Looking back, Vice President Kamala Harris’s first major mission as the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States – her trip to Guatemala and Mexico this past week to ease, if not resolve, the surging refugee crisis at our southwest border – really wasn’t as imperfect as some critics and pundits are saying.
But it was discouraging. And mainly, it was a missed opportunity to send a powerful and humane message to desperate people who needed to hear it the most. Namely: those hundreds of thousands of despairing men, women, teens and little children who are about to risk their lives, and may well waste their last dollars, on criminal coyotes who promised to somehow smuggle them into the USA.
Harris arrived in an increasingly dysfunctional region just as U.S. officials announced that in May, more than 180,000 refugees had surged to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum – the highest monthly total in two decades. And on June 6, Mexico held nationwide elections after a 10-month campaign in which 91 politicians were reportedly murdered – 36 of them aspiring candidates.
Those of us who watched Harris in action, respected her skills and hoped she would succeed in helping humanity, were sad to realize neither she nor her corps of Biden-Harris experts and advisers seemed to grasp how they could have been making good things happen at the intersection of the news media, policy and politics. (Memo to Message Manipulators: It happens just the same way at those intersections in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico as it does back in Washington.)
Today we are spotlighting the powerful message/policy tools the Biden-Harris team left unused in their toolbox – a missed opportunity that could have been more effective in communicating to hundreds of thousands of desperate Central Americans who are homeless and/or jobless. Also people in those long-corrupted countries who thugs threatened to injure or kill if they didn’t pay protection money to gangs that are also paying cops and judges to look the other way.
No wonder those frantic people have been easy marks for coyotes who conned them into believing the U.S. border was opening up – so they gave smugglers maybe $5,000 to be jammed cheek-to-jowl in panel trucks that would take them to the border. Smugglers promised to somehow get them onto U.S. land so they could surrender, apply for asylum, and live in U.S. shelters waiting for officials to let them in.
In Guatemala, Harris rambled at length before issuing a planned but only quasi-convincing warning: “Do not come (to the U.S.-Mexico border) … I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.” She also announced another batch of bureaucratic-sounding policies: the creation of a joint “Anticorruption Task Force,” a “Human Smuggling and Corruption Task Force.” It all sounded like more talk about aid that won’t ever reach them (because it never has before). So the surge surges on.
Predictably, U.S. reporters repeatedly asked her the gotcha questions that were being dished by Republican critics: Why didn’t she go to the border? Astonishingly, she seemed shocked each time. Finally, when NBC’s Lester Holt pressed her about it Monday, she snapped: “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t understand the point you are making.” CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that gaffe led to not just predictable criticism from the right and left, but also from anonymous White House sources.
But wait! Suppose the Biden-Harris thinkologists had used their message-molding tools and started her trip to start at the border with refugees telling her about the misery of their month-long trek to the border. Suppose she then went to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras – and cut a ribbon opening a Top Priority Refugee Asylum Application & Processing Center in each country. Suppose she announced that from now on, these new “Top Priority” centers are the only places where “top priority” processing will be rapidly done. (It is, after all, an existing procedure done in U.S. consulates each country anyway.)
Let the TV cameras record it all. Let the veep explain that starting now there is zero advantage to surging hopelessly to the border. Show video of people being returned from the border to await in these new centers back in their home countries while their relatives in San Diego and Cleveland were contacted.
Don’t admit the drug gang punks. But admit all refugees who indeed have relatives in the USA, who just want to work – and send money home to their families.
Team Biden-Harris can still make that message and broadcast it through the Americas. It’s not too late to show asylum seekers that, from now on, these all new, humanitarian centers are every refugee’s top-priority, peril-free place to be.
EPILOGUE: It is late at night and I am googling to find an example I can show you of a well-intentioned but overreaching U.S. aid program that failed to reach Latin America’s lower income workers who most needed our help. Up pops a perfect example of speaking truth to power.
It’s from the JFK-LBJ era. A government consultant wrote a memo warning foreign aid officials that a planned low cost housing project would be building homes that were too costly for the workers they’re supposed to be helping. The memo, really quite gutsy, urged that the U.S. build lower cost, truly affordable housing. And it questioned whether the project really was “designed to impress the USA (powers) … rather than serve the (workers’) practical necessities.”
The memo was spotted and quoted by a Stony Brook University grad student, Michael J. Murphy, in his 2013 doctoral dissertation: “The costs for workers seeking to purchase homes in these housing projects caught the attention of Marlo J. Schram…” – OMG! – that’s my dad he’s quoting! Well of course. Dad was always about helping people buy their first house – a dream many in the world still think will only come true for others. Dad’s been gone 17 years now. Yet as another Father’s Day approaches, we all think about our dads and always enjoy those fun times that still make us smile.
