Migrant caravans, like the one currently making its way through Central America, often cite violence and poverty as reasons they're fleeing their home countries. But there may be another factor in play, too: climate change.
"The projections are that the climate and the ecological aspects of this are going to intensify and events are going to become more frequent. So it starts to beg the question if this is going to happen and there's going to be displacement and these are the dynamics, then what is it that we should be doing? Ideas of people being displaced and on the move, like the caravans, moving across borders and heading to different places are going to be more commonplace. We're in a world where we really need to start thinking about that," said Todd Miller, author of "Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security."
The Central America Dry Corridor, a region of land stretching from Panama to Mexico, has been suffering from serious droughts for nearly ten years now—leading to subsequent crop losses. Those losses have hit the agriculture industry in those countries hard, not to mention all of the famines.
"As far as the caravan, there's 7,000 Hondurans," Miller said. "That's a pretty large swath of people, so you'd have to image that there are people in that that have been affected that are probably from the Dry Corrdior, that might've moved from the Dry Corridor areas of Honduras to Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula or one of those bigger cities."
According to the World Bank, up to 140 million people could be displaced within their home countries by 2050 due to water scarcity, crop failure, sea-level rise, and storm surges. One of the report's authors wrote, "Without the right planning and support, people migrating from rural areas into cities could be facing new and even more dangerous risks," adding, "We could see increased tensions and conflict as a result of pressure on scarce resources."
The caravan currently heading towards the U.S. has caused a contentious political debate just days ahead of the midterm elections. Miller suspects that migration patterns will continue to have significant influence on American politics well after November 6, pointing to a similar caravan earlier this year having a critical impact on U.S. border policy.
"If you followed what happened after that, it was soon after that Jeff Sessions stood and said we're going to do the zero-tolerance policy of family separation and that quickly led to the policy of family separation earlier this summer," Miller said.
