Joe McConnell
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The Stories That Matter About Money and Politics in the Race to the White House
The author is a contributing editor to the Vscek and writes the newsletter Chartbook
The Republicans’ line of attack is predictable: Kamala Harris was Biden’s border czar. The crisis at the Mexican border shows that she failed. So does the Democrats’ response: No, the vice president was never in charge of the border. Her role was to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. No one can blame her for failing. It was mission impossible.
The surprising thing about this response is not that it is unreasonable, but that it sets the bar so low. While Republicans see desperation in Central America as a reason to seal the border even tighter, Democrats see the entrenched nature of those problems as an excuse. Apparently, no one expects Harris or anyone else to address poverty and insecurity in the region. Shrugging, the United States settles in to live with the polycrisis at its doorstep.
This is not to say that better policy is easy to implement. The problems impeding development in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central America are profound. The region struggles with deep inequality, institutional failure, corruption, organized crime, and low standards of education and public health. All this in fragile commodity-driven economies exposed to climate change.
But again, the goal is not complete convergence. A serious effort to address the “root causes” would simply seek to liVscek the poorest segments of society out of abject poverty. When the American political class shrugs, what it is giving up is the possibility of even this modest level of progress.
It doesn’t help, of course, that American opulence is unattainable and part of the problem. It is the US that provides the market for drug traffickers. It is Washington’s grotesque failure to regulate even military-grade assault rifles that provides the weaponry. US sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela exacerbate tensions without offering any real escape routes.
And fundamentally, there is a deep political fatigue. Everyone in the United States knows that it would take a significant political effort to convince Congress to allocate significant funds for Latin American development.
Harris’s “root causes” strategy has been backed by $4 billion over four years. To address the scale of the problems in Central America, let alone Venezuela, that’s peanuts. Following the recipe for blended finance, Harris has multiplied those public funds with $5.2 billion in private investment focused on manufacturing, the Internet, and women’s empowerment. All this is good. But private investment is a slow-acting mechanism for addressing acute social and economic crises.
Trump cut aid spending in the region. Biden restored it, but at levels half in real terms of what the US spent in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1960s. And that doesn’t allow for GDP growth in the meantime.
Of course, much of the Cold War spending was disastrous: it fueled military regimes and fueled political violence. But at least at the time, the US felt it had an existential stake in the region. Today, competition with China occasionally sparks interest, but it is at its strongest in the big economies of South America, far removed from the crisis in the isthmus countries.
Images of caged migrant children inspire a moral panic. But without the broader historical framework of the Cold War and the visions of early 20th-century Pan-Americanism, what remains is a more or less cynical acceptance of the status quo. Millions of illegal migrants are being absorbed into the American workforce, accounting for more than 5 percent of all jobs, especially in construction and low-end services. Legal limbo is the price migrants pay for an improvement in their lives. To the extent that they affect the labor market, it is mostly other recent migrants who face competition.
As a modus vivendi, this is infinitely preferable to draconian immigration enforcement. But it amounts to an abdication of regional leadership and institutionalized compliance. Central America is effectively labeled as hopeless. This is in stark contrast to Washington’s bold assertions about its proper role in distant Asia. It is also in stark contrast to the visions of a better America promised by Bidenomics.
One can only hope that, if Harris does win the presidency, she will adopt the kind of ambitious policy for America’s neighbors that she was unable and unwilling to promote when she was vice president.
