NCFCA Topics: E.U. Migration, Development, Humanitarian Aid

The NCFCA debate league announced three topic choices for the coming school year:
1) The European Union should substantially reform its immigration policy.
2) The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its development assistance to one or more of the following: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala.
3) The United States Federal Government should substantially increase humanitarian assistance to one or more countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are many Economic Thinking posts on the economics of immigration.

All three topics are interesting and valuable for better understanding important public policy debates. For all three topics we face the question of why people in some countries are so much safer and wealthier than in others. Why do Middle East/North Africa (MENA) countries, apart from Israel and Dubai, lack economic freedom and rule of law institutions? The Frasier Institute’s Economic Freedom of the Arab World: 2019 Annual Report  explains:

Wherever true economic freedom takes root, it creates opportunity for all by eliminating obstacles to success. Economic freedom is simply the ability of individuals and families to make their own economic decisions and take advantage of opportunities and entrepreneurship, free of barriers imposed by overly powerful governments or greedy elites to protect their own dominance, whether foreign or domestic. All too often in the Arab world the less privileged and the excluded are deprived from finding meaningful employment or building new and creative businesses by onerous bureaucracy, red tape, restrictive regulations, complicated rules, corruption, and an uneven rule of law–all obstacles to economic freedom.

Millions want to escape the dysfunctional institutions and poverty of MENA countries, as well as sub Saharan African countries to find work and relative safety in Europe.

Similarly,  lack of economic freedom in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala both explains the high poverty rates and motivation for millions to escape from these and other Central American countries, and migrate, legally or illegally to the United States and Canada.

Naming the problem doesn’t solve it, but at least provides a goal for political and economic reforms. If the USFA were to increase development assistance to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, could future aid be more effective that past development assistance? Of course the Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala is also an immigration topic, as these are the countries large numbers of migrants and refugees travel from the the United States.

This Reuters article claims these countries are “still feeling the effects of the US-Soviet proxy wars…of the 1980s.”  U.S. restores aid to Central America after reaching migration deals (Reuters, October 16, 2019)

Neither Trump nor Pompeo said how much of the hundreds of millions of dollars of suspended aid would be released. The Washington Post, citing an unnamed person familiar with the decision, reported it amounted to $143 million.

The United States used the aid suspension as leverage over the three impoverished countries that are still feeling the effects of the U.S.-Soviet proxy wars in region in the 1980s.

Other articles, books, and studies will reach further back to claim that past U.S. military interventions in the region, to support U.S. corporations are a part of the problem. Others claim that American consumers are to blame when they buy low-cost bananas farmed and imported by U.S. corporations that pay low wages, instead of more expensive bananas from family farms.  

Popular novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude  “considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature” shape history in strange ways with some fifty million copies printed, and soon coming to Netflix to reach millions more, this “story of one hundred years that ‘shaped us as a continent,’ Ramos said, ‘through  dictatorships, through births of new countries, through colonialism’.” More at How Many Will Die When Netflix Shoots One Hundred Years of Solitude?

When young people are taught that poverty and suffering today in Honduras and Guatemala were caused in part by banana industry exploitation and repression of workers, past and present, they are more likely to support socialist foreign aid and diplomatic policies toward Latin American leaders.

I’ve posted videos on the economics of these three resolutions and will have further posts. First is: Economics of E.U. Immigration Reform, next is Economics of Development and Humanitarian Aid.