Guatemala’s presidential candidates are campaigning in the United States, mainly in the sanctuary state of California, as decades of high levels of legal immigration from Central America have brought hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to the nation.
As Guatemala preps for its first round of voting later this month, presidential candidates traveled to Los Angeles, California, last month to participate in a voter forum to score votes from the nearly 80,000 registered Guatemalan voters now living in the U.S.
Last year, Guatemalans living in the United States sent more than $18 billion in remittances back home — a figure revealing the extent of the immigration explosion from the relatively small Central American country, which has a population smaller than New York.
The vast majority of those Guatemalans in the United States who vote in Guatemala’s elections are left-wing, the Los Angeles Times reports. For example, in 2019, Guatemalans in the U.S. cast 235 votes for the far-left candidate, Thelma Cabrera, while the conservative candidate Alejandro Giammattei received fewer than half as many votes.
Giammattei went on to the second round to become Guatemala’s current president.
This year’s presidential election in Guatemala is only the second election in the country’s history where nationals living abroad can vote from where they live rather than having to travel back to cast a ballot.
Though Guatemala’s voting rules have only recently changed, presidential candidates have been campaigning in the United States for years.
In September 2015, Breitbart News exclusively interviewed conservative Jimmy Morales who was vying for votes of Guatemalans in the United States at the time in the hopes that they would return to the country for election day.
Morales went on to become Guatemala’s president from 2016 to 2020.
The latest data published by Pew Research Center shows an estimated 1.4 million Guatemalans live in the United States today — a 255 percent increase since the year 2000, when only about 406,000 Guatemalans lived in the U.S.
While about 33 percent of Hispanics in the United States are foreign-born, about 6 in 10 Guatemalans in the U.S. are foreign-born, and 22 percent live in poverty.
As Breitbart News reported, the United States population hit 333.3 million residents in 2022. More than 80 percent of that population growth is due to legal immigration levels, where over a million foreign nationals are given green cards each year and another million arrive on temporary work visas to take American jobs.
Without the continued flow of legal immigration to the United States, the population would have stabilized naturally with about 245,000 new residents added.
Research conducted last year shows that the foreign-born population in the United States is projected to hit a record nearly 70 million by 2060 if current legal immigration levels go unreduced. Today’s foreign-born population, at 48 million, is already the largest number of immigrants ever recorded in American history.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.