By John Daniel Davidson
In just five months, it seems Vice President Kamala Harris has managed to crack the code on illegal immigration. All we have to do to ensure that Central Americans stop illegally crossing our border is to transform the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador into stable, prosperous democracies. That’s it! That’s the answer!
Harris’s office on Thursday released what it calls a “Root Causes Strategy” that lays out, in just 18 pages, what decades of policymakers and successive administrations have apparently missed: the reason so many Central Americans come to the United States illegally, it turns out, is because their countries are plagued by poverty, crime, corruption, and violence. Solve those problems and bang! — you solve illegal immigration.
But seriously, the vice president’s “root causes” document amounts to a heap of bureaucratic nonsense from an administration that has never taken illegal immigration seriously and whose own policies have turned the border crisis into a maelstrom of chaos.
It’s hard to overstate the Biden administration’s fundamental unseriousness about all this, whether it be root causes of migration or the border itself. Every step of the way, Harris has shown a mixture of dismissiveness and incuriosity in her role as Biden’s “border czar.” After a quick jaunt to Mexico and Guatemala last month, and an even more superficial stopover in El Paso (which lasted a few hours and didn’t include a visit to the physical border), Harris has now released what amounts to a list of warmed-over platitudes about creating opportunity and fighting corruption in Central America.
The “five pillars” Harris puts forward as the administration’s core strategy are exactly the kind of inept, unfocused, and often meaningless efforts that have come to nothing over the past two decades in the region: addressing poverty, fighting corruption, promoting human rights, fighting crime, and combating violence. There’s nothing wrong with these as overarching goals, but one must be realistic about the enormity of the task at hand, and cognizant of what’s been tried before — and failed. If this strategy document is any indication, no one in the Biden administration is being the least bit realistic here.
For example, how will the United States accomplish these lofty goals? Take it away, team Harris: “Effecting systemic change and achieving the desired end state of a democratic, prosperous, and safe region will require the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to govern in a transparent, professional and inclusive manner that favors the public interest over narrow private interests.”
That’s great, but does Harris know that the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, is almost certainly a drug-trafficker, whose brother was sentenced to life in prison back in March by a U.S. judge? Is Harris aware that President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, whom she met in June, is right now facing mass civil unrest and demands for his resignation over the firing of a special prosecutor who was investigating corruption cases linked to Giammattei?
But please, let’s hear more about how we’ll never solve illegal immigration unless we can get Honduras and Guatemala to govern “in a transparent, professional and inclusive manner.”
That of course is the whole point of this charade. If you begin with the assumption that the only way to stop illegal immigration is to transform Central America into a model of good governance and economic prosperity, then you’ll never stop illegal immigration. And it appears this is exactly the approach the Biden administration is taking.
The Harris strategy, if you can even call it that, is described as “a core component of our Administration’s efforts to establish a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system.” But there’s no mention of other core components that must be a part of such a strategy in order to succeed.
Those are things like asylum reform, border security, and the robust enforcement of immigration laws, including enforcement of deportation orders in the nation’s interior by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which under Biden has slowed almost to a standstill. Getting Honduras to clean up its act is surely a worthy goal, but we’re on pace for a record number of apprehensions on the southwest border this year, and short-term policy changes, which Biden could make overnight, would have a real and immediate effect on the ground.
Instead, this pipe dream of nation-building in Central America, along with the entire mantra of addressing “root causes,” has been the only thing the administration has been willing to say about illegal immigration and the ongoing fiasco at the border. All the other “root causes” of the current crisis, like Biden’s decision to end a raft of Trump-era border policies as soon as he took office, go unacknowledged. No matter how bad the border gets, none of those early — and, as it turns out, disastrous — decisions by Biden will ever be reconsidered.
To put it bluntly, the “root causes” approach is designed to fail, because it ties the transformation of Central America’s Northern Triangle — a nearly impossible task — to meaningful reform of the U.S. immigration system. It’s like saying yes, of course we need to change our strategic policy toward China, but we have to establish a missile base on Mars first.
