Today, Explained - Banned: Aid

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

After months of threats, President Donald Trump has officially taken steps to cut off aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Vox's Dara Lind explains what this might mean for the current unprecedented wave of family migration to the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Daryl Lind, you host the Weeds podcast from Vox. President Trump is saying he's going to cut aid to three Central American countries. How come? So Trump has expressed for a while frustration with those three countries, which are the three countries that account for the current wave of migration to the U.S. going back about five years or so. It's now more common that people come from Guatemala or from Honduras, for example, than from Mexico. Trump blames those countries for not doing enough to stop their people from coming. And the State Department has actually formally notified Congress that it will be cutting off some aid as a kind of gesture of they're not doing enough for us,

so why should we do anything for them? And these three countries are El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Can we go through the three and find out what the situation is on the ground, starting with El Salvador? Of the three countries, it's the one that is currently sending the fewest people to the U.S. Okay. There was actually a big decline, even as overall unauthorized migration to the U.S. has surged in the last few months. El Salvador is sending fewer people substantially than it was a few years ago. As a matter of fact, the Trump administration has actually touted its efforts there, partly with foreign aid and helping to reduce migration by reducing violence. The country still does have serious gang and government impunity issues, but homicides are substantially down there from a few years ago. And the country elected a new president.

So we hope for a new era, not only in El Salvador, but in our relationship with the United States. There appears to be a certain amount of interest among Salvadorans in sticking around and seeing how things play out. The U.S. can send us a billion dollars in aid, but that won't make a real difference. But if the United States starts doing business with us, that will really make a real difference, that is solid, and that will create real jobs. Okay, and what's up in Honduras? Honduras has, I think, governance issues would kind of be the polite way to put it. There's both substantial poverty and malnutrition in the country, but also, like El Salvador, one of the world's highest homicide rates,

substantial problems of gang violence. People are killed here and the police never investigate. That's what happens to the poor here. And a government that often does not have effective control and has its own kind of impunity problems. The 2018 Human Rights Report from the State Department said very diplomatically that civilian authorities at times did not maintain effective control over the security forces, which is a polite way to say that people with guns and badges are going around doing things that are not under the government's control. There's substantial problems of, you know, gang involvement and infiltration in, you know, police and security forces in these countries. There are also problems of civilian crackdowns.

For example, the protests that erupted at the end of 2017 over the re-election of the current president resulted in 22 people being killed. It is not the safest place to be if you might be questioning the government. We'll put it that way. And things are even worse in Guatemala? Guatemala is a tricky problem because Guatemala is the country that is sending the most people to the U.S. And it's also the country of the three of them that has had the least violence and gang instability problems. But it's like crushing poverty in large part due to what appear to be climate change related patterns that are causing problems for farmers there. We have concentrations of malnutrition, chronic malnutrition in children as high as 90 percent in some municipalities.

And this is unbelievable. And that's happening at the same time that the government is backsliding on a lot of anti-corruption stuff. So there are both governance problems there and this really crushing poverty that's leading people to believe that they have absolutely no future in the country. How surprising was this for these three countries and the rest of the government that President Trump's saying he wants to cut this aid. Trump has been saying this for a while, but there's a certain kind of threat that Trump makes that just never goes anywhere. It's like Trump vaporware. The key example here is when he threatened to cut off FEMA aid to California, like literally no intergovernmental action was taken to do that. It was just Donald Trump saying he did a thing. And so for a while, it was kind of assumed that that's where aid to Central America was going to be because

other Trump administration officials, even while the president was saying, I'm going to cut off aid, were out there talking about how important it was to the U.S.'s goals in the region. So last week was a substantial shift in that regard. There were reports over the weekend when the State Department announcement went out that like plenty of people in the field didn't even understand what it meant for the contracts that they already had, that they didn't really know what exactly was being cut off. They understood why it was happening because it's obvious that the president wanted this. But there's definitely concern, even within the administration, not to mention anybody who's worked on development, that this is going to be counterproductive.

So why do it? What's the argument? So the unspoken assumption in talking about aid to Central America for the last five or so years is it is supposed to get fewer people coming to the U.S., right? So we give them money to stop the migration. The logic is the permanent solution to unauthorized migration is to address the root causes that cause people to want to leave. So if we make Guatemala a better and more prosperous place to be, people won't feel the need to leave their home countries. The Trump administration is looking at that and going, well, if that were true, we wouldn't have so many people coming to the U.S. right now.

