Im-Politic: More Evidence That it Really is a Biden Border Crisis

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Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden, Biden administration, Biden border crisis, Central America, El Salvador, Gallup, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mexico, migrants, migration, Northern Triangle, polling

If there’s something that “everybody knows” about the floods of Latin Americans who keep trying to migrate to the United States, legally and not, it’s that they’re acting out of desperation because their countries are such terrible places to live. As stated just this morning by Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, in the wake of news that 53 migrants found dead in the back of a sweltering tractor trailor that had snuck them across the U.S.-Mexico border paid the ultimate price for risking the dangerous journey northward:

“The migration that is occurring throughout the hemisphere is reflective of the economic downturn, increase in violence throughout the region, the — the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of climate change.”

Surely the perils that have long faced Latin Americans (and many others) seeking new lives in America have been grave, and the living conditions (and physical dangers) in their home countries have often been appalling.

But what, then, is the explanation for four straight years of polling data from Gallup that consistently show the populations of some of the leading sending countries to be among the happiest on earth?

Recently, through an annual series of Global Emotions Reports, Gallup has tried to measure “positive and negative experiences” in most of the world’s countries to determine their people’s “day-to-day emotional states – such as enjoyment, stress, or anger – as well as their satisfaction with their lives.” Countries are then scored on a scale of 100, with the highest marks indicating where people by an average of these measures are happiest. (See here and here for these descriptions.) 

So it’s more than a little interesting that for most of the last four years (through 2021), the world’s happiest countries have included El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Because, after all, the first three comprise Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” and collectively become the source of the largest number of immigrants arrested at the U.S.’ southern border as of fiscal year 2021. The latter remains the country that’s generated the most arrestees of any individual country. Here are the annual results from Gallup, including their score on that 100 scale and their global ranking.  (For links to the downloadable 2018-2020 reports and the 2021 report, see here.)  

                                    2018              2019            2020            2021

Guatemala                 3d (84)         2d (84)     not surveyed       n/a

Honduras                   4^th (83)         5^th (81)     not surveyed   3d (82)

El Salvador                4^th (83)         2d (84)        1^st (82)         3d (82)

Mexico                      3d (84)          4^th (82)           n/a               n/a

As is clear, Honduras and El Salvador have been among the top five happiest countries for three of these four years. Mexico and Guatemala made this list in 2018 and 2019.

Unfortunately, when it comes to 2020, Guatemala and Honduras were not surveyed. And because Gallup hasn’t provided the scores and rankings for every country it’s studied, no results were available for Mexico in 2020 and 2021, and for Guatemala in 2021.

But as Gallup noted in 2020, “While several of the countries that usually top the list every year, including Panama, Honduras and Guatemala, were not surveyed in 2020, the region is still well represented on the Positive Experience Index. El Salvador leads the world with an index score of 82.” So it sounds like the pollsters believe that countries for which data is missing or not reported stayed pretty happy.

Also striking – the happiness scores of these four major sending countries were not only among the world’s highest. They were way above the global averages, which respectively were 71, 71, 71, and 69.

Polls, as I’ve repeatedly said, are by no means perfect, and polling in developing countries can be especially tricky because inhabitants often do live in dangerous environments where even the authorities (and often especially the authorities) can’t be trusted.

But these Gallup results are consistent over several years. And they are so at odds with the conventional wisdom about the deep-seated socio-economic reasons for hemispheric migration that they seem to add to the evidence that the recent surge stems less from changes in those root causes — or perhaps from these root causes at all (as opposed to seeking improvement, not survival or freedom) — and more from the more permissive immigation measures and rhetoric emanating from the current U.S. administration from Day One. That is, the recent situation really is a “Biden border crisis.”

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Much Change Will the Afghanistan Debacle Really Bring?

