Biden’s response to the border crisis could result in more migration, not less | Opinion

In May, President Biden tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to head the administration’s diplomatic efforts with Mexico and the “Northern Triangle” countries — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — to address the root causes of the current border crisis.

Yet, no one should be fooled.

This is primarily a distraction to avoid accepting responsibility for the mess he has created at the border. And, ironically, the policies the administration will promote in the region, which include advancing their extreme ideological agenda, will do little to stem the flow of migrants to our border and could even result in more, not less, migration.

The White House is afraid of the political consequences of the crisis. A June Harvard-Harris Poll shows that only 36 percent of voters think Biden should continue its current policies, while 55 percent say the Trump administration policies should have been kept. To change this narrative, they hope to shift the focus of the discussion from the Biden policies that are the immediate cause of the unprecedented crisis we’re currently facing to the long term causes of illegal migration, which are found in region.

That’s why the administration continues to tout its efforts to deal with the lack of economic opportunities and violence that encourage so many people to leave their countries. Biden has already pledged $4 billion in new aid to the region. It’s unrealistic to think, however, that this will go very far in solving these problems.

For decades, we have provided financial and technical assistance to these countries; still, living conditions there haven’t improved. The reality is that no amount of aid can change these countries around. At the end, only their leaders can make the difficult decisions that can fundamentally transform their societies — and they’ve been slow to make them.

What is more, the administration’s efforts to tackle the serious governance and corruption problems in the region are not taken seriously or come across as politically biased. It wasn’t lost on many in the region that while the administration criticized El Salvador President Nayib Bukele for firing five Supreme Court justices who were blocking his agenda, Biden has created a commission to study expanding the U.S. Supreme Court — likely with liberal judges.

And in Guatemala, the administration seems to be supporting efforts by the left to politicize the criminal-justice system, as it is unwilling to recognize and denounce the ideologically bias of the country’s anti-impunity unit within the Office of the Attorney General. Vice President Harris hasn’t helped either, welcoming at the White House the former Attorney General Thelma Aldana, who is wanted in Guatemala on corruption charges and, who, while in office, aggressively targeted politicians and private individuals aligned with the center-right, while protecting those from the left suspected of criminal activity.

More troubling, perhaps, is that the administration is already using the crisis to push its progressive agenda, identifying as root causes of mass migration things that have nothing to do with the problem such as “violence against women, Indigenous people, LGBTQ people, and Afro-descendants.” A 2018 survey conducted by the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration, like other recent studies, shows that the main reason Central Americans joined migrant caravans was to find better economic opportunities.

Interventionist efforts to aggressively impose ideological programs will antagonize the vast majority of people in the region who resent these attacks on their sovereignty and see them as a form of “cultural imperialism.” Moreover, pushing “racial equity” theories in these racially and ethnically diverse countries can only foster an environment of social confrontation and potentially violence.

The root causes for the present-day border crisis are not found south of the border, but at the White House. The president should own up to his mistakes, regardless of the political fallout, and reinstate the Trump administration policies that effectively discourage migrants from coming to our border.

No intervention in the region right now will end the immediate problem we face at the border. If anything, heavy-handed meddling in their internal affairs can incite social and political unrest, destabilizing the region and producing more migration.

Alfonso Aguilar is the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and former chief of the U.S. Office of Citizenship in the administration of President George W. Bush.