The White House sees in “investing in neighbors” a way to tackle the immigration crisis

The way out of the migration crisis affecting Latin America, according to the US government, would involve focusing on foreign investment and strengthening asylum programs in transit countries to the US, agreed experts meeting Tuesday in Washington.

“You have to invest in your neighbors if you want to address your national security problem,” Juan González, director of the National Security Council for the Western Hemisphere at the White House, said Tuesday during a Latin American dialogue event organized by the EFE news agency. at the Cultural Center of Spain in Washington.

The official assured that “the US is not going to solve” the massive movement of migrants through the region on its own and, therefore, it must have the support of other countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Brazil.

“If you want to address the symptoms of migration, you have to address the economic challenges… you are not going to solve migration in the Darién jungle, you have to solve it in the country of origin,” González said during his speech.

González admitted that the current refugee system in the US is not “built to benefit people from Latin America”, as it is for countries in conflict, and therefore, reforms are needed that include legal ways to migrate. For example, according to what he said, the humanitarian parole program Available for Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians.

“There is this long-standing policy, I think, in Latin America that migration is a right. And I think that, although I don’t disagree with that, it is also often used as an excuse for not having strong asylum and integration systems in some countries,” González said.

Ilan Goldfajn, president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), participated in the meeting and assured that the financial organization is seeking to “improve basic conditions” in the region to address the problems that lead to migration.

Among the strategies highlighted by Goldfajn was supplying electrical service to all areas of Latin American countries, helping small and medium-sized companies, and promoting job creation.

“We are responsible for the indicators, we have to stop thinking about how many resources we need, we need to think about what we are giving, how many jobs we are creating, how much internet access we are allowing,” Goldfajn said.

Cynthia Arson, a researcher with the Latin American program at the Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington, noted that migration is an act of survival.

“People migrate because they cannot stay where they are, because there is a threat to their families and to themselves,” he said, noting that this was a perspective “that the Joe Biden administration has to address.”
The researcher highlighted that there is a gap between the resources that would be available to make the US asylum system more humane, and the process available to people who continue to arrive.

“Economic conditions in the region are not going to change from one year to the next. This will be a lasting problem due to issues such as climate change, including droughts and hurricanes,” Arson added, noting that the question must be how a system that quickly processes these migrants will be implemented.

regional collaborations

González pointed out the importance of the meeting between the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and President Biden, scheduled for Thursdayas a key moment to discuss the migration challenges faced by the South American country that today has more than two million Venezuelans in its territory.

“We need to find ways -such as loans- so that Colombia and others do not have to allocate fiscal resources to address migration, but use them on other problems,” said the White House official.

Regarding the possibility of lifting the sanctions against Venezuela, as Petro has requested during his official trip to the US, the White House official assured that “we are ready to demonstrate our intention to see results from the sanctions”, not without first seeing that there are “democratic guarantees” in the country.

Arson, for his part, considered that the sanctions strategy “has failed” and that it would be more productive to ask the Venezuelan government that “if they do one thing, we do another.”

Beyond the immigration challenge

Goldfajn, highlighted that the region faces “unhappiness” among the population due to the “inequality that has been in Latin America for years,” and that has led citizens to demand access to services such as education and health from their governments. as well as attention to climate change.

“There is a clear demand for more actions from the governments but they do not have more resources,” said the president of the IDB, an organization that revealed in January that the region’s public debt grew from 58% in 2019 to 72% in 2020 due to fiscal packages related to COVID-19, lower revenues and the recession.

Among the priorities of the financial organization, he added, is doubling investment in infrastructure to guarantee innovation in the region, such as the digitization of services.

Arson, for his part, assured that Latin America faces a “pessimistic” scenario due to factors such as food insecurity and poverty. “I think there needs to be radical thinking about how we address the situation that is occurring in the region,” he said.

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