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Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Biden, Central America, Donald Trump, failed states, globalism, Immigration, migration, nation-building, Northern Triangle, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, terrorism, The National Interest, Vietnam War

Since just yesterday, two big articles in the Mainstream Media have told us that President Biden’s latest speech on America’s (going-going-gone?) military involvement in Afghanistan could usher in a new, more circumspect era for U.S. foreign policy. (See here and here.) Me, I’m not so sure, even though I’d like to see nothing better, since I’ve been calling for such changes for no fewer than 35 years.

In fact, it’s not even clear whether Mr. Biden’s decision to pull the plug on this longest of America’s wars will profoundly influence America’s approach to world affairs on the level of day-to-day operations. For example, the President has insisted that “I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit”; and that with the Al Qaeda threat to attack the U.S. homeland and American allies squelched; and that the United States has “no vital interest in Afghanistan.” Nonethless, he still declared that “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries.”

Moreover, Mr. Biden acknowledged that the “over-the-horizon capabilities” that now enable attacks on “terrorists and targets” without fighting ground wars (through drone strikes and the like) will still require some “American boots on the ground.” That’s because you need some physical presence in order to identify and track the targets (which move around a lot), and because these forces need bases of some kind out of which to operate.

Further, the President claimed that “The terror threat has metastasized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan. We face threats from Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates across Africa and Asia.”

Even if he thinks that those over-the-horizon capabilities can suddenly meet this challenge (and obviously, they can’t now, or else we’d have seen a lot more of them and a much faster Afghanistan troop pullout), we’re talking about a non-trivial number of American boots on the ground in a huge number of countries – including more than a few states as failed, or as always-mythical, as Afghanistan.

President Biden was also pretty emphatic about “moving on” from what he suggested was the post-September 11 mindset of nation-building in places like Afghanistan – where democracy and unity and even cohesion has “never” existed.

But take another look at his “Strategy to Address the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.” The idea is to turn El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras into places acceptable enough to live in to convince huge portions of their populations to remain there, rather than seek better lives in the United States. And to achieve this aim, the administration’s blueprint “identifies, prioritizes, and coordinates actions to improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions in the region.”

That sounds pretty nation building-y to me, even if you believe that, unlike Afghanistan, these “Northern Triangle” countries have ever deserved to be called “nations” to begin with – rather than simply relatively large groups of very poor people exploited by (rotating) smaller groups of people possessing enough money and guns to climb to and stay on top for a while.

And since all the countries and regions that Mr. Biden has identified as new sources of terrorism suffer many of the same problems, there’s no reason to rule out the administration eventually dreaming up similar plans for them. According to the President’s speech, that would certainly be preferable to putting more American military boots on the ground.

But there’s a more fundamental reason to doubt that the President will engineer a major shift even in nation-building-type policies, much less in American foreign policy’s broader direction: Although the label didn’t emerge until after the September 11 attacks, nation-building has always been a core precept of the globalist approach that American foreign policy has carried out since Pearl Harbor, and Mr. Biden is a long-time card-carrying globalist. That’s the “back” to which he so proudly proclaimed America would return during his presidency.  

I explained what I mean by that most recently in a 2018 article for The National Interest. Globalism’s root assumption, I wrote, “has stemmed from the ostensibly timeless lessons of the nation’s 1930s indifference to aggression in Europe and Asia: that America’s security, freedom and prosperity are inseparable from the security, freedom and prosperity of a critical mass of the rest of the world in which trouble anywhere is sure to spread like wildfire unless checked.” And to prevent such contagions from emerging to begin with, “the entire global environment needed to be managed adequately” – including turning failed states and other breeding grounds for terrorism and all sorts of turmoil and instability into entities that are substantially better, or at least more tranquil.

That same article pointed out, however, that globalism’s grip on American foreign policy is so tight that even an avowed disrupter and America First champion like Donald Trump couldn’t shake it off completely – and even doubled down on some major globalist policies (like deepening America’s – nuclear – commitment to Europe’s security against Russian expansionism). Indeed, his Middle East and anti-terrorism policies were especially conflicted – as he himself admitted.

