Despite the Biden administration’s pledge to spend $4 billion to address the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle, U.S. assistance is doomed unless Biden rejects the policy’s underlying economic model that favours foreign investors over people.
The Decision To Migrate
‘As a father, I don’t want to abandon my daughter,’ Juan, a young Guatemalan man, said the night before he left his home behind to go north in search of economic opportunity. ‘As a husband, I don’t want to leave my wife. As a son, I don’t want to desert my parents.’
The next morning, he would embark on a 2,500-kilometer journey on foot from San Pedro La Laguna in the western highlands of Guatemala to Houston, Texas. Once there, his final destination lay another 3,000 kilometres away, in northern California.
‘It’s because of the pandemic,’ Juan said. ‘It affected everything. Month after month. The only alternative is this.’
Before the COVID-19 pandemic forced borders closed, causing an estimated 60 to 80% drop in international tourism, San Pedro was a bustling town on Lago Atitlán, Guatemala. Its many Spanish language schools, outdoor activities, and nightlife attracted young backpackers and families alike, primarily from the U.S.
Juan’s wife, Maria, was a teacher at one of the language schools. During high season, she often had back-to-back students in the morning and afternoon sessions. This income supplemented the couple’s business: printing custom stickers to decorate the numerous tuk-tuks and motorcycles weaving through the town’s small roads.
Then, in March 2020, Maria’s language school shut due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Bars, restaurants, and other tourist attractions followed suit. And as the town began to suffer from the pandemic-induced recession, fewer customers were willing to spend money on secondary concerns, like that of stickers for their motorcycles. Suddenly, the couple went from a double income house to no income at all, and no opportunities on the horizon.
Maria, along with a few other teachers comfortable using online platforms like Skype, tried transitioning their Spanish classes online, with scant results. She went four or five months with no work at all. ‘The [language] school had their first family this week,’ Maria told CYIS. ‘So five teachers had some work, but there just aren’t many tourists. It’s going to be a long and slow process to get back to normal.’
This long, slow process is hardly unique to Juan and Maria. The World Food Programme estimates that 8 million people in the Northern Triangle and Nicaragua are currently facing hunger, with 1.7 million people in emergency situations. Across Latin America, an estimated 231 million people will be living in poverty this year—the highest level since 2005. Unfortunately, the seismic drop in tourism and skyrocketing poverty rates in Guatemala are not being offset by government assistance. ‘The lucky ones are the ones working for the government, receiving money every month. No one else gets anything,’ she explained.
The lack of support makes the blatant corruption sting even more. ‘Giving millionaires loans, the elites the vaccine,’ she seethed. The inequitable distribution of government resources during the pandemic comes on the heels of former Guatemalan president, Jimmy Morales, forcing Colombian prosecutor, Iván Velásquez, out of Guatemala. Velasquez had led the UN-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) with much public support. However, with President Morales’ move to block further prosecution, many in Guatemala were disillusioned to believe corruption remained endemic in the country. Only a couple years later, as the elites were supported through this economic downturn, families like Maria’s saw their new businesses and steady livelihoods dissipate with no support.
‘We want work, there isn’t any,’ she repeated. ‘No one has money to buy anything.’ People like Maria and Juan are, therefore, left with virtually no choice when deciding to pursue a future within Guatemala or beyond its borders.
Biden’s reputation for being ‘more flexible’ on illegal immigration encouraged Juan, but in reality, domestic U.S. politics had little impact on his decision to migrate. Vice President Kamala Harris’s blunt warning to Central American migrants at her joint press conference with President Giammattei on June 7, 2021—’Do not come, do not come’—was irrelevant to Juan who arrived in Mexico City the day Harris told migrants to stay away from the U.S. border. The curt message from Harris is probably a response to President Giammattei’s criticism in April that the Biden administration’s ‘compassionate messages’ have only increased migration. But rather than improving the U.S.-Guatemala government relationship, Harris’s words are proof that the Biden administration does not understand—or does not care to understand—the situation on the ground.
Juan and Maria’s situation reflects the wide-spread desperation felt across the Northern Triangle. Developing policies to facilitate people staying, and thriving, in their own communities is an excellent aspiration but it does little to help people already in an impossible situation. Juan’s decision to travel to the U.S. does not contradict the Biden-Harris position that migrants would ideally remain in their communities but are being pushed to migrate by a wide variety of factors, including limited economic opportunity, food insecurity, disasters like the two category-5 hurricanes last year, gang violence, and rampant government corruption. Ideally, Juan would stay in San Pedro.
The Biden Administration’s Approach
The Biden administration–in a bid to differentiate itself from Trump's draconian migration laws– is seeking to address the migration crisis by solving the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle. Biden aims to do this via his four-year $4 billion assistance plan. Much of the humanitarian assistance represents a continuation of the work then-Vice President Biden spearheaded in 2014, but despite the billions of dollars the Biden administration envisions revitalising the Central American economies and stemming the flow of migrants, the plan will fail because the money will not be reaching those who need it most.
