Democrats shouldn’t be so sanguine about Kamala's 'Root Causes' strategy

In recent weeks, the vice president’s defenders have been eager to point out that Kamala Harris was never the “border czar,” responsible for securing America’s wide-open Southern border. Instead, they claim, she was only in charge of addressing the “root causes” of migration in Central America.

Even if that were true, the vice president’s supporters shouldn’t be so keen to brag about it.

In 2021, the Biden administration launched the “Root Causes” strategy, a lofty initiative led by Vice President Kamala Harris which purported to address the challenges of mass migration through U.S. development aid to Central America. Three years and $3 billion later, however, the impact of Harris’ root-causes initiative is practically indiscernible.

USAID points to dubious and unfalsifiable metrics as evidence of the success of the “Root Causes” strategy, obfuscating its meager impact, saying its support “helped create or sustain more than 70,000 jobs” in Northern Central America since 2021. During a recent congressional hearing, USAID officials even touted an increase in H-1B visas for Central Americans as a top achievement of the Root Causes strategy.

The reality is that the Biden administration’s 2021 plan was not new, but a simple repackaging of failed development strategies used for decades with added emphasis on liberal wish list priorities. Aid programs for controversial climate change, social activism, gender ideology, labor unions and regional journalism were added to a series of other priorities that were admirable but ultimately tangential to the challenge of mass migration, such as gender-based violence, workers’ rights and corruption.

This controversial liberal activism, especially on gender ideology, not only failed to fix the migration crisis, it actually hurt U.S. relations in the region and generated backlash from with Central America’s socially conservative leaders and people. But even without its progressive foibles, Vice President Harris’s plan to address the “root causes” of the migration crisis was on shaky ground from the outset.

Consider the ineffectiveness of economic development as a solution to the migration crisis, for example. Mexico has benefitted from deep trade integration with the U.S. for decades, helping it achieve a GDP per capita more than twice that of Guatemala and nearly three times that of Honduras. Still, Mexican nationals remain the largest group of new illegal migrant arrivals to the U.S. Even if Vice President Harris were somehow able to massively accelerate Central American economies, the lesson from Mexico is that illegal migration will continue to flow.

Another folly of Vice President Harris’ “root causes” strategy is its failure to contend with the reality of hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving to Latin America from Asia and Africa before making their way to the U.S. Should we also seek to massively increase aid to these regions to address their root causes? No. To do so would waste further billions more and likely yield even poorer results.

There is simply no alternative to a secure border when it comes to combatting illegal migration. The first step for the next administration must be to stop outsourcing the problem to the development industry or the Mexican military and instead exert control over the U.S. border.

Additionally, the next administration should fundamentally rethink its development aid strategy in Latin America, aligning it toward vital U.S. economic and national security interests to ensure its effectiveness. The first Trump administration made important strides toward this goal by focusing on increasing hemispheric trade and investment rather than pouring billions of taxpayer funds into failed social programs, but much remains to be done.

Congress can also play a fundamental role toward this goal by demanding accountability for aid funds and ensuring that development funds are not hijacked by controversial social activism.   

What won’t work is four more years of Vice President Harris’s “root causes” strategy, which was poorly conceived and had predictably poor outcomes. Rather than bragging about it, the U.S. should learn from its failures and craft a strategy that addresses the migration crisis head on and helps put Central America on a sustainable path.    

Andres Martinez-Fernandez is a senior policy analyst in Heritage’s Allison Center for National Security. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.