So the likeliest transformation I can envision for post-Afghanistan U.S. foreign policy is what I’ve called “globalism on the cheap” – retaining every ounce of this strategy’s grandiose objectives, but pretending that they can be pursued exclusively in neat, safe, and aesthetically appealing ways. In fact, this was the course chosen after another foreign policy debacle – the Vietnam War. And revealingly, Mr. Biden touted some of them yesterday: “diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support” (along with those over-the-horizon capabilities).

These and other tactics in principle can have their place in U.S. foreign policy, depending on circumstances. But calling them substitutes for major military deployments and operations in carrying out a globalist strategy is first-order misinformation spreading. And it makes me wonder just how damagingly globalism, on the cheap or otherwise, will need to fail before genuinely new foreign policy eras will begin.

 

Im-Politic: Good Luck to Biden Keeping Up with Immigration’s Root Causes

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Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden, Biden administration, Caribbean, Central America, Cuba, Department of Homeland Security, economic development, Haiti, Im-Politic, Immigration, Kamala Harris, Latin America, Mexico, nation-building, Northern Triangle, Western Hemisphere

Remember that advertising campaign launched by Jamaica a few decades ago, reminding Americans that “We’re more than a beach. We’re a country”? Lately it seems that the area’s islands are doing their best to reinforce this message, in the process presenting yet more reasons to doubt that President Biden’s policy of stemming immigration largely by addressing its “root causes” in the sending countries (especially in Central America’s “Northern Triangle”) will produce results in the policy- (and politics-relevant) future.

After all, in the last week alone, not only has Haiti lapsed into chaos again, but Cuba has been roiled by what are being described the biggest protests in decades against Communist rule. So undoubtedly heading state-side is looking especially attractive in those countries now. In addition, Venezuela keeps looking like a candidate for a political explosion (its migrant outflows have already been considerable for years as the left-wing regime’s policies keep destroying the economy).

Nor do these countries exhaust the list of deeply troubled countries whose inhabitants are increasingly flocking to the U.S.-Mexico border. As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, U.S. government data show that “From South America, the Caribbean, Asia and beyond tens of thousands of migrants bound for the United States have been arriving to Mexico each month.” Further, the shares represented by Mexico and Central America are going down, and those of nationals from “beyond” are going up. Many more migrants from regions further afield, moreover, are apparently on the way.

Indeed, in 2018, Gallup research found that more than 150 million adults worldwide want to live in the United States permanently. Of course, not every one will try to migrate. Nor does every one come from a homeland afflicted by various combinations of poverty, dictatorship, corruption, major disorder, and out-and-out conflict. But clearly most of them do. Meaning that there’s a massive amount of root causes out there to be addressed if that approach is to be the Biden strategy’s main pillar long term.

And it’s not like Washington has a great record in promoting the kind of nation-building (see, e.g., here) or even narrower economic development needed to root out those causes, or that lots more money – public or private – will be forthcoming (assuming that money is even the biggest obstacle to begin with). Heck – Americans haven’t even done a decent job of addressing the root causes of violence in many of their own inner cities.

Therefore, given the high and growing amount of turmoil in the United States’ backyard and beyond, to avoid swamping the nation with ever greater numbers of migrants, the Biden administration will need to return American policy to a border security-centric approach. It’s true that both Vice President and immigration point person Kamala Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have both publicly warned not to try to enter the country.

But this message clearly has been drowned out by dozens of other administration decisions that de facto put out the welcome mat (see, e.g., here) – including a virtual halt to interior enforcement that supercharges the odds that newcomers who make it into the United States will be able to stay in the United States. Which is why the longer the current Biden policy mix lasts, the more the root causes dimension of his administration’s immigration strategy looks like a dodge aimed at greasing the skids for much wider border opening.

