American companies this month pledged to invest nearly $1 billion to expand manufacturing operations and other investments in Central America as a way of boosting economies, creating an estimated 1 million jobs and reducing the incentive for people to migrate northward. The pledges, on top of previous ones worked out by the Biden administration, now exceed $4 billion and are exactly the kind of action needed to address the immigration problem at its source.
Such investments are unlikely to stem the erroneous heckling by Republicans that President Joe Biden’s inattention to the border is why the nation faces an opioid epidemic and a surge in illegal crossings, but addressing the causes of mass migration within the home countries is the wisest long-term strategy. Republicans demand that Biden seal up the U.S. border, use force if necessary and circumvent existing asylum laws (passed by Congress) in order to stop migrants from coming.
Those get-tough tactics might serve as a temporary deterrent, but history has proven that such efforts collapse over the long term. Even then-President Donald Trump’s harsh tactics, including mass detentions and forcible separation of migrant children from their parents, did nothing to stop migrant caravans. And the GOP strategy would have minimal effects on the smuggling of fentanyl and other opioids that are coming into the country hidden in cargo trucks and shipping containers.
