Why Central Americans migrate to the United States when they do

ARECORD NUMBER of migrants are trying to cross into the United States over its southern border. Central Americans are among them: in October almost 53,000 people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were apprehended on the country’s southern border. People from the Northern Triangle, as these countries are collectively known, have many reasons to leave their homes, from poverty and gang violence to the pull of better salaries in the United States. A new paper definitively shows another reason: climate change. Using border-apprehension data from 2012 to 2018, researchers from the universities of Texas and Utah show that more people journey north when there is drier-than-usual weather during a (see chart).