Im-Politic: Biden’s Latest Americans Last Immigration Policy

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America First, Biden, Border Crisis, border security, Central America, Chobani, cities, corruption, crime, El Salvador, foreign aid, gang violence, governance, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, inequality, Kamala Harris, Mastercard, Microsoft, migrants, Northern Triangle, racial economic justice, urban poverty

As known by RealityChek regulars, I’m deeply skeptical that the Biden administration can bring migrant flows from Central America (or similar regions) under control by adequately improving the miserable local conditions that (understandably) drive so much flight northward to begin with. But the first detailed description of this policy that I’ve seen not only ignores all of the intertwined institutional, governance, and cultural obstacles to turning regions like Central America’s Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) into even approximations of success stories. It also casts real doubt on the seriousness of the vaunted domestic social justice and inequality commitments made both by President Biden and by at least some of the U.S. corporate sector.

As argued by a White House Fact Sheet released yesterday, support for economic development in these long-impoverished, abusively ruled countries will “require more than just the resources of the U.S. government.” Also essential “to support inclusive economic growth in the Northern Triangle” will be the “unique resources and expertise” of the private sector.”

It’s true that only three completely private, profit-seeking American companies have responded so far to the “Call to Action” for business involvement issued by Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s the administration’s designated czarina for dealing immigration-wise with the Northern Triangle. But let’s say lots more get involved.

Why would anyone capable of adult thinking believe that their efforts will succeed? After all, the administration acknowledges that economic success in the region depends on overcoming its “long-standing impediments to investment-led growth.” And it specifies that these obstacles include governments that simultaneously either can’t or won’t carry out their duties in corruption-free ways, and are unable to provide minimal levels of security for their populations against criminal gangs.

Meaning that private businesses will be keen even on setting up the kinds of training and business incubator and internet connectivity programs that predominate in their Northern Triangle plans while threats of violence and extortion remain omnipresent? Maybe they’re planning to cope by hiring massive  private security forces – but such precautions were never mentioned in the Call to Action announcement.

Just as important, here’s another major head-scratcher, especially given the flood of promises over the last year or so from U.S. business circles about promoting racial economic and financial equality. If companies are willing to wade into dangerous environments to educate populations, build or strengthen the infrastructure needed for significant economic progress, and foster new businesses in Central America, why aren’t they focusing their efforts on America’s own inner cities, or at least focusing more tightly on these efforts first? It’s not like their needs aren’t pressing. And although the Northern Triangle countries have actually made some noteworthy progress in fighting violent crime lately, they’re still much more dangerous places than even most of America’s homicide capitals.

Consequently, for companies concerned overall with actual results, it would make far more sense to take an America First approach. Not that Microsoft, Chobani, and Mastercard have ignored their disadvantaged compatriots in practice. But even as their U.S. efforts remain pretty modest (Microsoft, e.g., to date has only launched its digital skills and access improvement program in Atlanta and Texas, and Chobani’s incubator program still seems pretty small scale), they’ve decided to head south of the border(s).

Incidentally, the entire Biden Central America and overall immigration policies are vulnerable to a similar criticism. Since however difficult it’s going to be to spur racial and other economic and social progress at home, the challenge will be far more difficult in foreign countries, a President truly committed both to these vital domestic goals and to staunching migrant flows would focus focus his economic development programs on his own country, and deal with the migrants as an immigration issue – by securing the border. Unfortunately for Americans, Joe Biden has been anything but that President.

Im-Politic: Can Biden Really Solve the “Root Causes” Behind His Border Crisis?

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Biden, Border Crisis, border security, CAFTA, Central America, Central America Free Trade Agreement, Colbert I. King, Cold War, Donald Trump, El Salvador, foreign aid, George W. Bush, globalism, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Jorge Castaneda, Kamala Harris, Lawence E. Harrison, migrants, Northern Triangle, race to the bottom, Trade, Washington Post

One of the time-honored practices – and myths – behind globalist U.S. foreign policies has been its faith that turmoil in various parts of the world that allegedly threatens American interests can be either eliminated or reduced to manageable levels with enough foreign aid. The idea is that such assistance will address the social and economic problems thought to be mainly to blame for the instability. So it’s no surprise that the globalist Biden administration has decided that aid programs are the keys to bringing immigration from Central America under control – though not of course right away.

