On a trip to Guatemala last June, US Vice President Kamala Harris initiated a rhetorical and strategic shift in her administration’s approach to immigration from Central America with three simple words: Do not come.
Directed towards would-be migrants in Guatemala and repeated twice for emphasis, the message clashed with the Biden-Harris ticket’s promises of inclusion, compassion, and humanity broadcast during the previous year’s election season. The initial flurry of executive orders intended to realize these ideals, including one pledging to facilitate the “safe and orderly processing of asylum seekers,” appeared to have given way at least in part by the time of Harris’ speech as the number of individuals arriving at the US-Mexico border soared and immigration authorities continued expelling many under a controversial emergency public health law.
Harris warned that those who journeyed to the US would be turned back under the same measure but tried to inspire “a sense of hope that help is on the way” in announcing that the US would provide Guatemala with 500,000 Covid-19 vaccines and $26 million in pandemic relief. Accordingly, she defined the American position towards Guatemalan refugees as one primarily focused on discouraging them from leaving in the first place, which will be achieved through a combination of harsh messaging, strict customs enforcement, and, most importantly, foreign assistance to improve conditions at home. Although addressing economic insecurity through aid is a well-intentioned avenue to promoting general welfare and atoning for a destructive history of US foreign intervention, these programs’ poor implementation and inability to meet migrants’ immediate needs warrant alternate solutions. Instead of shutting the door on those requiring immediate help, the US should institute common-sense reforms to enhance the country’s capacity to process asylum seekers trying to exercise their legal right.
The plan to tackle the root causes of migration from Central America through foreign aid is less a novel creation than a continuation of Obama-era policy. US President Joe Biden expressly tasked Harris with carrying on the initiative that he spearheaded in 2014 that devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to the region. He referred to his past project, dubbed the Alliance for Prosperity, in a speech to Congress: “When I was vice president, I focused on providing the help needed to address these root causes of migration. It helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave. Our plan worked.” The verdict, however, is not so straightforward. Despite receiving more than $1.6 billion over the past decade, Guatemala still suffers from rising poverty rates, rampant malnutrition, unchecked corruption, and gang violence. As long as the so-called “push” factors remain unresolved, families have no choice but to look northward for safety—if not for themselves then for their children, who have increasingly presented unaccompanied at the southern border.
Much of the blame for the ineffectiveness of US-financed development projects in Central America lies at the feet of the private American contractors responsible for executing 80% of them. According to several experts familiar with the companies’ corporate bureaucracies, a large fraction of the public funding they receive is often sucked up by administrative costs or used to pad executives’ salaries and company profits. Even when the diminished aid reaches its designated communities, it gets wasted on proposals that are out of touch with the needs of the local population. Take an app financed by Bethesda, Maryland-based global development company as an example. It allowed Guatemalan farmers to monitor coffee prices, but most farmers had neither smartphones nor the means to pay for cellular data. Carlos Ponce, a professor of nonprofit management at Columbia University who also took part in many of these programs, pointed to a cycle in which “the same implementers win the contracts again and again, despite having implemented badly in the past, not showing any level of impact and not changing anything.” At the end of the day, as he put it, “it’s a business.”
This is not to say that aid is uniformly useless and unnecessary. When the Trump administration withheld $450 million in support to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, recipients of humanitarian cash transfers, for whom the additional income purchased groceries, became even more susceptible to extreme poverty and food insecurity. Nor is it out of the question that under Vice President Harris’s supervision, the apportioned resources—amounting to a total of $4 billion over the next several years—will be more attuned to the countries’ distinct social, cultural, and economic dynamics and have a greater material impact. Moreover, given its well-documented role in destabilizing Central American countries in service of Cold War interests, the US has a responsibility to try to fix the unfavorable circumstances it precipitated.
Still, aid for the purpose of righting past injustices, uplifting the dispossessed, and fostering prosperity must be separated from the challenges posed by masses flocking to the border, which demand a different kind of policy action: immigration reform. The Biden administration has already indicated it wants to lift the number of refugees admitted into the US to 125,000 in the upcoming fiscal year and is currently in a legal battle to terminate the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols that force asylum seekers to wait in makeshift encampments on the Mexican side of the border until their hearing in an immigration court.
Nevertheless, the administration’s sustained use of Title 42—a law that empowers the government to bar entry to the country during a health crisis and that was labeled “illegal” and “inhumane” by a former State Department senior legal advisor Harold Koh—to turn away migrants undermines both its stated aspiration of undoing the harmful immigration agenda enacted under former President Donald Trump and the legal right to claim asylum on US soil. Not to mention that public health experts generally agree on there being no basis for such a ban. Ending this practice and other forms of “metering,” or restricting the number of migrants who can seek asylum per day, would constitute steps in the right direction. Furthermore, while Attorney General Merrick Garland has requested additional immigration judges and an expansion of the immigration courts’ budget to cut down on the severe backlog of cases, more structural change is needed in the court system. As it stands, the courts function within the executive branch, making them vulnerable to the whims of presidential politics. This allowed the Trump administration to convert them into instruments of enforcement, thereby compromising judicial independence and denying migrants a fair process. All such improvements would not only address the short-term issue of migrant safety but also work towards building more just, humane institutions for the future.
If the Biden administration is serious about affirming the US’s commitment to taking in the world’s tired and poor, it must look for solutions inward, not just outward, when treating the delicate subject of migration from Central America. Do not come cannot be the message of a nation of immigrants.
Original illustration by Kai Gietzen