Amid yet another crisis of unaccompanied minors arriving at the southern U.S. border in large numbers, it’s easy for politicians to take potshots at one another about what has become an easy wedge issue.
But if decades of successive administrations and failed approaches have revealed anything, it’s that fixing the “root causes” of out-migration from Central America, to borrow the term du jour, will not be quick or easy.
Georgia companies and nonprofits have tried to be part of the solution, operating for decades in a region that news reports have reduced to a nuisance for the U.S. but offers cultural and economic richness for those who engage with it productively, experts said during an early May Latin American Crossroads conversation hosted by Global Atlanta.
Much of the attention has turned to the so-called Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, lumped together in a shorthand that tends to gloss over their differences in acknowledging their shared challenges of governance, corruption, narco-trafficking and legacies of war.
Watch the full conversation:
President Joe Biden has tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with tackling the issue, ironically by taking up some of the same solutions he began to enact in the same role under the Obama administration — funding to shore up civil society organizations, billboards encouraging people to stay home and efforts to drive economic growth.
The Trump administration discarded these approaches, taking a tougher stance that focused on building a physical wall and forcing Central American asylum seekers to “Remain in Mexico” while their claims were processed — a signature Trump policy that Mr. Biden ended only early this month, said Charles Kuck, founding attorney at Kuck Baxter Immigration, which sponsored the “Transforming the Triangle” event along with series sponsor Emory Executive Education at Emory’s Goizueta Business School.
While Mr. Trump’s family-separation policies were decried by activists as cruel and poorly executed, the idea of detaining migrant children is not new, and the complex origins of the problem defy easy blame-laying.
“Everybody put kids in cages, because they didn’t know how to deal with it but didn’t eally understand initially why that was happening. Once (the Obama administration) figured out they had a plan, and the plan was working, and then the Trump administration ended that plan and started building a wall, thinking a wall is going to keep people out, which it obviously does not do,” Mr. Kuck said.
One issue is the Temporary Protected Status, enacted in the 1990s in the wake of the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Mitch, which enabled some Hondurans to build lives in the United States while traveling legally back and forth. Now, many of their Honduran-born children 13-15 years old are headed north as caretakers pass away and pressures like violence and criminal gangs grow.
But Trump policies made things worse, Mr. Kuck said. He ended an Obama-era rule that granted refugee quota numbers to children of Hondurans enjoying temporary protected status, then created as policy that encouraged parents trapped in Mexico to send kids across unattended.
“If you send your children across alone, they’ll take the kids. Many of you have seen the movie ‘Sophie’s Choice’ — this is Sophie’s Choice. What are you going to do? Live in a tent in Mexico, where getting kidnapped and ransomed is basically guaranteed?” Mr. Kuck said during the event.
A lesser-known culprit driving migration is climate change, which has exacerbated longstanding economic trends in places like Guatemala, said J.T. Way, a history professor at Georgia State University and the author of “Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala.”
Two hurricanes that hit Honduras last year, plus the economic uncertainty of the pandemic, have been drivers of northward movement. In Guatemala, even before today’s crippling drought, which has made subsistence farming even less attractive, encroachment of large export-oriented farms, carving up of family plots and other trends have driven urbanization, though many people have kept links to the countryside. An “upper lower class” of farmers contracted to grow cash crops has emerged. They send their kids to school in the cities, detaching them further from the land, Dr. Way said.
“There’s work for some of them. But for most of them, there are just no jobs. And so these are these villagers, many of them, who are coming up and migrating to the United States in what’s now become a flood to the point where remittances (remesas) are the No. 2 source of foreign exchange in Guatemala. And arguably most of the development is being paid for with remittance dollars, so it becomes an endless sort of feedback loop,” Dr. Way said.
He also blamed a decades-long trend of government decentralization, encouraged by aid groups, local activists and foreign benefactors alike, that has backfired by creating small fiefdoms around the country.
“The problem is in a weak new democracy that’s torn up by the wounds of war and all the vengeances that go with that, that is being interpenetrated by organized crime of every type. It’s made municipal government become a seat of corruption, graft and violence in ways I don’t think anyone imagines but that are a primary driver,” Dr. Way said.
This so-called “narco-governance” can be a factor in asylum cases, said Mr. Kuck. While governments are bound by international law to weigh the claims of those who fear returning to their countries, successful cases under U.S. law rely on the ability to prove persecution due to religion, politics or membership in a specific social group. With gangs increasingly controlling local government apparatus, some asylum seekers now may have legitimate claims that they are being targeted for their political views.
In some cases, countries that had made progress are now seen as backsliding. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez is accused of (thought not yet indicted for) being linked to organized crime, while El Salvador’s populist president, Nayib Bukele, recently drove through a law removing constitutional justices from the country’s supreme court.
That has threatened the stability of business operations in a country where YKK, the Japanese-owned zipper multinational that runs its Americas business out of metro Atlanta, has seen great success.
“I can talk to you about revolution, I can talk about threat of kidnapping, and fear of gangs and embezzlement, and all of those kind of tropes,” said Jim Reed, president of YKK Corp. of America. “But one thing that we should really focus on is that our operations in Central America continue to be very good investments with great profits. It’s a smart business move.”
Companies, he said, can provide a reason for people to stay by operating with the highest standards and engaging deeply in their communities. In San Salvador, where YKK has operated since the 1970s, that has meant providing a doctor on site, school supplies for workers’ children and subsidized lunch, in addition to practical measures like adjusting shift times so people aren’t walking home in the dark.
“One of the best things a business can do is operate down there. And if you can provide a fair wage, then people won’t migrate. You provide that stability. If you operate with a focus on compliance, and honesty, and don’t fall into graft, you create an example, and you can create a culture,” Mr. Reed said.
Other commodities in short supply in rural Central American communities are financing and hope, said John Burrough, a former NFL player who now leads HOI, formerly known as Honduras Outreach International.
The organization has a functioning ranch in the northeastern Olancho region where it has brought hundreds of volunteer mission workers from the U.S. over the years. But it also offers structured programs in hundreds of communities focused on economic and spiritual empowerment, partnering with corporations and, yes, the government, where possible.
To “cement hope” in the region, Mr. Burrough said during the panel discussion, organizations must take a holistic view of personal development, addressing poverty not only in the material sense but also in terms of relationships, identity and community belonging. Migration occurs when opportunity seems to have left.
“That is just a symptom of a much deeper problem that’s going on in the Northern Triangle. When hope is not present, when hope is distant, you can’t see a brighter future. Desperation will set in with families … and when desperations sets in, despair will take root, and people make really difficult decisions when they’re living in that type of environment,” he said. That said, money is a big part of the equation, which is why HOI is working on community finance networks and growing micro enterprises in Honduras.
Just as important is building up entrepreneurs and helping grow the innovation ecosystems in each country, said Monica Novoa, research faculty and program manager with the economic development lab at Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute.
EI2, as the institute is known, has hosted more than 20 Central American entrepreneurs as part of the La Idea business incubator program underpinned by the U.S. State Department, and it also offers the Soft Landings Program to help foreign companies determine whether and how they should break into the U.S. market.
“Entrepreneurial capacity building locally is so important, because entrepreneurs have potential in Central America,” said Ms. Novoa, a Venezuela native, adding that studies show that investors see promise in the businesspeople of the region. “But they need the entrepreneurial skills and financial training. They need the mindset to think globally, because each country in Central America is a very small market. If they can solve a problem that has a global reach, then they can be integrated into the supply chain and grow and have a more strong ecosystem in the region.”
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