Yes, Kamala Ran Biden’s Disastrous Efforts To Increase Migration

Okay, fine: Vice President Kamala Harris never held an official government title called “border czar.” But the media fact checkers and partisan fans who have zeroed in on separating her from that euphemistic title — as though this silly contest over rhetoric absolves her of responsibility for the worst mass migration crisis in American history — does not cut the anchor line.  

The president of the United States assigned Harris to “lead the effort” of the administration’s signature border security strategy, the main one he chose above all others, for ending mass illegal immigration over the southern border. That strategy was to alleviate the so-called “root causes”spurring outmigration from its most common sources — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, also known as the Northern Triangle.

The president and his top lieutenants regarded the root-causes doctrine — which calls for nation-building to induce aspiring emigrants to stay home instead — as central to his entire border-management strategy and found Harris a highly willing, eager root causes chief.

“I look forward to engaging in diplomacy with government, with private sector, with civil society, and … the leaders of each in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to strengthen democracy and the rule of law, and ensure shared prosperity in the region,” Harris responded after her presidential appointment at a March 24, 2021, press event announcing her new role.

A few months later, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reiterated that Harris would lead a “whole-of-government approach” to “lead the Administration’s work on our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, a testament to the importance this administration places on improving conditions in the region.”

Inalterable Numbers

Hard, inalterable facts also show that Harris’ leadership over the implementation of the U.S. root causes doctrine was as complete a failure as any in American history. It rightly saddles her and her boss with what happened to our country as a direct result — a record-smashing 10 million foreign nationals crossing the southern border in 36 months, because the top team let most of them in to stay.

Before Covid, in fiscal year 2019, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended a total of 609,775 Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans crossing the border. By the end of Harris’ first year overseeing the root causes strategy in 2021, that number was 701,049. During the next two years of Harris overseeing the root causes doctrine, Border Patrol encountered another 1,036,904 such immigrants.

So far this fiscal year through the end of June, Border Patrol has encountered another 347,911, which projects out to another more than half million by fiscal year’s end on October 1. That’s well more than 2 million more immigrants from the Northern Triangle during those four years.

To somehow buy away bad conditions in source countries but never explaining how, when, or offering accountability benchmarking, the Biden administration pledged a $3 billion downpayment to Central America over four years, including $860.6 million in fiscal year 2022 and $986 million in fiscal year 2023.

Harris showed no reluctance to downplay, hide, or diminish her role leading this essential administration strategy. In fact, she later held press conferences boasting of having coaxed some American companies to invest in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as a positive result of her personal leadership.

Borrowing a Failed Strategy from Europe

But failure was predictable from the start because root causes doctrine is a total ruse. The administration merely borrowed the idea from European leftists who’d been failing at it for 40 years already. That’s right.

When the Biden campaign in 2020 first appropriated Europe’s failed liberal social engineering experiment as its chief immigration policy, star-struck American media never bothered to dig into its long, sorry history or demand details for how much it would cost. No one asked when, exactly, the White House would consider Central America “fixed” enough to declare U.S. border security success.

Now is the time to finally dig in as Harris gears up to take her boss’s job. It’s never too late to make up for earlier professional journalism failure.

Campaign reporters should know that the most cursory glance at Europe’s experience addressing “root causes” from the earliest 1980s pilot programs show the strategy never worked. For example, the European Union-funded policy think tank Mignex reviewed some 10 studies spanning more than a decade where development aid was invested to reduce Europe-bound emigration from poor countries.

“In its current form, development aid does not seem to be big enough to create the underlying changes that affect migration decisions,” the Mignex report concluded, in part. “In cases where we do see a deterrent effect of aid on migration, a noticeable impact would require an unrealistic increase in aid.”

Writing for the International Institute of Social Studies in 2007, social scientist Hein de Haas concluded that, “Besides the limited scope and credibility of such policies, empirical and theoretical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development increases people’s capabilities and aspirations and therefore tends to coincide with an increase rather than a decrease in emigration.”

Harris never once questioned the decision to carry on, not even when other factors started to gum up the whole idea of the absurd root causes stratagem for just the Northern Triangle countries. For instance, root causes proponents of rebuilding Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador do not take into account that more than 45 percent of everyone reaching the southern border during this crisis are not from those countries or Mexico but from 100-plus other wrecked countries such as Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Are Americans expected to pay for eliminating the root causes of emigration from those nations too, or for those of any poor nation whose citizens decide to come here next? The political reporters and Harris fans all look away from this obvious question. Harris never offered any illumination while in charge of the three-country strategy.

Harris’s Role

What Americans really need to know from their media is that the vice president and her acolytes always doubled down on selling the root-causes elixir no matter its poisonous ingredients. During an April 2021 state visit to Central America, the border czar, or whatever else you want to call her, laid blame for the surge in illegal immigration on “extensive storm damage because of extreme climate.” She kept going with “food scarcity” as a result.

Harris deserves to be held to account for knowing full well that the root-causes doctrine was really nothing more than tinsel to flitter around while opening the border. Progressive liberals know its true purpose is to serve not as a complement to American deportation, detention, and deterrence — which actually cause immigrants to stay home — but as total replacement for those policies.

So, while taxpayer dollars somehow will rebuild three countries on no particular timeline (a dubious proposition), the Biden administration left the border gates open. The real solution meantime was hard at work with Harris at the helm.

So whether you can call her “border czar” or just the person in charge of the administration’s main policy approach to the border, Harris must still answer for her contribution to the worst border crisis in American history that she aided and abetted in office.

Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based research institute, and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. His latest book is “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History” (Bombardier Books). For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Follow him on Twitter @BensmanTodd.