This op-ed originally appeared in El Tecolote.
In a chaotic yet necessary turn, President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 Presidential race on Sunday, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the presidential ticket. Harris, who was specifically tasked by Biden to tackle the “root causes” of migration, exemplifies the fundamental incapability of national politics to grapple with the country’s immigration crisis.
The “root causes” strategy, meant to stem migration by improving conditions in three Central American countries, led to some of Harris’ most unfortunate political moments as vice president. During her first trip to Guatemala in June 2021, Harris urged, infamously, “Folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.”
Soon after, Harris took part in an embarrassing interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, who asked her why she hadn’t visited the US-Mexico border yet if her task was to solve its crisis. Harris responded, “At some point, you know, we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt replied, correcting the Vice President, “You haven’t been to the border.” Harris then retorted, “I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t… understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”
These early flubs as VP had an enduring impact on Harris’ reputation, plunging her into Biden’s shadow as the number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border surged over the next three years. Notably, this wave of migration emerged not only from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—but also from across the hemisphere, particularly from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Colombia.
In response to rising numbers of migrants, the Biden-Harris administration signed an executive order on June 4 that halts asylum-seeking at the US-Mexico border when crossings surge. Critics argue this decision will only cause more chaos along the border. It also represents a long-standing Democratic tradition in moments of political uncertainty: punching left and moving right.
Shortly after the executive order, on June 18, the administration announced a significant expansion of the “parole in place” (PIP) program, giving nearly half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to US citizens the ability to stay in the country and work legally. While this is a positive step, it’s a proverbial drop in the bucket when it comes to easing the dehumanization of America’s immigration system.
It also highlights the Democratic party’s signature approach to immigration: qualifying who is worthy to enter.
Would a Harris presidency change that? While it’s hard to disentangle Harris’ actions regarding immigration from the Biden presidency, a brief look into her history as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004-2011 doesn’t give much hope. Midway through her tenure in the city, she supported a policy requiring law enforcement to turn over arrested undocumented youth to ICE, regardless of whether they were convicted of a crime. Outside of that policy, immigration was never one of Harris’ mainstay issues before becoming VP.
GOP’s hard-line immigration stance
However problematic the solutions are on the left, at least there’s some pretense of humanitarian compromise. Republicans, quite unimaginatively, simply don’t deem immigrants worthy.
Since the W. Bush administration, the American right has embraced the darkest parts of racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, a trend that has subsumed their platform as a whole. Right before the failed assassination attempt against Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, Trump touted the “great job my administration did on immigration at the southern border,” which is grimly ironic considering the similarities between his administration’s approach and the Biden-Harris administration.
When Trump officially accepted the party’s nomination amid an excited, if not fervent, Milwaukee crowd at the Republican National Convention on July 17, he wasted no time moving into the red meat of the speech. “A massive invasion on our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land,” Trump said, as suburban moms and small-business dads hooted and cheered.
That kind of fear-mongering has worked well for Republicans over the past 25 years or so, but it’s worth noting that no part of Trump’s speech offered any tangible policy proposal to quell the perceived hordes. Because in actuality, there is no policy that Republicans could back that would stifle the scores of people coming to this country for better opportunities.
The root cause of immigration, ignored
What both parties fail to address is that most, if not all, of the countries migrants hail from have endured some amount of violent US intervention, regardless of the president’s political party.
Stemming from the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the US has operated with relative impunity in Latin America. James Monroe’s annual message to Congress laid out a tentative plan for the future of America and the Western Hemisphere as a whole, allowing the US to invade or overthrow Latin American countries to protect its own interests.
The post-WWII era has seen the Monroe Doctrine put on steroids. Beginning in a Cold War context, in 1954, Republican Dwight Eisenhower supported a coup in Guatemala at the behest of Alan Dulles and the United Fruit Company due in large part to left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz’s land reform that would undercut the multinational company’s profits. In the early 1960s, Democratic President Kennedy supported a coup in British Guyana.
During the Nixon administration in the 70s, Henry Kissinger—the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser who never met a country he couldn’t use to his advantage—sought to dispense with left-leaning Salvador Allende to undermine the leader’s economic reforms. In keeping with Republican strategy, Nixon and Kissinger sponsored Operation Condor, a wide-range strategy of political subversion, repression, invasion, and assassination to undercut the left across the Southern Cone of South America.
In more recent history, the W. Bush administration offered military support for a 2002 coup against Marxist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Seven years later, the Democratic Barack Obama administration supported a coup in Honduras.
Today, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, which are big contributors to the current surge in migrations, are among the countries facing US economic sanctions, a form of “soft power” that can be just as devastating as direct military intervention.
These are just a few examples in a long list of U.S. foreign interventions post-WWII that have forced millions of migrants to make increasingly risky journeys to America, leaving behind countries that have been economically ravaged and marred with violence.
Supplying relief packages for countries that have been ravaged in part by US interference makes the Biden-Harris “root causes” strategy appear misguided at best, and woefully ignorant at worst. To “fix” immigration requires an overarching recalibration of the American state and its history. Doing so would unravel the US’ status as the post-WWII superpower, or at least severely weaken it.
Whether it be Democratic incompetence or Republican disdain, the political issue of immigration is not one any current American politician or party can solve. Referring to it as a political issue distracts from the real people going through daily horrors to alleviate the suffering stemming from US policy.
So, what is to be done?
Despite national failures, there are avenues on a local level to make immigrating a more humane process. Political engagement on a national level is disheartening for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being ineffectiveness. On a municipal level, though, the votes count and the support matters.
Local resources—like the Women’s Building in the Mission that offers weekly food pantries and hosts political events, AROC Bay Area that supports peaceful protests against America’s military presence, and the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area that provides legal services and support to migrants across the region—can make the process better.
While immigration has become a politically useful talking point nationally, local organizations still help make the lives of migrants more equitable.
