Civil order has basically disintegrated in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. El Salvador is particularly violent, but other forms of upheaval - plantation agriculture, climate change - have pushed huge numbers of people into a state of malnutrition. Think about it - if you had the means to feed yourself where you lived, would you travel more than a thousand extremely dangerous miles on foot to sit in a camp on the Rio Grande?

These people are truly desperate - famine-era Ethiopia/Somalia desperate. We can bitch about them trying to get into the U.S., but we had damn well better do something, because it's going to get much worse from here.