The Caravan Is Reading Washington

On Nov. 8, La Jornada reported that the third Honduran caravan since September had reached Tapachula, Mexico, two days after crossing in from Guatemala and five days after the U.S. election. Its correspondent asked a 25-year-old named Misael Vázquez why he had come now.

“We’ve heard that the Democrats have won,” he said, and “maybe they could help us cross the border and get better jobs.”

A senior Border Patrol official in Texas told the Washington Examiner the same week that the cartels are preparing: “The message is already being sent. ‘The borders will be opened again.’”

Both men are describing the same thing from opposite ends of the pipeline. People deciding whether to migrate north are reading Washington. So are the people who sell them the trip. And the House of Representatives is one signature from telling them both they were right.

Three caravans in two months

La Jornada counts the new caravan, which calls itself “Dios con Nosotros,” at more than 1,000 people. Other Mexican outlets put it between 300 and 800. It left San Pedro Sula on Election Day. CNN reported a group of Salvadorans leaving San Salvador by bus on Friday to join it at the Guatemala–Mexico border.

It is the third such group in two months:

• September: about 350 Hondurans, dispersed by Mexican immigration agents near Arriaga after three weeks on the road.
• Oct. 20: more than 600, mostly Hondurans, left Tapachula and were also broken up in southern Mexico.
• Nov. 6: the current group, the largest of the three.

Mexico has stopped every caravan since late 2024 before it reached Oaxaca. This caravan will probably be stopped, too. But the groups keep forming, and the people in them have been clear about why.

Why now

The answer, over and over, is the election. A 47-year-old woman traveling with five relatives told AFP on Election Day, before results were in, “Trump is on his way out in these elections. That’s why we’re taking the risk.” A mother traveling with a three-year-old told the same reporter she hoped to arrive while Americans were busy voting.

In the October group, a Honduran named Olvin Colin told reporters he was going “with the hope that there will be a new administration after the upcoming elections.”

CNN’s reporters in Guatemala and El Salvador found the same expectation last week, along with the family and economic reasons that are always there. A Honduran man deported twice said he hoped the results would make things better for migrants. Another, deported in September after 26 years in the United States, had tried twice to get back in through Mexico, found the caravan online, and was trying again because his wife and two children are in the U.S. A Salvadoran who had been out of work for four months said that was what put him on the road.

One man at a Guatemalan crossing told CNN that if Mexico catches him tomorrow, he will head north again.

“Let’s see who gets tired first. Them or us.”

The sales pitch

A second senior Border Patrol official in Texas said intelligence reports reviewed last week showed at least one cartel planning how to use the election outcome. Two more agents agreed that Democratic wins, including in Texas, were material the cartels would put to work. Gov. Greg Abbott’s defeat is an obvious piece of it. Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa has called Operation Lone Star a waste of taxpayer money and has said she will review its budget once she is sworn in. Her incoming attorney general says he will take a hard look at the state’s agreements with ICE. None of that has happened yet, but the cartels are not waiting.

How secure is the “secure border”?

Rep. Michael Guest, who chairs the House border security subcommittee, told the Examiner that Southwest border apprehensions are at their lowest level on record. A migrant-advocacy analyst in the same story said he saw no reason cartels would change their approach as long as Trump is in office.

The migrants quoted above feel differently. They have heard what the administration says. They know that Congress has not yet codified border security into law. They are betting on what Congress does next.

Signals move people

That people move on signals from Washington is one of the better-documented findings in the economics of illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is primarily determined by America’s pull factors.

In a 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Mark Hoekstra and Sandra Orozco-Aleman looked at what happened to migration from Central America after the 2016 election. Nothing had changed in law. As they put it, “the election itself did not change policy.” It only signaled that policy might. Central Americans apprehended by Mexico on their way north fell from about 7,000 a month to about 2,000. Mexicans deported from the United States were about 20 percent less likely to say they would try again. The authors think the drop was probably temporary, and flows were back near 7,000 a month two years later. The signal still moved people by the thousands every month.

