📊 Ecuador's Immigration Surge

What's behind a nearly five-fold increase? Where does the rest of LatAm stand?

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Immigration 🛂

Our first story of 2024 was on the record number of migrants at the border between Mexico and the United States, some 250K in the 2023 fiscal year. We looked at some surprising trends, such as the decline of Mexicans from making up basically all arrivals to the border to just about a third.

The border remains a salient and heated topic in at least US political discourse, as it tends to every election cycle. The two likely presidential candidates have traded insults over each other’s approach to immigration, while a congressional bill to step up border enforcement was killed last month. Politicians in the US have maintained a strong focus on criminals coming from abroad, even if it’s well-established that immigrants commit significantly fewer crimes than their US-born peers.

But if 2023 saw the biggest number of undocumented migrants apprehended at the border (and not at official ports of entry, mind you), it’s Ecuador who’s gone through the most explosive change.

Ecuadorian Border Detentions Surged By Nearly 5x in 2023

The small Andean country of just under 18M people saw a nearly 400% year-over-year increase in its citizens being apprehended by US Border Patrol in 2023.

What’s driving this change? Unfortunately, crime back home. Ecuador has seen a massive crime wave in recent years, with its major port city of Guayaquil becoming especially dangerous.

Local criminal outfits have allied with Mexican, Colombian, and Albanian cartels and gangs and struggled for control, with everyday Ecuadorians bearing the burden—hence the skyrocketing rates of people fleeing north.

Is there any good news in sight?