British news agency Reuters reported on August 19 that the U.S. government is offering to triple the size of the H-2A (farm worker) labor force recruited in Guatemala as it continues to try to reduce the pressure on the southern border.
The Center for Immigration Studies published a posting of mine making exactly the same proposal on June 18 of this year:
The logical suggestion would seem to be: Why not make sure that a substantial portion of those H-2A visas [mostly used by Mexican Nationals] are granted to Central Americans who (and this is the hard part) are determined to be likely to return to their homelands following seasonal work in the States.
We cited Homeland Security data that indicates that 3,964 H2-A visas were issued to residents of that country in 2018, a small minority of all such visas.
It will be interesting to see: A) if this comes to pass; and B) if it is useful in the effort to lessen the pressure to migrate from rural Guatemala to the United States, mostly illegally.