Cutting U.S. Aid to Central America Is Self-Defeating

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Just a day after the U.S. reached a new agreement on migration with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, President Donald Trump announced he was cutting off their aid. At a stroke he has thrown the State Department into chaos, and, more important, made it more likely that caravans of Central American migrants will keep heading north.

Migrant smugglers have taken advantage of a broken, backlogged asylum system that creates perverse incentives to apply. Ending U.S. aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras will not solve that problem. But it will certainly damage the organizations that distribute the aid, and will worsen the plight of their desperate clients. Since desperation drives migration, this is directly counterproductive. Moreover, some of the U.S. assistance helps pay for security. Halting aid will undermine efforts to combat the smuggling of drugs and people.

Trump is right to press Mexico to better control its southern border. (The new government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has weakened enforcement there.) But the best approach to security cooperation with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would be to step up support for investigations into bribery, money-laundering, theft, and complicity of corrupt officials in drug and migrant smuggling. 

The long-term answer to out-migration is opportunity and prosperity at home. Admittedly, foreign aid is no panacea in that regard. Many economists question its efficacy and have drawn attention to pernicious side effects like corruption and dependency. At low levels of development, moreover, faster economic growth can often add to migration, because it furnishes the means to move.

Nonetheless, well-designed assistance can help. In Honduras, for instance, U.S.-supported local programs have reduced homicides and dissuaded migrants. Similar micro-targeting can be used to improve food security and economic opportunity. Programs of this kind are cheap compared with detaining asylum seekers until their cases can be heard. Each detention bed costs the U.S. about $160 per night. At the end of March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was already near its capacity with about 50,000 adult detainees. If that persists, the cost for detention alone could run to about $3 billion a year — nearly five times the aid appropriated by Congress for Central America last year.

Aid to Central America is no substitute for working with Congress to fix a broken asylum system. Yet helping El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is part of the answer, cheap at the price, and very much in the U.S. interest. The president should reverse his decision.

Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.

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