Latin American Program in the News: "In Mexico, rails are risky crossing for a new wave of Central American migrants"
Eric Olson is featured in the Washington Post on the rise in migrants from Central America passing through Mexico.
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On the U.S. side of the divide, the number of Mexicans taken into custody since 2000 has dropped 84 percent. But of 365,000 arrests made by the U.S. Border Patrol during fiscal 2012, nearly 100,000 were individuals classified as “Other than Mexican,” the highest percentage to date and almost twice as many as in 2011.
The vast majority were from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Central America’s Northern Triangle, where economic failure and rampant violence exert a powerful push, even at a time when the pull of the U.S. labor market remains weak.
“There’s a feeling that Mexico has changed demographically and has turned the corner economically, and we’re never going to go back to what we had at the turn of this century,” said Eric Olson, a Central America expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, referring to the historic wave of Mexican migration that peaked in 2000, when Border Patrol agents made 1.7 million arrests.
“The real growth is projected to come from Central America,” Olson said.
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About the Author
Eric L. Olson
Director of Policy and Strategic Initiatives, Seattle International Foundation
Latin America Program
The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action. Read more
