President Donald Trump’s cutting $560 million in aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador hasn’t been effective at slowing immigration from those countries, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Although Trump cut off the Northern Triangle from hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, people in those countries received billions of dollars in remittances from the United States last year.
“I don’t think that the Central American governments are going to be so easily blackmailed by withholding aid,” said Adam Isacson, who is a Central America expert with the Washington Office on Latin America. “Central America aid was mostly intended to benefit poor Central Americans facing strong incentives to migrate” and not the government officials who dictate policy.
“No amount of economic development aid is going to greatly transform economic opportunity in the Northern Triangle in short order,” said Michael Clemens, economist and senior fellow at the D.C. think tank the Center for Global Development. “In contrast, remittances are critical across the region to shield families from poverty and from bad shocks from things like crop failures — which drive more migration.”
“By voting with their feet, the migrants are sending a very clear signal,” added William Easterly, New York University economist and a prominent critic of international aid initiatives. “They are telling us that aid is not working for them, that they like the American model, American institutions and the higher wages in America.”
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