As stated by Vice President Kamala Harris upon being tasked by President Biden to oversee U.S. effort to turn the counties of the region’s “Northern Triangle” into places whose populations won’t be determined to leave, the United States “must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek” northward.

That’s why I sure hope she reads Colbert I. King’s column in Tuesday’s Washington Post before she rolls up her sleeves too far. For as the author notes, the Biden administration plan to turn the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) from clearly failed states into (reasonable) success stories isn’t exactly new in its essentials.

And especially in recent years, when conditions in the region ostensibly worsened dramatically, and therefore fueled especially big migrants flows, there’s been no shortage of U.S. aid, especially considering the tiny size of the three economies.

As King details,

“Congress appropriated more than $3.6 billion to fund a Strategy for Engagement in Central America program between 2016 and 2021. The money was supposed to strengthen rule of law, improve the administration of justice, promote economic prosperity, prevent violence and combat gangs, and empower youth and women.

“>In fiscal 2021 alone, U.S. funding amounted to $505.9 million.

“>Between 2013 and 2018, The U.S. Agriculture Department allocated $407 million to Central America to provide school meals, nutritional programs for women, infants and children, and to train and provide technical assistance to improve agricultural productivity.

“>The Obama administration asked for money to help the region in fiscal 2016, and Congress appropriated $750 million, requiring the countries to improve border security, combat corruption and address human rights concerns.”

Then the author – properly – proceeds to ask “What happened to it all?” And what can the Biden administration do to make sure that the $4 billion it plans to spend in the region will work any better if Congress approves this sum?

Moreover, the case against more Central America aid as a Border Crisis game changer is actually stronger than King describes. Because Washington has not only been pouring money into the region for decades. It’s also granted these three Central American countries (and their regional neighbors) tariff cuts and other trade-related assistance aimed at enabling them to export their way to prosperity.

Indeed, as then President George W. Bush declared while lobbying for passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) – which was eventually expanded to include the Dominican Republic,

“People have got to understand that by promoting policy that will help generate wealth in Central America, we’re promoting policy that will mean someone is less–more likely to stay at home to find a job. If you’re concerned about immigration to this country, then you must understand that CAFTA and the benefits of CAFTA will help create new opportunity in Central American countries, which will mean someone will be able to find good work at home, somebody will be able to provide for their family at home, as opposed to having to make the long trip to the United States. CAFTA is good immigration policy as well as good trade policy.”

Critics can reasonably argue that these U.S. programs failed to achieve their immigration aims because they were poorly designed. On the aid front, it’s true that too much of the assistance provided by the United States during the Cold War was military or other security assistance that largely helped corrupt governments repress their own people – and fight rebels labeled as tools of the Soviet Union and Cuba.

When it comes to trade, globalist U.S. Presidents did Central America no favors, either. For CAFTA simply plunged the region into a frantic race to the bottom in wages and worker safety that had been sparked by the decision to free up trade indiscriminately with all the very low-income countries (including China, India, and Bangladesh) that also produced the apparel products that have represented Central America’s best hope for prospering via globalization.

At the same time, significant U.S. assistance for Central America continued after the Cold War’s end, and more was targeted at economic development. And the Biden administration has said nothing about U.S. trade policy reforms that actually would give the Northern Triangle – or the rest of Central America for that matter, or Mexico – major legs up on non-Western Hemisphere competitors.

All of which could support the conclusion that no amount of aid or trade breaks can make Central America successful. A globalist administration will be particularly loathe to accept this admittedly depressing proposition, but there’s abundant evidence in its favor. The work of development economist Lawrence E. Harrison, to cite one leading example, has compellingly argued that some counties – and entire regions – simply don’t have what it takes to achieve economic success because of the cultures they’ve evolved.

