Strong Economies Are Drawing Migrants Back to Colombia and Peru

Sitting inside the distillery in Ica, Peru, where she makes her pisco, Melanie Asher sips several blends of the clear grape brandy as she weighs which one will wear her La Diablada 2016 label. As in previous years, most of Macchu Pisco’s annual output of almost 100,000 bottles will be exported to the U.S., where some retail for as much as $300. Asher and her sister, Lizzie, co-founders of the business, were born in Peru and emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s at ages 10 and 12, respectively. Both wound up at Harvard, where Melanie earned an MBA and Lizzie a law degree. “I’m American, but I’m very much Peruvian,” Melanie says. “I have the best of both worlds.”

The Asher sisters are part of a reverse brain drain. Beginning in the 1970s, tens of thousands of Peruvians and Colombians left for the U.S. and Europe to escape struggling economies, civil wars, and narcoterrorism. As their children grew into adults, the troubled countries they left behind experienced remarkable turnarounds aided by soaring commodity prices, rising foreign investment, and ebbing violence. Now many of the hyphenated Americans find themselves back in Peru and Colombia, running small export-oriented businesses. “An increasing proportion of migrants, especially the second generation or those who came very young, see an opportunity to actually be able to live both here and there, to have an existence where they have one foot firmly rested in one country and one in the other,” says Demetrios Papademetriou of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.