El Salvador sends more people to the United States than any other Latin American country after Mexico. About 1.4 million Salvadoran-born people live in the U.S., many spurred to come here by natural disasters — a hurricane in 1998 and two earthquakes in 2001.
Of course, people have their own reasons for immigration, and Salvadoran immigration has continued since those events. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Pew Research Center calculates that Salvador-born immigrants in the U.S. increased by 142 percent between 2000 and 2017 alone.