Biden's Migrant Policy Worsens Central America's 'Root Causes,' Critics Say

[Valin]

Real Clear Investigations

James Varney, RealClearInvestigations
November 03, 2022

When Vice President Kamala Harris visited Mexico last year, she cited poverty, crime, and political instability as "root causes” driving millions of migrants to cross the U.S. border. 

But some critics with regional expertise say Biden administration policies, which migrants have interpreted as an invitation to travel north, have severely worsened those root causes, destabilizing large swaths of Central America and Mexico. The torrent of people moving across the region has delivered billions of dollars to the coffers of human smuggling rings and the drug cartels that have taken advantage of America’s overwhelmed border patrol to deliver fentanyl and other deadly substances to the United States. 

Criminal organizations, these experts say, have stoked rampant corruption, especially in Mexico, as they pay bribes to police and other local officials to ease passage of their cargo. The migrants themselves are prey to gangster elements that, according to one account, leaves more than two-thirds of them victims of crime and nearly one-third of the women subjected to sexual assaults.  

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Todd Bensman, who for two years has reported from various hotspots along Central American immigration caravan routes for the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said he always asks immigrants what they have seen along the way. The images they show him on their phones – of corpses, some of them of pregnant women clutching their dead infants – has convinced him the surge in traffic is something close to an international crime. 

“There’s most definitely a lot of blood on the hands of the Biden administration for opening the Southern border on purpose, and not to know what will happen and then how to deal with it,” Bensman told RCI. “Untold numbers of people are dead.”