In my last post, I offered a timeline of Vice President Kamala Harris’s activities as the administration’s “Root Causes of Migration Czar”. Included was a lengthy excerpt from a January 2022 White House “readout” of a meeting Harris had with the then-newly elected president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, during the last trip Harris took abroad in the role. The duo “discussed deepening our cooperation across a broad range of issues, including addressing the root causes of migration, combatting corruption, and expanding economic opportunity”. Not much progress has been made on corruption there, which may partially explain why CBP has encountered more than 333,000 Honduran nationals at the Southwest border in the past 21 months.
“Push Factors” and “Pull Factors”. Underpinning all migration – legal or illegal – are what so-called “push factors” and “pull factors”.
Pull factors are those that draw immigrants to a specific country. In the legal immigration context, they primarily boil down to just two influences: family ties and economic opportunities.
The same is more or less true when it comes to illegal migration, only with much more nuance.
If you can earn 10 times as much here than you can back home and are all-but assured you’ll be able to enter, live, and work here despite your illegal status, coming illegally becomes more attractive. That’s especially true if your increased wages offset the smuggling or other fees you must pay to get here.
Working illegally generally requires connections, however, and if you have relatives here that can help you get a job, it increases the likelihood that you’ll come.
Conversely, push factors:
are those that force the individual to move voluntarily, and in many cases, they are forced because the individual [may] risk something if they stay. Push factors may include conflict, drought, famine, or extreme religious activity.
Poor economic activity and lack of job opportunities are also strong push factors for migration. Other strong push factors include race and discriminating cultures, political intolerance and persecution of people who question the status quo.
Neither push nor pull factors exist in a vacuum. Even if you’re forced to leave country A, if you can’t then get into country Z, you will either stay in country A or pick a third country. And if country Z is much more economically attractive (and/or you have the connections in Z) than countries B through Y that you must pass through and could alternatively choose to relocate in, you’ll make the trek to Z.
Under the current administration, as federal Judge T. Kent Wetherell, II held in March 2023, the pull factors have trumped all others. As he explained, Biden/Harris administration officials:
effectively incentivized what they call “irregular migration” that has been ongoing since early 2021 by establishing policies and practices that all-but-guaranteed that the vast majority of aliens arriving at the Southwest Border who were not excluded under [Title 42] would not be detained and would instead be quickly released into the country where they would be allowed to stay (often for five years or more) while their asylum claims were processed or their removal proceedings ran their course – assuming, of course, that the aliens do not simply abscond before even being placed in removal proceedings, as many thousands have done.
“Root Causes”. The Biden administration has rebranded those push factors “root causes” for illegal migration, which rather naively (or deceptively) suggests that by addressing those factors at the roots, migrants will simply stop coming illegally, regardless of the lure of the certainty of release or any other pull factors.
There are many problems with such an approach, but two are particularly notable.
The first is that immigration – legal or illegal – has never worked that way anywhere in the world at any point in history, and especially not when it comes to immigration to this country.
In naming Harris to this role, Biden sarcastically groused:
it’s not like someone sits around a . . . hand-hewn table somewhere in Guatemala and says, “I’ve got a great idea: Let’s sell everything we have, give the money to a coyote, have him take our kids or us to the border of America, take us across, leave us in the desert. We don’t speak the language. Won’t that be fun?”
Actually, putting aside the desert part (coyotes never mention the dangers, and few arrivals share them with folks back home), such conversations take place countless times a day as would-migrants make their plans to come here. Trust me – I’ve talked to more illegal crossers than I can count.
The second – and bigger – problem is the root causes identified in a July 2021 plan issued by Harris and the White House National Security Council (NSC), “which include corruption, violence, trafficking, and poverty” in the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (the sole targets of this strategy), are intractable, certainly in the near future and likely ever.
“Combating Corruption and Impunity”. Which brings me back to the January 27, 2022, meeting between Vice President Harris and Honduran President Castro.
At that meeting, according to the official White House readout:
Vice President Harris emphasized that combating corruption and impunity remains at the center of our commitment to address the root causes of migration. To that end, Vice President Harris welcomed President Castro’s focus on countering corruption and impunity, including her intent to request the assistance of the United Nations in establishing an international anti-corruption commission and commitment to advancing necessary legislative reforms to enable such a commission to succeed.
Most of the root causes identified in the July 2021 Harris/NSC plan flow from corruption and impunity. If honest people can’t open or run a business without greasing the palms of government officials, there will be fewer jobs and more poverty. If those government officials are on the take – or worse, actually aligned with criminals – then criminals can act with impunity, and violence and trafficking will flourish.
Thus, “combating corruption and impunity” is the cornerstone of any effort to address the drivers of illegal migration, regardless of whether you call them push factors or root causes.