So clearly this isn't doing anything many people coming to the U.S. right now. So clearly this isn't doing anything or it's not doing enough. We were paying them tremendous amounts of money and we're not paying them anymore because they haven't done a thing for us. Donald Trump himself often takes kind of a punitive spin on it that like these countries are taking money from us and so we're going to get them back for not giving us what we want. But the take that, say, Mick Mulvaney gives is. If it's working so well, why are the people still coming?

Why are these historic numbers? Again, 100,000 people will cross the border this month alone. Which is higher than any time since the Great Recession. And for the first time in history, 60 percent of them are families. That is a crisis. It's a humanitarian crisis. It's a humanitarian crisis. It's a security crisis. It's not working well enough to help us solve our border crisis.

And that's what the president's focused on. There is definitely reason to be concerned about the current migration crisis. But they're looking at that and going, well, we're doing aid. We're still getting this outcome. Therefore, the aid must not be doing anything. That's kind of their logic. So this is reaching a boiling point right now. The migration crisis is the worst it's been in a decade.

And in the thick of it, the president's saying we're cutting off aid. Right. I mean, he's also saying that we're going to close the U.S.-Mexico border. That's kind of the other longstanding Trump threat that it looks like he's actually trying to put teeth behind now. But that's really, really hard to do. And it's also, it would also be an economic disaster. But what makes this migration crisis unique is that a lot of these people are seeking asylum and legally they have that right once they're on U.S. soil. They don't have the right to necessarily get their claims approved. But even though so many of these people who are coming in are getting apprehended and are actually turning themselves in, the problem, as Trump sees it, is once they're

on U.S. soil, they have rights. Therefore, we need to stop them before they get here. And so the border threat is a threat to Mexico. The Central American stuff is sometimes portrayed as a way to ship these countries up and get them to take it seriously. But there is an understanding in the administration that this requires cooperation with Mexico and with Central American governments to get them to do what the U.S. wants them to do. And then, of course, Trump appears to think that the best way to do this is to bully them into going along. So what comes next? If the administration expects that because aid got cut off, countries are suddenly going to be able to stop their people from leaving, like, we know that's not going to happen. The question in the Central American migration crisis has never been, like, can a country stop its people from leaving, especially these countries, countries that can't guarantee the safety of their people generally, don't necessarily have the capacity to physically prevent them from leaving.

It's always been Mexico's role in all of this. And that's the other we're going to get the region stabilized is for us to have a 21st century Marshall Plan, to invest a lot in southern Mexico and in the northern triangle of Central America. And the U.S. was at least paying lip service to going along with that. And in return, on the ground, the AMLO administration has done a lot to help the U.S. stop people from coming in. The question I think now is going to be, is that cooperation going to continue apace now that the U.S. has basically kicked sand in the face of Mexico and said, actually, we don't agree with your 21st century Marshall Plan.

We don't think that these countries need any money. We think that you just need to stop people from coming just because we said so, whether Mexico is going to bristle at that at all. Dara, I'm wondering if we can get a bit more into the actual aid that the United States provides to Central America. How much money are we talking about and where exactly does the money go, to the best of your knowledge? Right. So the State Department said that there were going to be about $700 million up in the air. I think about half a billion of that was unallocated money that they were still holding onto from 2018. Okay.

As far as where that goes, it's really, really a broad array of things. The State Department and USAID, they're doing some of the stuff themselves. They're writing checks to nonprofits on the ground, both international and local. They're sending money to other U.S. government agencies that are doing international programs. And in Central America in particular, the vision of the current Central American strategy set by the Obama administration is to braid together security improvements, governance improvements, kind of like transparency, anti-corruption, and economic development on the logic that you can't really just fix one of those. That, like, if somebody is safer but is still starving, that they're still going to want to leave. Yeah. That actually, you know, deterring migration in the long run requires working on all three of these together.

And so if you think this sounds like the president's just cutting off aid directly to these governments, that's not the case. This money is going to all sorts of organizations that do work within these three countries. Right. And some of it is work that is supposed to, you know, bolster the central government. Like a lot of the security training in particular is like, you know, the State Department, its anti-narcotics division has a really robust presence, like training police in these countries. So it is, it's not that the government doesn't benefit at all from it, but that's the State Department doing that work or whatever other government agency. When USAID is working to like improve economic opportunity for girls in a certain village in Guatemala, they're like they might be partnering with a charity or giving money to the UN for that kind of thing. Like the people receiving the checks are not government employees, even though in theory the logic is that it's going to help the strength and stability of that government in the long run.

