The Migrants Are Coming! The Migrants Are Coming!

While watching the inauguration, my brother-in-law said, “Biden wasn’t even in office yet and the Trumpsters were already starting their conspiracy theories about Latino caravans marching towards our southern border.”

He’s generally much more up-to-date on this sort of thing than I am, so I didn’t challenge him. But I did think to myself: Why wouldn’t caravans be forming? If I lived in Central America and wanted a better life for my family, I’d be on my way. (I subscribe to the theory that economics is a key factor in human behavior, and people generally respond to economic incentives and disincentives in predictable ways. In much of academia today, this is a very unpopular idea.)

I asked Amaru to check it out, and I was right. Instead of conspiracies theories, he found more than 20 stories – from sources including NBC News, Fox News, BBC News, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and NPR – verifying that thousands of migrants from Honduras and Guatemala were already on the move, hoping to take advantage of the new administration’s plans for immigration reform.