How your morning wake-up drink, immigration crisis are related

There are no simple answers to the immigration crisis, and that's in part because it's not a simple problem.

The U.S. Senate is complicating things more, politicizing both immigration and aid to Israel with one fell swoop -- Democrats adding $225 million to deal with immigration in a bill to give Israel more funding to rebuild its dwindling supply if Iron Dome anti-missiles, used to defend against Hamas attacks.

If Republicans refuse to vote for the bill, the issue could endanger our only reliable ally in the Middle East as well as prevent progress on the immigration issue.

Most of us have some idea why there's a Middle East problem, with virtually all of Israel's neighbors plotting to put an end to the nation.

We've also heard about false rumors being spread in Latin America about the United States granting immunity to unaccompanied minors who make it through our borders. U.S. policy has actually not changed, but that doesn't keep "Coyotes" from spreading false rumors and collecting large fees for bringing children here.

But why do Central American children, more specifically their parents, want them to come here?

For one, poverty, gang violence and civil war in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. Gangs control neighborhoods, forcing children to join or be beaten up or killed. The murder rate in Honduras is above 90 per 100,000 residents, according to the U.N. office on Drugs and Crime. Parents see a trip north as a way for them to escape, or, if the parents are already here, to be reunited with their families.

But what is fueling the poverty and gang violence?

The answer may be as close as your morning cup of coffee.

A coffee rust -- or roya, in Spanish -- has been around since being discovered in Kenya in the 1800s, but has recently spread throughout coffee-producing regions, thanks, some experts say, to higher temperatures associated with climate change.

As it reached Central America, it devastated coffee production, throwing thousands out of work and increasing pressure to reach the United States. Some three-quarters of all coffee trees are infected with roya in El Salvador, 60 percent in Costa Rica and 70 percent in Guatemala.

The fungus thrives in hot weather, attacking the leaves of coffee trees, choking off nutrients to the cherries that encase the beans, and, as temperatures increase, spreads to higher altitudes where the best coffee beans had previously been untouched.

Major coffee companies like Starbucks and Green Mountain have teamed up with the U.S. Agency for International Development to help rebuild the coffee farms and train farmers to fight roya, but it will be a long time before results of those efforts will be felt.

Clearly, simple solutions to a complex problem, especially when the Latino vote is carrying more and more weight in the U.S. political process, will be difficult to find.