Two months after he was sworn into office, President Joe Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with addressing the “root causes” of the migration crisis. As Democratic Party theory of the border crisis goes, Harris’s efforts have not been a complete failure. She has raised billions of private sector dollars for economic development in Central American countries.
The disqualifying fault with the “root cause” theory, however, is that it misdiagnoses the problem. Migrants aren’t spending thousands of dollars to come to the United States because they are poor. If anything, these nations are already becoming wealthier. That’s why they can afford cellphones and smuggler fees to come to the U.S. Migration can be a phenomenon of economic success, not merely of failure.
The real “root cause” of the border crisis other than Biden’s catch-and-release policies is that socialist governments in Central America and South America are using migration as a weapon to extract concessions from a weak and ideologically sympathetic Biden administration.
Instead of coddling leftist governments in Bogota, Caracas, Managua, and Mexico City by letting them use migrants as weapons, Biden should get tough with these regimes and use every tool at his disposal, including cutting off all remittances, to force them to stanch the migrant flow.
When the White House released its first Fact Sheet Strategy to Address the Root Causes of Migration, it had five pillars: 1) addressing economic insecurity and inequality, 2) combating corruption, 3) promoting respect for human rights, 4) countering and preventing violence including crimes perpetrated by trafficking networks, and 5) combating sexual, gender-based, and domestic violence.
Of these, only the fourth came close to an effort to push countries to crack down on migrant flows, and even then, the Biden administration’s follow-through has been weak and ineffectual.
Before Biden became president, the Panama-Colombia border saw only 10,000 migrants a year. Under Biden, more than 500,000 migrants have crossed in each of the past two years. White House officials have notionally worked with Colombian socialist leader Gustavo Petro to crack down on migrant trafficking through his country. They even signed a 60-day agreement with Colombia and Panama to “end the illicit movement of people and goods” through the region. But after a few arrests, enforcement efforts were abandoned, and the flow of migrants north has continued unabated.
Asking other nations to crack down on migrant flows across their borders can be problematic, especially when your own government’s policy is to catch and release migrants into your country as quickly as possible. But the socialist governments of Central America and South America aren’t just being lax on human smuggling — they are actively encouraging it.
Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega has loosened visa requirements not only for travelers from Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela but also for many West African countries. Migrants from these countries are taking advantage and paying tens of thousands of dollars for flights into the Central American nation. Same for Colombia’s Petro, who has suspended visa requirements for several African nations under the guise of increasing tourism.
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The main reason migrants from around the world are flooding across our southern border is that they know Biden is likely to let them in and that, once in, they won’t be deported. Shutting down the flow by forcing migrants to remain in Mexico will be difficult, especially if they keep coming in their current huge numbers.
This is all the more reason to stop wasting billions of dollars on economic development that won’t stop the migrant flow and instead press governments to raise their visa requirements and stop turning a blind eye to traffickers. If you dismantle the migrant superhighway to the U.S., the migrants won’t come.