U.S. News & World Report/Simeon Tegel: Aid Cuts Won’t Slow Central America’s Exodus

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Aid Cuts Won’t Slow Central America’s Exodus

Cutting aid to impoverished countries will give desperate people more reasons to leave, not to stay, experts say.
By Simeon Tegel ContributorApril 9, 2019, at 8:54 a.m.
U.S. News & World Report
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Central American migrants help each other wrap themselves in mylar blankets, which were distributed by Border Patrol agents, while they wait to be processed and transported to a holding facility in El Paso, Texas on February 22, 2019.(Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

LIMA, Peru — Experts agree that U.S. President Donald Trump's move to halt some $500 million in aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras likely won't lessen the migration crisis at the United States' border with Mexico.

"We were paying them tremendous amounts of money and we're not paying them anymore because they haven't done a thing for us," Trump declared on March 29, when he announced the measure in retaliation for the supposed failure of the three Central American governments to stem illegal migration to the United States. "They set up these caravans in many cases; they put their worst people in the caravan. They're not going to put their best in. They get rid of their problems and they march up here."

But the money is actually intended to allow potential emigrants to stay at home by improving living conditions in the impoverished, violence-wracked countries, including by encouraging economic development and job creation, and helping to tackle rampant corruption and impunity.
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SZEGED, HUNGARY - SEPTEMBER 06: Migrants and refugees celebrate as they cross the border from Serbia into Hungary along the railway tracks close to the village of Roszke on September 6, 2015 in Szeged, Hungary.After days of confrontation and choas Hungary unexpectedly opened its borders with Austria allowing thousands of migrants to leave the country and travel onto Germany. (Photo by

"If anything, the aid needs to be continued and even intensified," says Daniel McQuillan, who has spent the past 10 years working in Honduras and Guatemala for the Baltimore-based nonprofit Catholic Relief Services (CRS). "People are migrating because they feel they have no choice. This aid was helping to give them a choice."

The Connection Between Aid and Migration.

USAID's El Salvador page says its program in the country is intended to "reduce irregular migration" by strengthening "prosperity, security and good governance."

"All cutting this aid will do is cause more instability and force more migration," says Vicki Gass, Oxfam's senior policy adviser for Mexico and Central America. "It will not address the reasons why people are fleeing."
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The money includes funds administered through USAID, the United States' international aid agency, as well as the Alliance for Prosperity, launched in 2015 by the Obama administration. The bulk of it is given to nonprofits, including CRS, to work on a myriad of highly targeted programs varying from improving agricultural productivity to smarter policing to cracking down on tax evasion.

It represents a recognition by development experts, the U.S. Department of State and local officials that as long as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — collectively known as the Northern Triangle — remain among the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere and among the most violent on Earth, immigration, legal or otherwise and largely headed to the U.S., is inevitable.

According to World Bank data, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras had annual per capita incomes in 2017 of just $3,889, $4,471 and $2,480 respectively, far below the Latin American and Caribbean average of $9,275.

Meanwhile, according to U.N. data, those countries have sky-high annual homicide rates, of 83, 27 and 57 per 100,000 residents in 2016. To put that in perspective the U.S. rate is 5 per 100,000 residents and most Western European countries are around 1 or less.

Sometimes described as failed states, the three countries are wracked by high rates of rape, femicide and gang violence, much of it connected to the cocaine trade, with large quantities of the drug passing through on its way from the Andes to the U.S., which the United Nations calls the world's largest cocaine market. In many parts of the Northern Triangle, the only alternative to joining a gang or accepting their rules — and even paying their "taxes" — is near-certain death.
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"These migrants do not want to leave," McQuillan says. "Parents do not want to leave their kids. Husbands do not want to leave their wives, or their town, or farm, and go to a new country where they can't speak the language and aren't even legal."

Underpriced Exports Leave Countries Vulnerable

Oxfam's Gass also blames the migrant crisis on economic models adopted by El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which are largely focused on exporting commodities, like coffee, at the cheapest possible price rather than strengthening domestic markets through raising wages. That failed model has been encouraged by Washington, she says.

McQuillan, who works closely with coffee growers in heavily rural Guatemala and Honduras, says that even well-organized coffee collectives with organic and rainforest-friendly certification receive around 75 cents per 100 pounds of beans.

"That is below cost," he says, blaming both global overproduction and the lack of a disaggregated global coffee price, which would distinguish between high-quality premium produce and that grown on a massive scale, particularly in Brazil and Vietnam, to make instant coffee.
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Unlike Oxfam, which does not accept donations from the U.S. government, CRS could see its operations significantly impacted by Trump's decision to cut back on aid. Its Northern Triangle programs are among its most important in Latin America and the nonprofit receives about 60% of its total funding from the U.S. government.

"It's just bad policy," McQuillan says. "The policy that makes the most sense is figuring out where and how best to invest in these economies. That is the way you can impact migration. It can be done. It's not an intractable problem. But you need to commit to it."
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Simeon Tegel, Contributor

Simeon Tegel is a journalist based in Lima, Peru, who covers South America. You can follow him ...  Read more

Tags: world news, refugees, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Latin America, foreign aid, foreign policy, poverty, global economy, crime, drugs, cocaine, Best Countries

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