At the same time, as my friend – and noted political scientist and former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda – has argued, the Central American economies are so small that enough smartly spent U.S. money might be able to overcome even these deep-rooted obstacles.

I can’t say that I know the answer. But the analyses of King, Harrison, and Castaneda all point to the overarching conclusion that the kind of business-as-usual version of the address-the-root-causes of Central America’s failings being contemplated by the Biden administration can’t possibly stem the migrant flow. Moreover, until genuinely promising plans are developed, there will be no substitute for re-securing the border by reinstating the type of Trump-ian controls that minimize the strength of the U.S. magnets that influence migrant flows as surely as the problems of sending countries.

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: U.S. Trade Policy Deserves Blame for the Caravans

Tags

apparel, asylum seekers, Bangladesh, CAFTA, caravan, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Central America, Central America Free Trade Agreement, China, economic development, El Salvador, globalization, Guatemala, Honduras, immigrants, Immigration, manufacturing, migrants, Multi-Fibre Arrangement, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Northern Triangle, Trade, Uruguay Round, Vietnam, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Hot on the heels of the current caravan of Central Americans heading through Mexico to the U.S. border, another such procession is gathering in Guatemala. And these two have followed the flood of unaccompanied migrant children from the area that reached the United States in 2014.

I wish I could tell you that there’s a silver bullet for solving the problem – though nothing could be clearer than that these human tides will keep organizing in even greater numbers if Washington follows the general advice of the Open Borders lobby to view all of the caravan-ers as legitimate asylum-seekers entitled to full due process once they reach the border and request this status. Upon which time current procedures call for recording their claims and then releasing them based on the ludicrous assumption that they’ll report back to immigration court on the appointed date and risk being rejected and thus deported.

What I can tell you is that this crisis has been greatly aggravated by an unforgivably short-sighted U.S. trade policy strategy that emerged in the 1990s. It consisted of indiscriminately liberalizing trade with developing countries, and thereby ignoring the case for targeting trade diplomacy to ensure that countries and regions of greatest importance to the United States receive the lion’s share of the benefits. And the prime victims of this strategic failure – which mainly reflected the determination of offshoring multinational manufacturers and Big Box retailers to gain maximum flexibility to source imported inputs and final products – were the poorer countries of the Western Hemisphere. That group of course includes Mexico and the Central American countries that have sent so many migrants northward.

Interestingly, Central America and the Caribbean countries were placed prominently in line to receive significant shares of the vast U.S. market by a Reagan-era initiative aimed mainly at stemming the spread of left-wing revolutionary forces in the region. But scant years later, any hopes generated by this strategy for fostering more prosperity in these impoverished regions and strengthening the appeal of pro-Western leaders were kneecapped by two big decisions.

The first was the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. The second was the phase out of U.S. and other developed countries’ quotas on apparel imports that was approved the following year as part of the Uruguay Round global agreement that reduced various trade barriers worldwide and created the World Trade Organization (WTO). And the third was the Clinton administration’s subsequent rush to liberalize trade with a host of low-income countries outside the Western Hemisphere.

In principle NAFTA’s tight focus on Mexico was justifiable given Mexico’s size, position as a U.S. neighbor, and history of political, economic, and social policy failure that seemed to be reaching a crisis point. But economic growth and employment could still have been greatly lifted in Mexico and Central American (along with the Caribbean countries) had American trade liberalization stopped or at least paused there.

Yet the quota phaseout forbade Washington from incorporating any strategic or non-economic considerations into apparel trade policy, whether conditions urgently required them or not.  As a result, it ensured that the benefits of freer trade would be greatly watered down (and many garnered by China and the rest of developing Asia in particular), and insult was added to injury by new liberalization deals reached or renewed, or decisions made, regarding Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, Jordan, most of developing Asia (in the form of a deal on information technology products, including labor-intensive consumer electronics), and China. Largely as a result, the poorer countries of the Western Hemisphere were left in the dust in the business models of the multinationals and the big retailers.

