Electric vehicles registered in the USU.S. southwest border encounters
US electric vehicle registrations and US southwest border encounters have, between 2016 and 2023, risen together at a correlation of 0.959. The pairing is destined to be weaponized by every political party capable of reading a spreadsheet, which is exactly why no one should take the correlation seriously. EVs and migration flows are not coordinating. They share a calendar and nothing else.
US EV registrations grew from around 400,000 in 2016 to over 3.5 million by 2023, driven by Tesla production scale, federal tax credits, and state-level mandates. Southwest border encounters rose from about 400,000 to over 2.4 million in the same window, driven by asylum-seeker flows, policy whiplash, and regional instability in Central and South America. The two trends have nothing operationally in common but rise across the same eight-year window of intense economic and political activity. This is the canonical case of correlation that means nothing: two headline numbers climbing through the same decade for completely separate reasons.
Eight years of two lines rising together can describe two politically explosive numbers sharing nothing but a calendar. The charger and the border are not in dialogue. The partisan reader is.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Electric vehicles registered in the US” vs “U.S. southwest border encounters” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
