The New Yorker did a 3-part series about why those subhumans from Guatemala are swarming the border.
Part 1 - Climate change
In February, citing a “national-security crisis on our southern border,” Donald Trump declared a state of emergency, a measure that even members of Congress from his own party rejected. Three months earlier, with much less fanfare, thirteen federal agencies issued a landmark report about the damage wrought by climate change. In a sixteen-hundred-page analysis, government scientists described wildfires in California, the collapse of infrastructure in the South, crop shortages in the Midwest, and catastrophic flooding. The President publicly dismissed the findings. “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it,” he said. There was a deeper layer of denial in this, since overlooking these effects meant turning a blind eye to one of the major forces driving migration to the border. “There are always a lot of reasons why people migrate,” Yarsinio Palacios, an expert on forestry in Guatemala, told me. “Maybe a family member is sick. Maybe they are trying to make up for losses from the previous year. But in every situation, it has something to do with climate change.”
Part 2 - Debt
Richard Lee Johnson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona who is based in Quetzaltenango, has spent the last five years studying the relationship between debt and migration, and has interviewed dozens of immigrants and their families in the western highlands. What he’s found is a feedback loop in which immigrants who fail to reach the U.S. become stuck in a cycle of future attempts. “These days, average migrant debts have climbed so high that a U.S. wage is the only real way to pay them off,” Johnson told me. The Trump Administration has only exacerbated the situation. By focussing almost exclusively on harsher enforcement at the border, it has made crossing much more painful but no less urgent for those who are trying to alleviate mounting debts. “Deportation doesn’t seem to deter undocumented migration,” Johnson said, “so much as to reinforce it.”
Part 3 - Money
At the same time, nearly every aspect of life in Guatemala depends on money coming from the United States. Last year, nine billion dollars were sent back to the country in the form of remittances—an amount that is roughly double the total from a decade ago and accounted for more than eleven per cent of Guatemala’s gross domestic product. Donald Trump has announced that he will be cutting all aid to Central America, complaining that the U.S. gives these countries “tremendous amounts of money”; in 2017, the total sum of money the U.S. sent to the region in annual aid amounted to roughly five hundred million dollars, or less than three per cent of the money received in the form of remittances. “People can afford milk and eggs because of the remittances they receive,” Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, a social anthropologist from Quetzaltenango, told me. “They can build houses. Their children can get an education. And people can start small businesses. The only way poor indigenous women can afford their traditional dress is because of remittance money.”
Like most New Yorker stories, it's worth the deep dive.