Nowhere does the opportunity lost by Mexico and Central America come through more clearly than in the apparel trade figures. This sector is almost always the first utilized by developing countries to begin their industrialization and modernization drives mainly because its own labor intensivity means that capital and technology requirements are pretty modest, the relevant skills can be taught fairly easily, and its job-creation promise is substantial.

Here are the figures for apparel imports from Mexico, the three “Northern Triangle” Central American countries, China, and two other current Asian textile giants (Bangladesh and Vietnam) for four key years. Next to them will be the figure for the share of American apparel consumption (market share) won at that point by each. We start with 1997 because that’s the year when the U.S. government began adopting its current dominant system for slicing and dicing trade and manufacturing data – which enables us to see statistics that are apples-to-apples. The second year is 2001 – the year China’s was admitted into the WTO – and thus gained substantial immunity from American laws aimed at curbing predatory trade practices. The third year is 2006 – when Congress approved a Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiate by George W. Bush’s administration. And the fourth year is last year – the latest for which we have full-year numbers.

1997

Mexico:                       $5.317b                    11.29 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.052b                     2.18 percent

Guatemala:                  $0.973b                     2.07 percent

Honduras:                    $1.689b                     3.59 percent

China:                          $7.279b                   15.46 percent

Bangladesh:                 $1.442b                      3.06 percent

Vietnam:                      $0.026b                      0.06 percent

2001:

Mexico:                       $8.112b                     12.99 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.634b                      2.62 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.630b                       2.61 percent

Honduras:                    $2.438b                       3.91 percent

China:                          $8.597b                     13.47 percent

Bangladesh:                 $2.101b                      3.37 percent

Vietnam:                      $0.048b                       0.08 percent

2006:

Mexico:                       $5.514b                       7.16 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.408b                      1.83 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.685b                      2.19 percent

Honduras:                    $2.519b                      3.27 percent

China:                        $22.405b                    22.09 percent

Bangladesh:                 $2.915b                       3.79 percent

Vietnam:                      $3.226b                       4.19 percent

2017:

Mexico:                       $3.806b                       4.52 percent 

El Salvador:                 $1.920b                       2.28 percent

Guatemala:                  $1.371b                       1.63 percent

Honduras:                    $2.522b                       3.00 percent

China:                        $29.322b                     34.85 percent

Bangladesh:                $5.046b                       6.00 percent

Vietnam:                    $11.613b                     13.80 percent

The big takeaway? Even during the decade after the Central America free trade deal was signed, the three Northern Triangle countries actually saw their share of the U.S. apparel market stagnate or actually shrink. Mexico’s share has been cut by about almost 60 percent. And the business won by China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam has exploded – since 2001 for China, and since 2006 for the two other Asians. Again, the year that the free trade deal that was supposed to benefit El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras was inked.

With Mexico, there are of course mitigating factors. Chiefly, although its apparel competitiveness in the U.S. market is way down, its competitiveness in higher value automotive manufacturing in particular is way up. But millions of poor Mexicans still could have benefited from apparel employment, and no such progress has been made in Central America – which is partly understandable since incomes are even lower, and governments and other institutions needed for economic development are so much weaker.

Apparel should have been the great hope for these populations, but that sector’s potential for expanding production (which of course needs to be export-oriented since these countries’ domestic markets are tiny) and employment has been virtually choked off. Just as important, the prospect that apparel wages in the Northern Triangle might rise adequately has been limited, too – since pay throughout developing East and South Asia (even in China, according to the chart below) remains so much lower.

American trade policy could have lent a big helping hand to Central America had it adopted a strategically sensible set of priorities. But it failed to learn a fundamental lesson of strategy: When everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. You can see the victims of this failure in the flow of human misery heading up from the Northern Triangle.