Working to resolve the crisis in Central America

Christine Wade has a terrific take on what is occurring in Central America in the World Politics Review with The U.S. Contributed to Central America’s Migrant Crisis. It Must Help Fix It.

Finally, the administration should recognize the crisis that exists not on the southern U.S. border, but some 1,500 miles south in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Actually addressing that humanitarian crisis requires improving access to official U.S. ports of entry, restoring the Central American Minors Program—which allowed minors in the Northern Triangle who had parents legally living in the U.S. to apply for asylum from their home countries—and re-evaluating the administration’s policy on gender-based and gang-related violence. Those with legitimate claims for asylum should be able to make them and have them processed expeditiously.

The United States, across multiple administrations, has contributed to the current crisis in Central America in many ways. It has a role to play in remedying it.

As are the solutions, the causes of instability in Central America's Northern Triangle are complex. I have little confidence in the Trump, Hernandez, Morales, and Sanchez Ceren administrations working together to address the root causes of the instability and the needs of those who have already been displaced. However, these are a number of more limited policies and investments that could make life better for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of the region's people.

Christine includes some of those policies in her article as does Stephanie Leutert in Foreign Affairs. Victoria Sanford also had a good op-ed in the New York Times with ‘Criminals?’ Hardly. That’s Who the Caravan Flees.