If an election that changed no policy could cut Central American crossings by roughly two-thirds, an election followed by an amnesty vote will do the opposite.

The same two economists found in an earlier paper that Arizona’s 2010 immigration law cut the flow of unauthorized Mexican workers into the state by 30 to 70 percent, and that the effect started when the law was announced, before it took effect and before a court blocked most of it. Their conclusion was that the decision to cross illegally is “sensitive to expected benefits and costs.”

In other words, migrants weigh the risks against the rewards.

Amnesty – the ability to stay and work – is the biggest benefit a migrant can expect. Barry Chiswick and Timothy Hatton wrote in 2002 that amnesties encourage more illegal immigration because once granted, they “offer the prospect of future amnesties.” George Borjas and Richard Freeman noted in 1992 that after the 1986 amnesty legalized more than three million people, the Border Patrol made 954,000 apprehensions in 1989, about the same as in 1982. A 2007 Georgetown study concluded that IRCA’s legalization “generated stable networks for increased migration,” though its authors credit the booming U.S. economy as the bigger draw.

Even amnesties for the most sympathetic groups lure vulnerable populations to risk illegal immigration. In 2014, the Congressional Research Service reported that unaccompanied children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador had gone from 17 percent of 19,668 apprehensions in 2009 to 73 percent of 47,017 in the first eight months of that fiscal year. CRS attributed to critics the explanation that the surge followed “a perception of relaxed U.S. immigration policy towards children.” The policy critics had in mind was DACA.

One signature between “security” and “surge”

Discharge Petition No. 25 would force a floor vote on H.R. 1589, the American Dream and Promise Act. It has 217 of the 218 signatures it needs, and the 218th has to come from a Republican. The bill would grant permanent work permits and a path to citizenship to millions of illegal aliens, and it would make TPS holders permanent residents.

The House has done this once already. In April, a discharge petition forced a vote on a three-year TPS extension for Haiti, and it passed 224–204 with ten Republican votes. The Senate never took it up. That is the pattern pro-amnesty groups are counting on: a House vote in the lame duck, a marker laid down for the next Congress, and a headline that will be read in Tapachula.

Behind H.R. 1589 sits the Dignity Act, Rep. María Elvira Salazar’s bill, with 40 cosponsors split evenly between the parties. Its Dignity Program would give seven-year renewable work permits to illegal aliens present before 2021, a population the bill’s critics put at 10 to 12 million. Salazar’s coalition has been organizing for this moment since the spring.

The House returned Nov. 9 for two weeks in November and three in December. Discharge petitions die with the Congress on Jan. 3. Meanwhile the border bill, H.R. 9773 in the House and S. 5371 in the Senate, which would write the past two years’ border gains into law, has been approved by the House Judiciary Committee. It needs a floor vote. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put the question to Senate Republicans on Fox News the day after the election: “Why haven’t we codified Trump’s immigration executive orders?” No one has answered him.

The workers at home

The people with the most at stake in that vote are not in Tapachula. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Nov. 6 that 7.1 million Americans are unemployed and another 6 million want a job but have stopped looking. Black unemployment is 6.6 percent. Teen unemployment is 13.9 percent. Wages rose 3.1 percent over the year against 3.7 percent inflation.

Those are the Americans who compete most directly with a newly legalized workforce. An amnesty hands some employers a settled labor pool and forgives the ones who built payrolls on illegal hiring. It hands those 13 million Americans nothing. A petition circulated by the bill’s backers says construction and roofing firms need the workers. The people in the BLS tables are not the workers they have in mind.

Congress exists to serve the American people. The caravan is a measure of how well it has done that. Its members looked at the border, looked at Washington, and concluded that the second would overrule the first. One signature on a petition would confirm it. Refusing to add it would send the opposite signal, and it would not even take a vote.