Trump's failure to understand Central America is dangerous — at least the Mexican president can act like an adult

Mexico is on the brink of a major humanitarian crisis and the president is gunning for it. The so-called “mother of caravans” with over 20,000 migrants, mostly from Honduras, is supposedly preparing to head for Mexico in the coming days, but the country doesn’t have the institutional resources to support so many people as they wait to apply for asylum in the US.

The northern border city of Tijuana declared a crisis in November 2018, after 5,000 migrants looking to apply for asylum in the US were forced to wait there instead of being allowed to cross legally into the US and apply.

Shutting down legal entry points of crossing has nothing to do with a migration crisis – it would just be bad for businesspeople and students that cross. About $1.5 billion dollars in commerce takes place on the US-Mexico border daily and approximately 500,000 people cross it. As Aaron Rupar explained last week, “Trump’s latest comments about the border illustrate he doesn’t understand how trade works” despite the fact that “it’s supposedly his signature issue”.

Such a move would also make a developing humanitarian crisis in Mexico into a full-blown one. With nowhere to go and without the adequate infrastructure to take care of migrant families, especially vulnerable groups including pregnant women, children and the elderly and LGBT people, the situation in border cities like Juarez and Tijuana could progress from squalid to deadly in a matter of days.

Most of the migrants currently stuck in Mexico who are trying to make it to the US are looking to cross legally, and have the legal right to apply for asylum under international and US federal law.

Looking to make things worse, from the nauseatingly gaudy comforts of his resort in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump also announced over the weekend that he planned to cut funding to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, or, as Fox News referred to them, “three Mexican countries”. As Doctors Without Borders has repeatedly reminded the White House and Republican leaders, “a humanitarian crisis needs a humanitarian response”. Cutting funding would obviously have the opposite effect.

For his part, Mexico’s new president hasn’t said much about Trump’s latest barrage of insults and threats for its southern neighbour. Instead, highlighting the country’s noninterventionist policy, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — or “AMLO” as people call him here — has reiterated that he wants a friendly relationship with Trump and isn’t looking for a fight. And while he has gotten a lot of slack for not standing up to the bully in the White House, I personally think it’s a smart move: Trump is behaving like a spoiled toddler and AMLO is the seasoned parent who won’t give in to yet another tantrum in public.

Mexico, instead, has encouraged investing in job creation and internal security and infrastructure projects in the Northern Triangle (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) countries. Last week, the government announced that federal police would be moving to hold migrants with a history of delinquency in the Istmo de Tehuantepec on Mexico’s border with Guatemala, but said the country would not militarise its southern border. Mexico’s interior secretary, Olga Sanchez Cordero, also said that they would be distributing temporary visitor visas and work visas to those who were allowed to stay in Mexico in the meantime, in order to ameliorate the impending humanitarian crisis and allow migrants to work legally while in the country.

If Trump does choose to close all legal entry points from Mexico to the US, it will be a stupid and ineffective move – more indicative of a white nationalist agenda than of someone truly looking to effect better border security and normalise the immigration process.

It is old news that most of the refugees and asylum seekers coming up from the Northern Triangle are people fleeing war-zone levels of violence, extreme poverty and persecution. The US president either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that cutting aid to the very civil society programs in these countries that work to address the root causes prompting such dangerous en masse migrations will only lead to more migrations.