More than 70,500 children in El Salvador live without one or both parents due to emigration: survey

SAN SALVADOR – Two of Mateo’s 6 years have lived without his father, who in 2021 decided to emigrate from El Salvador to the United States.

Dylan is one of the 70,569 minors who live in the Central American country without one or both parents due to emigration, according to data revealed by the 2021 Multipurpose Household Surveymade by the General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses in El Salvador (Digestyc), an institution recently dissolved by the Salvadoran Congress.

Of the 70,569 children who live without one or both parents, 66% live without their father, 21.8% without their mother and 11.4% without both.

Mateo’s father, Leonardo Antonio Patriz, 27, assures that he emigrated for economic reasons.

In the Digestyc survey, 27% of households reported seven or more of the 20 deprivations that were taken into account for the survey. Among the deprivations, school absence, overcrowding in the home, child labor, food insecurity and incidence of crime, among others, stand out.

“I knew that if the economic situation did not come to me, it would not improve. Although it is difficult to be here, my son already has what he did not have before, like going to school and from time to time having what he wants,” Patriz told the voice of america.

El Salvador continues to be one of the countries with the most migrants in the region. In 2021, it broke the record for migrants detained at the southern US border, exceeding 96,000 Salvadorans detained trying to cross into the US.

The World Migration Report 2022 of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) indicated that the countries with the most emigrants were Jamaica, El Salvador and Venezuela, around the proportion of total population.

In El Salvador, a country of seven million inhabitants, the Salvadoran Institute for Migrants (INSAMI), a San Salvador-based NGO, estimates that at least three million live in the US and Mexico.

According to data from the Mexican government’s Directorate of Statistics, 25,040 Salvadorans found themselves in an irregular migratory situation in that country between January and November 2022.

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