President Joe Biden wants to stem soaring migration levels through aid to Central American countries and by targeting corruption, efforts that have shown mixed results in years past while stoking new opposition in a region that feels scapegoated by the new U.S. administration.
Buy-in from leaders in the countries people are leaving is “fundamental” to achieving success, said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. But the new U.S. leader is finding such cooperation is not always easy to secure, with officials in the region questioning whether Biden and his team are up to the task of quelling the situation.
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has bristled at the administration’s criticism, refusing to meet with Biden’s envoy to the region during a visit last month and balking at rebukes from Washington this week, including from Vice President Kamala Harris, after his party ousted the country’s attorney general and five top judges.
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Bukele defended his decision in a meeting with foreign diplomats, purportedly private but broadcast on national television, that the move was within the law and that “elections have consequences.” Bukele’s party, which won a landslide victory in March, voted on the measure over the weekend, arguing the court was hamstringing the president’s ability to crack down on the spread of COVID-19 by overruling his lockdown orders.
A top Harris aide told reporters the White House remains committed to working on migration issues with Bukele, as they are seeking to do with other regional leaders.
“The news out of El Salvador will not impact the administration’s efforts to work with the El Salvador government on immigration,” Harris’s chief spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, told reporters this week. But the White House, she added, expects Bukele “to respect the rule of law.”
Speaking to the Washington Examiner, an adviser to Bukele balked at the criticism, charging that the White House had done more to decimate relations between the two countries “than any president since Carter,” when the administration supplied military aid to a U.S.-backed government.
“Biden and Harris are trying to save their reputation by destroying ours,” this person said. “They mishandle the crisis at the U.S. border by allowing in tens of thousands of migrants so they can supply cheap labor to U.S. corporations and are trying to defend their incompetence by casting Bukele as a dictator.”
U.S.-Salvadoran relations, they added, “are now at a breaking point.”
The White House’s efforts have yielded better results with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who will meet virtually with Harris on Friday.
Biden has asked Mexico to crack down on migrants heading north toward the U.S. border, as did former President Donald Trump.
Though Obrador had a positive relationship with the last administration, he has blamed Biden for the surge in migration, charging that “expectations were created” by the Democrat and calling him the “migrant president.”
But he has said he is willing to work with Biden, and he urged the White House to spur economic development in the region.
Biden, who led the aid and development effort to Central America under former President Barack Obama, has tasked Harris with the same job.
The administration faces an uphill battle.
Border patrol encounters have continued to grow, with 172,000 encounters in March, 96,628 of whom were single adults.
Of the remaining 75,000 or so, more than 18,000 were unaccompanied minors, a record since 2009, with just under 53,000 families.
Under Title 42, a public health rule, the Biden administration has immediately deported solo adults, as well as some families. But the rationale for using it is fading as vaccines become more widely available.
Further, “smuggling networks understand U.S. immigration law,” which favors certain claims, said Peter Margulies, an immigration law professor who has written extensively on the issue.
Shifter said he supports the Biden administration’s efforts to engage in the region but that intermittent attention to the issue makes results harder to achieve.
“Where has the U.S. really successfully attacked root causes to produce a more stable and better situation and improve the welfare of the population in Latin America, or for that matter of the world? There aren’t many examples since the Marshall Plan, and the sad fact is that this is very infertile ground,” he added.
During her confirmation hearing, Samantha Power, Biden’s new USAID administrator, touted the agency’s work in Honduras as one noted success.
“In districts where USAID had programming aimed at curbing violence, there was a drop in homicide rates,” Power told senators in March. “That is encouraging.”
Beginning in 2014, Obama’s “strategy for engagement” included hundreds of good governance, jobs, and crime reduction projects. Biden praised the strategy, and the countries purported buy-in, in a 2015 op-ed.
Biden has tasked Harris with running a similar playbook, but systemic corruption and weak economies in the Northern Triangle countries make reform challenging.
“It doesn’t mean that this effort is not worth pursuing. But I think it’s sobering to take a look at what previous experiences have been like and the meager results that have been produced,” Shifter said.
“There really needs to be some fundamental changes, structural changes in these countries. And it’s very hard to see that happening.”
On top of this, there’s a debate among officials over the extent to which Washington should work with civil society, business, and religious groups.
Shifter said that for sustainable results, working with governments is “unavoidable.”
Some experts say aid does little to deter migration in the short term, and can in fact lead to more departures as growing numbers of people can afford the journey.
“The world’s poorest are not the ones who migrate,” said Mariapia Mendola, professor of economics at the University of Milano-Bicocca and the author of a study.
“As a poor country gets richer, at first more people emigrate, until the process eventually slows and reverses itself,” said Michael Clemens, director of Migration, Displacement, and Humanitarian Policy and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “We’ve seen it with Sweden a century ago and Mexico a half-century ago. We’re seeing it now in Central America, and we’ll hopefully see the pattern emerge in sub-Saharan Africa as that region gets richer.”
This is not a reason to cut aid, according to Clemens, who published a study last year that saw emigration rates rise along with growing GDP per capita.
The aid serves other purposes, he said, by warding off humanitarian disasters, disease, helping maintain stability, and enabling greater economic activity with other countries. And development slows migration over the long term.
For the Biden administration, humanitarian assistance is just one part of the plan. Another is a drive against the region’s “predatory elite,” under the charge that graft drives people to leave home and seek economic opportunities elsewhere.
Harris pointed to migrants leaving home at “alarming rates” in remarks Monday.
“No matter how much effort we put in on curbing violence, providing disaster relief, on tackling food insecurity — on any of it — we will not make significant progress if corruption in the region persists,” Harris said in remarks to the 51st Annual Washington Conference on the Americas. “If corruption persists, history has told us, it will be one step forward and two steps back. And we know corruption causes government institutions to collapse from within.”
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The two-pronged strategy played out in one day last week.
The administration issued sanctions against senior Guatemalan officials over alleged corruption. Hours later, Harris joined Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei for a virtual meeting during which she pledged $310 million in foreign aid and disaster relief to the Northern Triangle region.