The Biden plan of assistance is built upon the same economic model that has caused many of the issues facing the Northern Triangle today. The model is one of investor-driven economic development. Aviva Chomsky, author of Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration and Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, writes, ‘The model Washington continues to promote is based on the idea that, if Central American governments can woo foreign investors with improved infrastructure, tax breaks, and weak environmental and labor laws, the ‘‘free market’’ will deliver the investment, jobs, and economic growth that (in theory) will keep people from wanting to migrate in the first place.’
Of course, the very factors attracting investors to the region are the reasons that impoverished residents of the Northern Triangle will not benefit from the Biden plan: tax breaks ensure that there is no revenue to then invest in infrastructure and education, health, and housing programs; weak environmental laws further exacerbate the impacts of climate change on the region and cause health problems via water and air pollution; and weak labour laws ensure that workers remain powerless to demand better wages and conditions.
Just last month, Harris announced that one of the companies the Biden Administration supported investing in the region is Nespresso, which will expand coffee sourcing in Guatemala and then look towards doing the same in Honduras and El Salvador. This investment is lauded as a long-term solution, lasting beyond Biden’s four years as president. However, it is this exact arrangement many owners of small farms resist because Nespresso will likely purchase beans at low prices in Guatemala and then run a profit by selling products in the U.S., and around the world. Instead, farmers ‘aspire to roast, package and ship their beans directly to hipster cafes in Guatemala City, San Salvador and Los Angeles’, thus making the profit themselves.
The political elites with whom Vice President Harris and other U.S. officials are negotiating stand to benefit from maintaining the status quo wherein corporations and landowners continue to monopolise profits. They remain a significant roadblock to achieving the structural transformations that will allow economic growth that helps the working class. Therefore, Biden is proposing a $4 billion economic development plan to support the U.S. corporations investing in the Northern Triangle and predatory local elites, thus exacerbating the ‘root causes’ he has pledged to resolve.
Additionally, millions of dollars will be spent on training and arming military and police forces, just like in 2014 under President Obama. Under pressure from the U.S., Mexico is expanding its control over the Mexico-Guatemala border and Guatemala is doing the same with its border with Honduras. In January of this year, Biden’s acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Michael Kozak, applauded Guatemalan soldiers for blocking a caravan of 2,000 Honduran migrants from crossing into Guatemala on their way to the U.S.. As a result, ‘the U.S. border is moving further and further south,’ a Honduran human rights activist, Ismael Moreno, explained.
Despite the legal—and moral—issues with blocking access to asylum in the U.S as collateral damage when trying to reduce general migration, there are clear benefits for the Biden Administration to stem migration by outsourcing border control to Mexico and Guatemala. The moral outrage directed at President Trump for his administration’s handling of migrants, particularly families and children, can be avoided entirely if migrants are prevented from reaching the U.S. border.
The Mini-Marshall Plan
There is an alternative, however, and its proponents have nicknamed the solution the ‘Mini-Marshall plan’, reminiscent of the 1948 European Recovery Program when the U.S. invested $15 billion in rebuilding Europe with modern, stable economies. There are two key elements of the Mini-Marshall Plan experts like former Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis are advocating for. First, focussing aid on developing infrastructure, schools, and a public health system rather than militarised security. And second, building an integrated regional economy that encourages intra-regional trade that further stimulates national economies.
A plan built on this foundation is radically different from the plan Biden is currently proposing, but there are characteristics of his plan that remain critical. Notably, Biden and Harris’s emphasis on anti-corruption will be integral to creating functioning social programs, quelling violence, and advancing social justice movements.
Furthermore, Biden’s desire to capitalise on remittances that account for as much as 10% of Guatemala’s GDP can help build a stronger regional economy. Given infrastructure that better supports businesses—for example, roads and power grids—local entrepreneurs like Juan and Maria can invest money made in the U.S. in their own communities.
On President Biden’s official campaign site, which outlines many of his plans for his presidency, his team writes that, ‘Joe Biden knows that the most effective and sustainable way to reduce migration from the Northern Triangle is to comprehensively address its root causes.’ He is correct, and it is absolutely critical to do so, but promoting investment from U.S. corporations will not reach people like Juan who are desperately seeking a way to provide for himself and his family without leaving his community.
It is time to dedicate the funds and political will to drafting a comprehensive ‘Mini-Marshall Plan’ to build stable national economies and foster an integrated regional economy in Central America. Politicians can frame this mission in whichever manner they choose. However, regardless of whether this is sold on moral grounds that consider the U.S's historical role in planting the seeds of the root causes of migration or security concerns implicated in the so-called 'border crisis’, it is time to act.
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