Central American Stagnation Drives Migrant Exodus
Central American Stagnation Drives Migrant Exodus
CAFTA-DR “was seen…as a way to guarantee access to the US market rather than to integrate among themselves," said AS/COA's Eric Farnsworth to Financial Times.
Jocsan Avilés Díaz comes from a town called El Progreso — progress — but for him, it was anything but. Unemployment drove him out of Honduras in 2019, bound for the US. “I hadn’t had a job in years,” he explained, still stuck on the Mexican side of the border two years later…
Unauthorised border crossings into the US from Mexico have soared this year to near 20-year highs. This poses an acute political problem for President Joe Biden, who has asked Vice President Kamala Harris to deal with the crisis and has earmarked $4bn in aid for the Northern Triangle. How this will be spent is not clear.
“We want to help people find hope at home,” she told a regional conference this month as the US focuses less on interdiction, as it did under Donald Trump, and more on financing development. “And so we are focused on addressing both the acute factors and the root causes of migration.”…
“CAFTA-DR hasn’t worked as intended for a variety of reasons: it was seen…as a way to guarantee access to the US market rather than to integrate among themselves; it didn’t effectively mesh up with Nafta…and during the negotiations, the US restricted imports of a number of products where the region was highly competitive,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice-president of the Council of the Americas…