That’s not to say that we’re not long overdue for rethinking our long-term policy of strategic neglect toward Central America. Indeed, we can’t solve our illegal immigration problem without changing our approach vis-à-vis Mexico and Central America.
One major shift, for example, is to begin thinking of illegal immigration not primarily as a domestic political issue but as a national security and a foreign policy issue, and to stop thinking of the governments of the sending countries as partners with whom we can collaborate but as bad actors who need some serious arm-twisting to do the right thing.
And what kind of Paradise do you mean you old bat? The kind we see in Nations under Communism? Harris needs to see a Headshrinker
This is like me having a pipe burst in my house and, instead of stopping the flow of water, I determine what the “root causes” were. Bad joint? Corroded pipe? Overpressure? Damage? Sabotage? Meanwhile, carpet, sheetrock, flooring, furniture and photos are being ruined. But, for lack of personal knowledge and determined not to call the previous plumber, I pretend to seek “causes”.
No, stupid. You STOP the damaging flow FIRST, then fart around with “root causes”. You don’t just watch crime, drugs and disease flood the country while you piddle around with petty despots that take our aid money and steal it. That can be resolved when the border is secure.
Trump cut off aid. That changed behavior. How about in your search for “root causes” you examine what has worked? Oh, sorry… that makes too much sense. That would indicate the presence of intelligence.
All this is is something to turn in in response to the criticism of Kamala’s abject failure to do ANYTHING about ANYTHING. Dang, I wish I worked for a boss that was as easily fooled as this whore does.
“Effecting systemic change and achieving the desired end state of a democratic, prosperous, and safe region will require the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to govern in a transparent, professional and inclusive manner that favors the public interest over narrow private interests.”
I wonder if that would even work? Maybe to test it out, Democrats should try it here, instead of the corrupt totalitarian police state they have been putting in place. Basically, they endorse the most corrupt and oppressive regimes in Central and South America.
Between idiot Biden’s stupidity and whore Kamala’s worthlessness and failure, it’s more than clear why so much fraud was necessary to subject the United States to this much disaster.
notice that her plan runs parallel to the ten pillars of communism? her plan collapses pillars 1 and two on the marx’s manifesto into 1, and 3, 4 into 2…. the pedophile is a career plagiarizer and the slut is following in his footsteps
Why doesn’t she start a little closer to home. Say Obama’s home town.
Hell, she could start right down in LA. Their only goal is not to stop dangerous and costly illegal immigration; it is to cover it up.
News Break:
Kamala Harris chuckles as she tells the story. Not the chuckle of an insincere politician making up a story to appeal to her base, but the chuckle of a warm, loving woman. The kind of chuckle you would chuckle while hanging out with your family or locking up non-violent drug offenders for decades.
She recalled in her interview with The Babylon Bee how as a little girl she helped slaves escape to the North on the “undewgwound wailwoad.” (Did we mention how warm and sincere she was? It was like talking to your best bud).
“My parents were pushing me in a stroller,” she says, cackling — no, chuckling — “and I must have gotten loose somehow.” (At the time, there weren’t any safety regulations on strollers, so this is not her parents’ fault, just to be clear). “Anyway, I wandered away down to the Deep South and began helping slaves get to the free states. When my parents found me years later, they were understandably upset. They said, ‘Kamala! What are you doing?!'”
She chuckled again.
“I replied, ‘I’m hewping swaves escape on da undewground wailwoad, mommy!'” Harris then revealed that one of the slaves she helped escape grew up to be none other than Albert Einstein.
Harris, with her likable laugh and authentic demeanor, went on to tell the story of how she helped “Abwaham Winkon” draft the “Emancipation Pwocwamation” and how she refused to give up her seat on a bus, launching the “Civil wights” movement.
The Bee
Yeah, but she never drove an 18-wheeler.