A Migration Becomes an Emergency

This chapter examines the circumstances that produced repeated migration surges from the Northern Triangle of Central America—El Salvador, Honduras to Guatemala—to the United States. Dominated by women and children fleeing poverty and violence, since 2014 the surges have challenged the U.S. asylum system, prompted crisis responses at the border and provoked ongoing political controversies. This chapter argues these surges are an outgrowth, really a kind of mutation, of long-standing migrations that have been dominated by labor and family reunification flows in recent years. Moreover, the surges were facilitated by migrations channels, including criminal smuggling networks, that had developed to transport what was once a far larger Mexican flow. The surges serve as a warning that seemingly stable labor migrations can transform into sudden, large scale movements of humanitarian migrants due to changing circumstances in sending communities.