‘Root causes’ aren’t behind migrant surge — it’s open borders
By Todd Bensman on October 14, 2022
As the nation’s “Border Czar,” Vice President Kamala Harris is 20 months into carrying out the White House’s signature “root causes” immigration plan to bring order and security to America’s southern border. The idea behind it was that if America fixes the poverty, physical insecurity, and bad governance that drive emigration from three big sending nations — Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — its citizens will rather stay home.
Voila! American border squared away.
So how’s that root causes nation-building project working out so far?
Short answer: About as well as the idea worked for European liberals who first concocted the root-causes doctrine in the early 1980s, resurrected it after the catastrophic mass migration of 2014-2015, and have seen it fail miserably ever since. Border Patrol apprehension numbers, widely regarded as the chief indicator of total crossings, is the ultimate progress report.
In 2020 when Donald Trump was in office, Border Patrol caught 106,762 Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans. By the end of fiscal 2021, they’d caught 701,049. Border Patrol caught another 505,448 this fiscal year with another month left to count.
https://cis.org/Bensman/Root-causes-arent-behind-migrant-surge-its-open-borders