How climate change is fueling the U.S. border crisis

The western highlands, which extend from Antigua to the Mexican border, cover roughly twenty per cent of Guatemala. The population in the highlands is mostly indigenous, and people’s livelihoods are almost exclusively agrarian. The malnutrition rate, which hovers around sixty-five per cent, is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. In 2014, a group of agronomists and scientists, working on an initiative called Climate, Nature, and Communities of Guatemala, produced a report that cautioned lawmakers about the region’s susceptibility to a new threat. The highlands, they wrote, “was the most vulnerable area in the country to climate change.” In the years before the report was published, three hurricanes had caused damage that cost more than the previous four decades’ worth of public and private investment in the national economy. Extreme-weather events were just the most obvious climate-related calamities. There were increasingly wide fluctuations in temperature—unexpected surges in heat followed by morning frosts—and unpredictable rainfall. Almost half a year’s worth of precipitation might fall in a single week, which would flood the soil and destroy crops. Grain and vegetable harvests that once produced enough food to feed a family for close to a year now lasted less than five months. “Inattention to these issues,” the report’s authors wrote, can drive “more migration to the United States” and “put at grave risk the already deteriorating viability of the country.”Guatemalan migration to the U.S., which had been steady since the late nineteen-seventies, has spiked in recent years. In 2018, fifty thousand families were apprehended at the border—twice as many as the year before. Within the first five months of the current fiscal year, sixty-six thousand families were arrested. The number of unaccompanied children has also increased: American authorities recorded twenty-two thousand children from Guatemala last year, more than those from El Salvador and Honduras combined. Much of this migration has come from the western highlands, which receives not only some of the highest rates of remittances per capita but also the greatest number of deportees. In recent years, U.S. immigration policy in Central America has largely relied on the idea that, in order to control the flow of immigrants heading north, the government should make it as painful as possible to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s always been about deterrence,” a former official at the Department of Homeland Security told me. “Unless you send a message, people will keep coming.” On Friday, Trump announced that he was cutting all aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, because the three countries “haven’t done a thing for us.”Even approaches that have accounted for the root causes of regional mass migration have underestimated the impact of climate change. Sebastian Charchalac, an agronomist and environmental consultant told me, In most of the western highlands, the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when. “Extreme poverty may be the primary reason people leave,” Edwin Castellanos, a climate scientist at the Universidad del Valle, told me. “But climate change is intensifying all the existing factors.” Extended periods of heat and dryness, known as canículas, have increased in four of the last seven years, across the country.  Climate change is outpacing the ability of growers to adapt. Based on models of shifting weather patterns in the region, Castellanos told me, “what was supposed to be happening fifty years from now is our present reality.”