From the article:
A wave of Central American children arriving at the U.S. border in recent years was driven by violent conditions at home as much or more than economic variables, according to a new study.
Economist Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development think tank in Washington, compared data on unaccompanied minors from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala taken into custody by the U.S. government with homicide figures for those countries. His analysis found one additional homicide per year over a six-year period resulted in 3.7 additional children caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally.
“The explanatory power of short-term increases in violence is roughly equal to the explanatory power of long-term economic characteristics like average income and poverty, and much greater than the explanatory power of short-term economic shocks like rises in overall unemployment,” Mr. Clemens wrote in a working paper released Thursday.
Read full article here.
