Until 2022, Honduras was ruled by Juan Orlando Hernández, a repressive, corrupt president who both the Obama and Trump administrations propped up—supposedly because he represented “stability.” (Fortunately, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York was not buying it. Hernández’s preferred successor lost the 2021 election, and soon thereafter the ex-president was on a plane to New York, where he is presently jailed, awaiting trial for narcotics trafficking.)
Let’s turn to Mexico, which has historically provided the vast majority of people who come north. As it happens, until recently migrants from Mexico had declined sharply. Professor Massey explains that normally, the primary group who emigrate are people between 18 and 30 years old. But the Mexican birth rate has over the years dropped greatly, leaving fewer people in that age range. (In fact, after the 2007 Great Recession, the number of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. actually shrank, by an estimated 1.7 million, as many had planned to return home and retire there.) Today, however, Mexico is living through a new crisis.
Mexico’s reality is contradictory. Much of the country is safe—1.6 million Americans, many of them retirees, live there. But other regions are mired in the same gang/narcotics trafficking violence as much of Central America. Maureen Meyer, the Vice President for Programs at WOLA and an expert on Mexico, says that in recent years many of the migrants from Mexico have fled the states of Michoacán and Guerrero, which “have been overwhelmed by organized criminal violence.”