So you mentioned the Obama administration. Did President Obama increase aid to these countries? The Trump administration ostensibly is still operating under the aegis of a Central America strategy that the Obama administration signed off on in 2014. And 2014 is notable because that was when we saw the kind of child migrant crisis that summer, the first big spike of this wave of new migration from Central America. The Pentagon said today it is opening a third emergency shelter for thousands of unaccompanied children who are pouring into the United States from Central America. Over the last year, the number of children crossing illegally has surged from 24,000 to 47,000.

The Obama administration kind of hit the gas on the kind of integration of aid streams that they were already thinking about a little bit, but that became very rapidly the thing that they were doing to address this crisis. As part of its response, the White House announced tens of millions of dollars in new spending aimed at stopping the flow of unaccompanied kids and the crime driving them from home.

Their line on it was, well, we're doing the hard work of addressing the root causes. And so that's an appealing message to immigration hawks as well, right? Oh, we're going to stop people from wanting to come to the U.S. by taking on these issues at the root. But the Trump administration is generally committed to cutting things like foreign aid. And so the amount of money that they've asked for from Congress has continued to decrease. But it's decreasing, you know, from levels that were set by the Obama administration as a, OK, we really need to prioritize Central America right now. Did that Obama administration's refocusing of Central America do anything? Because things are getting worse, right?

There is some legit evidence that reducing violence reduces the emigration of, in particular, children. But there's also evidence that if you improve somebody's economic conditions just a little bit, the thing they do with that extra money is emigrate. Because they'll use that money to fund their journey to go somewhere else that will pay them a lot more money. So it's not really a great idea generally to look at, oh, well, people are still coming. That means the aid didn't work. Yeah. Unless the reason that you're engaging in aid is exclusively to stop people from migrating. That said, it's important to look at El Salvador here because some members of the Trump administration really were trumpeting that as a big victory for the root causes model.

They were talking about it, you know, last summer and fall when migration was really, you know, spiking from Guatemala and Honduras and decreasing from El Salvador. That's what's causing some people to raise their eyebrows at this decision right now, because the Trump administration has never come out and said, well, we've decided that that actually didn't work. It's part of the problem that this just takes a certain amount of trust in aid that you have to surrender a whole bunch of money and not necessarily know whether it's helping or not. And maybe the Trump administration doesn't have the patience for that anymore. Yeah. I mean, aid is always a very slow process. Like there are so many indirect things that

influence whether somebody feels safe in their home country, that influence whether they can be prosperous, not to mention totally intangible stuff like do they have trust in government? Does the government promote human rights? Like because you're not literally paying people to be not corrupt, it's a very complicated system that you're trying to influence. And so it's really difficult to know would this be worse if this money weren't being spent in the way it's being spent? Or is there a more effective way it could be spent? Like there is an entire industry to evaluate this very thing. It is not that the Trump administration is making that assessment. It's that the Trump administration has decided that its need to reduce the number of people coming into the U.S.

and to show that it's tough trumps, you know, any kind of benefit that it could be having. How is this message being received in Central America? It's been several days now since the president's officially sort of announced this. It's generally not reasonable to expect that you're going to hear super feisty responses out of Central American countries. The bottom line is that governments of these countries in particular definitely need the U.S. a lot more than the U.S. needs them. The history of U.S. involvement in Central America and of U.S. support of these governments in particular is such that it's just they aren't necessarily going to pick a fight on any particular thing. But in the meantime, we can expect this crisis to get worse.

The numbers of people coming into the U.S., absolutely. There is not an indication that that's going to slow down. It typically increases through spring anyway. Donald Trump likes to portray things as very sudden. When Mexico pulled a bunch of people off buses a couple of days ago, he said, well, finally, for the first time in decades, they're stopping people from coming. And like, that's not true at all. Mexico has deported hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants over the last several years.

We're not going to see a bunch of people emigrating from El Salvador because the U.S. cut off aid there. In fact, if we do see increasing numbers of people coming from El Salvador in the coming months, it's going to be really hard to say, well, it's because aid stopped. Even if violence does increase and then emigration starts up again, it's going to be hard to draw, well, it's because AIDS stopped. Even if violence does increase and then immigration starts up again, it's going to be hard to draw those lines. So yeah, we're dealing with a regional crisis. By one estimate, 1% of the population of Honduras and Guatemala are going to leave the country by the end of this year. It's really a massive issue that's going to take a lot of intergovernmental effort to get back to any kind of equilibrium. And even without the added wrinkles of cutting off aid, it's not clear what the solution would be. It's just that we know pretty well that cutting off aid is not getting us any closer to

that. Daryl Lind writes about immigration for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained.