Abstract

Following a sharp increase in the number of border arrivals from the violence-torn countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in the spring and summer of 2014, the United States quickly implemented a strategy designed to prevent such surges by enhancing its detention and deportation efforts. In this article, we examine the emigration decision for citizens living in the high-crime contexts of northern Central America. First, through analysis of survey data across Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, we explore the role crime victimization plays in leading residents of these countries to consider emigration. Next, using survey data collected across twelve municipalities in Honduras, we evaluate the extent to which knowledge of heightened US immigration deterrence efforts influenced respondents’ emigration decision. Though a vast majority of these respondents were aware of the stricter US immigration policy regime, this awareness had no effect on their consideration of emigration as a viable strategy.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-28-2018

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Latin American Research Review, v. 53, issue 3, p. 429-447.

© 2018 The Author(s)

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.147

Related Content

The additional files for this article can be found at: https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.147.s1

larr-53-3-147-s1.pdf (438 kB)
Additional Files: Table A1-A17.

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