ABSTRACT
In recent years, the question of migration in general, and migration’s developmental impact in particular, has become an issue of heated public and scholarly debate. This is also the case for Central America, where the costs and benefits of migration have become matters of national and, to a lesser extent, regional policy discussion. Central American migration within and beyond the region encompasses a broad range of experiences with important effects for social, political and economic governance. It poses severe challenges to the individuals and communities involved as well as to migration scholars and policy-makers conventionally dividing migratory practices into neatly fixed compartments with distinct development effects: internal, regional or international; cyclical, temporary or permanent; voluntary/involuntary or economically/politically motivated; driven by push factors in the countries of origin, pull factors in the countries of destination, or processes of transnational community formation. The lines of demarcation are rarely clear-cut anywhere and nor are they in Central America. To measure the effects of migration on development, it is important to understand how migration is regulated and organized by a plurality of (f)actors, as this review of Central American migration sets out to do.
