Since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him, Republican lawmakers have focused more on Harris’ record on the southern border.
“The fact is she has a long track record of opposing border security and immigration enforcement, whether as a senator, a presidential candidate, or as Joe Biden’s ‘border czar,’” Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, recently said on the House floor.
Although Biden didn’t give Harris the formal title of “border czar,” he tasked Harris in the third month of his presidency with “leading the administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” according to a White House fact sheet.
Since March 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the Border Patrol has encountered over 1.9 million illegal aliens from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras along the southern border, the same number of total illegal aliens the agency said it encountered during all four years of the Trump administration.
Between the start of fiscal year 2017 on Oct. 1, 2016, and the end of fiscal year 2020 on Sept. 30, 2020, which represents most of the time Donald Trump was president, the Border Patrol encountered a total of 1,952,654 illegal aliens from nations around the world at the southern border, according to CBP data.
Since Biden tasked Harris with addressing “the root causes of migration” from the three nations, CBP has encountered over 282,000 El Salvadorian nationals, 853,000 illegal aliens from Guatemala, and over 808,000 from Honduras.
In June 2022, a little over a year after Harris was put in charge of addressing the central causes of illegal immigration out of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the vice president “announced more than $1.9 billion in new private sector commitments to create economic opportunity in northern Central America.”
The pledge followed an initial $1.2 billion in private sector commitments in December 2021.
In April 2022, the White House released a long fact sheet detailing Harris’ actions to address mass migration out of northern Central America. The long list included small business financing, millions of dollars to fight COVID-19, actions to create more than 70,000 jobs, funding for school feeding programs, creation of a Justice Department Anti-Corruption Task Force, and the training of over 5,000 civilian police across the region, to name a few examples.
Because so many U.S. resources were used to address migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, The Daily Signal spoke with Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, to understand why Harris’ efforts didn’t appear to result in a decrease in the number of citizens fleeing that region.
The issues driving immigration out of Central American countries, whether it be “corruption, or poverty, or crime, violence, … lack of economic opportunities, those are endemic problems,” Arthur said.
“Early on, the Biden administration made clear that it was going to reject deterrence as a border strategy,” Arthur said. “In lieu of this, [the administration was] putting all of the eggs in the [one] basket, putting its total focus on root causes.”
Focusing on the root causes of illegal immigration while not also focusing on deterrence means that “in the short term, there’s really nothing that you can do to address those problems,” he said. “And honestly, even in the long term, you know, until the point at which those countries have American-level living standards and American governance standards, those problems will always exist.”
Instead of placing a focus on border security, Arthur said, the way the Biden-Harris administration “has approached immigration is to say, ‘The world is a bad place, these countries are bad places, and until we can make those countries better, we should allow nationals of those countries to come to this country, be released, and to make asylum claims.'”
The Biden-Harris administration has sought to address root causes of illegal immigration in Central America through the use of “diplomacy and money to make those root causes better,” Arthur said. But, he said, “because the administration has had this categorical policy of releasing people who enter the United States illegally, they keep showing up in increasing numbers.”
Just over 31% of illegal aliens encountered at the nation’s borders were removed during the Trump-Pence administration, according to the National Immigration Center for Enforcement. During the Biden-Harris administration, by contrast, 4.4% of illegal aliens encountered at the borders have been removed.
Harris previously advocated “progressive” immigration policies. Most notably, during her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she expressed support for providing government health care to illegal aliens and decriminalizing border crossings by foreign nationals.