President Joe Biden’s deputies say he is trying to repair Central America’s migration-crippled economies with $4 billion in financial aid for the next four years.
But “The $4 billion is a fig leaf to conceal the fact that the real policy is to allow everyone to come in,” responded Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. The aid “is a prop to give the public the impression that they are dealing with the problem,” even though they continued to extract valuable young migrants from Central America for use in the U.S. economy, she said.
The U.S. is “strip-mining” the Central Amerian countries of their young people, in tacit cooperation with the cartels and coyotes who traffick the migrants in exchange for a share of their wages, she said.
The aid promised by Biden’s people is very limited. It is far less than the taxpayer spending migrants trigger among U.S. state and local governments, and far less than the money sent from the United States by migrants back to their home countries.
Biden’s aid would total $4 billion over four years for the 33 million in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The works out to $121 per person, or $30 per year, while huge numbers of young people exit those countries to accept open-borders invitations, jobs, and the hope of U.S. citizenship from Biden and his deputies.
In contrast, the three countries received roughly $10.3 billion in remittances in 2019 from their emigrants, the vast majority of whom are now living and working in the United States, according to Pew Research Center. The flow of remittance is 10 times Biden’s promised flow of aid.
The promise of $30.22 per person was sketched out by Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s “Special Assistant to the President & Coordinator for the Southern Border.”
The President has committed to seeking $4 billion over four years to address the root causes of migration, including corruption, violence, and economic devastation exacerbated by climate change. As part of that plan, we will address the causes that compel individuals to migrate, including improving governance and providing a foundation for investment and economic opportunity, strengthening civilian security, and the rule of law … Only by addressing those root causes, can we break the cycle of desperation and provide hope for families who clearly would prefer to stay in their countries and provide a better future for their children.
Yet the U.S. government still will welcome migrants from those countries and will even fly them from those countries directly to the United States, she said.
“Working across the whole of [U.S.] government, we will look at access to international protection and refugee resettlement and rethinking asylum processing to ensure fair and faster consideration … Going forward, we will continue to look for ways to provide legal avenues in the region for people needing protection while we continue to enforce our laws.
And the aid program will be hands-off, with very little pressure on the local governments, she added:
We can’t make the changes. We can [just] encourage them. We can help support them with resources both technical assistance and funding, but we can’t make those changes. The changes have to come in the Northern Triangle countries … The president really wants to move forward on this, but he won’t unless he feels he has those commitments from the local governments] on an ongoing basis.
The $4 billion will go to low-impact projects, according to Jacobsen:
There are myriad people in organizations who are trying to make those changes. And part of what we want to do is empower them … [by giving] economic support, whether it’s training for young people, whether it’s anti-gang programs, whether it’s mothers’ clubs and empowering local communities, all of that gets done through people on the ground, not by the United States … We [could] deliver new lighting facilities that reduce violence and crime, you know.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform scoffed at Jacobson’s comments:
The administration [has an] utterly unrealistic plan to end the crisis they created. Rather than take immediate steps to actually restore effective enforcement policies they have dismantled, the White House continues to suggest that $4 billion to fight ‘corruption, violence and economic devastation’ in a region that has experienced generations of corruption, violence and economic devastation is going to solve all of their problems and ours.
The one word that can be applied to the administration’s response to the full-blown crisis they have created, and to their feeble attempt to explain it to the American public is “pathetic.”
If Jacobson and Biden were seriously trying to stop the northward migration, they would offer to spend more money, Vaughan said. “It would take a lot more than $4 billion to fix all of the civil society and economic problems in these three countries — because first of all, they have to be motivated to fix it,” she said.
But the Central American governments are corrupt, and are not motivated to fix the root cause of migration because they favor the migration, said Vaughan. The current U.S. extraction migration policy vacuums away all the young people who might demand political change and then returns migrants’ wages back to fund the government and keep the population quiet, Vaughan said.
“What’s going to stop this [migration] crisis is changing [U.S.] policies and ceasing the practice of letting those who get here come in and stay,” she said.
But Biden’s deputies have zero intention of stopping the extraction migration that endangers migrants and cripples the Central American countries, Vaughan noted. For example, Jacobson blamed the current crisis on President Donald Trump’s low-migration border policies, which created a “pent-up demand” by migrants to enter the United States:
We’ve seen surges before surges tend to respond to hope, and there was a significant hope for a more humane policy after four years of, you know, pent up demand. So I don’t know whether I would call that a coincidence, but I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that [migration] decision. But perhaps more importantly, it definitely drove smugglers to spread disinformation about what was now possible.
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