So, what’s happened since President Castro promised Harris that she would “focus on countering corruption and impunity”?
Here’s how the U.S. State Department described the situation in its latest Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Honduras: “The law provided for criminal penalties for corruption by officials, but authorities did not implement the law effectively, and officials continued to engage in corrupt practices with impunity. There were numerous reports of government corruption”.
In fact, AP reported last June that Gabriela Castellanos, director of the National Anti-Corruption Council (CNA), had fled the country “due to threats”. She left not long after the council “warned of the dangers posed by a ‘concentration of power’ from government posts going to the sons and other relatives of Castro and her husband, former President Manuel Zelaya”.
There’s little English-language coverage of events in Honduras, so it’s not clear whether Castellanos has gone home or not. She apparently serves on the Civil Society Advisory Board of the Partnership for Central America (PCA), a D.C.-based NGO headquartered just a few blocks from the White House, so if Harris wants the skinny on corruption and impunity in Honduras, she could schedule a meeting at PCA.
In any event, there’s reason to take CNA’s nepotism warnings seriously. As Americas Quarterly (AQ) has explained: “Castro’s eldest child is her private secretary, her youngest daughter is in Congress, her brother-in-law is the president of Congress, and his son is the defense minister”.
The brother-in-law in question is Carlos Zelaya, and during the New York federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández (Castro’s predecessor), one witness, Devis Rivera Maradiaga (identified by InSight Crime as a leader of the Cachiros drug organization), claimed that he’d paid Zelaya bribes of between $100,000 and $200,000 (which Zelaya denied; he has not been charged with any crimes).
AQ further notes: “Castro and her allies in the legislature also passed an amnesty law that ostensibly sought to protect those persecuted by past administrations, but critics say that in practice it shields some of her closest allies from prosecution”.
A separate article in InSight Crime on other claims made during the trial, headlined “Honduras ‘Narco-State’ on Trial in US”, underscores why that’s such a salient point.
None of this is to cast any aspersions on Castro, her family, or the situation in Honduras generally. I’m quick to note both that “political family dynasties” aren’t unique to that country and that corruption allegations are just that – allegations.
But if Harris thought she could fly into Tegucigalpa, sit down with the new president, and make any real progress on impunity and corruption, she’s either jejune or simply checking a box to show the White House is “doing something” about the root causes of migration. My money’s on the latter, particularly given that she’s never been back.
“Asylum Seekers”. The biggest problem with a root causes strategy that focuses solely on push factors (aside from its futility and blithe obliviousness to reality) is it assumes all migrants are coming due to real problems back home – problems the wise and powerful United States must swoop in to fix.
It’s the flawed Bush-era “nation building” theory in a border context, and won’t be any more successful.
It’s also pejorative. In 2018, President Trump was excoriated for using an earthy epithet to describe the countries from which border migrants come. The Harris root causes strategy essentially relies on the same conclusions Trump made, only in more diplomatic terms.
And the current administration assumes all those problems migrants claim to have back home constitute “persecution”, entitling them to asylum – at least until immigration judges find otherwise. Hence, the White House refers to illegal entrants as “asylum seekers” even if they’re plainly just economic migrants.
The problem is, most border claimants can’t come close to satisfying that strict persecution standard, as the Supreme Court has held:
Every year, hundreds of thousands of aliens are apprehended at or near the border attempting to enter this country illegally. Many ask for asylum, claiming that they would be persecuted if returned to their home countries. Some of these claims are valid, and by granting asylum, the United States lives up to its ideals and its treaty obligations. Most asylum claims, however, ultimately fail, and some are fraudulent.
Congress expressly mandated the detention of all inadmissible applicants for admission, including illegal entrants, to deter those weak and fraudulent claims. By ignoring that mandate to instead chase its “root causes” chimera, the current administration “incentiviz[es] irregular migration”, as Judge Wetherell held.
In reality, as the administration has tacitly admitted, it’s exercising its “prosecutorial discretion” to ignore that border detention mandate and most other immigration restrictions to “advance[e] equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity”, having concluded the immigration laws are discriminatory.
The administration plainly knows that refusing to detain migrants in lieu of a root causes strategy won’t secure the border. Kamala Harris’s feigned efforts to stem corruption in Honduras prove root causes are intractable. Either the vice president naively bought into this scheme or she was complicit in the White House’s open-borders strategy. Neither is a good look.
Let me bottom-line it: The administration’s feckless “root causes” strategy was its sole effort to stem illegal migration. Once migrants were here, they were here. Therefore, if Vice President Kamala Harris was the “root causes” lead, then she was the “border czar”, regardless of what anyone in the bowdlerized media may tell you today.