etc
https://jacobin.com/2023/05/us-sanctions-migration-cuba-venezuela-mexico-border
In US politics, it is very convenient and effective to blame the victims and powerless and use them as a tool of political motivation. But the US MassMediaCartel and politricksters don’t want people to connect dots. DT this, JB that, blah blah blah – typical superficial political nonsense. Let’s give the Israelis more money to build more walls, yeah, that’s a cracking idea eh.
To be simplistic: If the US stopped bombing, meddling, regime-changing, imposing “free trade” agreements, and looting other countries, we wouldn’t have this problem. But then we couldn’t exploit them, scapegoat them, and use them as a political distraction.
I don’t see any incentive for the ruling classes to honestly address the issue.
Oops, I meant political mobilization, not motivation. But I guess that fits too..
Do you believe the world was a better place before the US became the center of the world politics?
I believe it was less shameful to be an American citizen.
Speaking of migrants, you can trade passports with one of them and cross the border into Mexico. That would balance it out somewhat.
When you’re the global hegemon the immigrants come with the scenery ( paraphrasing Chrissie Hynde). We all better get used to this and stop complaining.
The immigrants should come knocking at the door. But the door should be at a local embassy or consulate in their respective countries, not my door.
It’s not clear if your comment refers to begging at the embassy or consulate door for money, clothing, etc. as described in the post; or for entry into the US. If it’s the latter, people can apply for asylum only from within the US or at a port of entry.
It’s true that
“To seek asylum, you must already be in the U.S. and believe you will be in danger of persecution if you return to your country”
If the borders are closed as they should be, this procedure is available for those in danger.
“To seek refugee status, you must be outside the U.S. and believe you will be persecuted in your country”
There’s no knocking on the embassy door process available to most of the people who arrive at the US southern border. People applying for refugee status must meet more restrictive criteria than asylum seekers, have already fled their home country, and have a referral.
“The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) accepts referrals for refugees determined to be particularly vulnerable and in need of the protection provided by third-country resettlement.”
“The USRAP is a multi-step process. The first step for most people seeking refugee status is to register with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the country to which they have fled…U.S. Embassies or qualified non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may also provide referrals to the USRAP for individuals of particular concern to the United States.”
https://www.state.gov/refugee-admissions/
https://www.state.gov/refugee-admissions/about/
If the goal is eliminating the possibility of entry for people in circumstances typical of current asylum seekers it should be presented and evaluated as such. It’s not useful to imply that there’s an alternative process for them.
“believe you will be in danger of persecution if you return to your country” and “believe you will be persecuted in your country”
look same to me
Yes, I looked again and the legal definition of who would qualify is the same. The process is different and in both* cases isn’t initiated by potential refugees/asylum seekers at an embassy or consulate in their home countries. The other differences are that asylum seekers don’t need a referral, and the legal process to determine if asylum is granted takes place after the person is already in the US. (This is a general description – I assume there are other nuances and exceptions).
[*] limited exceptions for refugees
Civilized hegemons have a different approach.
North Koreans deported from Chinese jails face torture, activists warn
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67656585
Civilized hegemons have a different approach.
North Koreans deported from Chinese jails face torture, activists warn
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67656585
Crook County, Illinois would be more accommodative. Not one cemetery precinct voted for Trump. Start in the Graceland and Rosehill neighborhoods, and Lincoln Park where the Confederate POW graves were dumped.
I worked in Honduras in one of the poorest areas for some time. It is not US foreign policy other than perhaps the US refusal to fund population control. It is simply insane overpopulation. In Honduras a farmer might have a plot that enables the family to grow food. This is then split up among the children of the next genertion and after a few generations there is not enough. Even when I was there decades ago the only option for Hondurans was to come to the US unless they had connections to the politicians and the oligarchs….kind of like how it is in the US.