The Price of Neglecting Latin America

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To the extent that foreign crises helped shape the outcome of November’s U.S. presidential election, it wasn’t the ones in Gaza and Ukraine that had the strongest effect. It was, instead, those closer to home that mattered most: namely, the spread of Mafias and Mafia states throughout Latin America and the corresponding mass exodus of migrants and refugees to the southern border of the United States.

Backlash to the post-2020 spike in undocumented immigration from Latin America weighed strongly in Donald Trump’s favor. He made “closing the border” and the “largest deportation program in American history” centerpieces of his campaign, and voters rewarded him for it. Immigration turned out Trump’s base and was neck and neck with inflation in pushing swing voters to cast their ballots for him. Before Election Day, Democrats worried whether Arab Americans in Michigan and college students nationwide might cost them the election over Gaza. But now it’s clear that they had more to worry about among young men, voters without college degrees, and Latinos, who named immigration and the border among the top reasons they did not vote for Kamala Harris.

Voters, American politicians, and even some foreign policy officials may not see the “border crisis” as an extension of turmoil abroad. But mass migration to the United States would not exist in its post-2020 proportions if Latin America’s economically diversified crime groups, and the states with which they have fused, were not pushing millions of people to flee north. Trump’s electoral successes owed largely to his ability to tap into and reinforce voters’ fear and frustration over their arrival. He won in 2016 in part by peeling away Obama voters who leaned right on immigration and liked his hard-line positions after an upswing in crime-fueled Central American migration in the years prior. In 2024, in response to a much larger migration wave, he reused this playbook, adopting even tougher positions, and won again decisively.

Trump’s return to office signals a rejection of Democrats’ vision of a reinvigorated liberal internationalism, which President Joe Biden laid out in Foreign Affairs in March 2020. Trump promises a different style of leadership: openly nationalist in its goals, transactional in its methods, part hawkish, part isolationist. The question now is not whether his return to office will reshape the international order but by how much and how quickly. U.S. policy toward Asia, Europe, and the Middle East may change abruptly as the administration devotes its attention to fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise to curb migration from Latin America.

That turmoil in Latin America shaped this course of events, even if indirectly, challenges the assumption that Latin America is too peripheral, too insular, and too small in population terms to exert much influence in world events. And because the crisis-fueled mass migration shows little sign of abating, it is likely to continue dividing the United States and, by extension, hindering its capacity for global leadership. The United States has it in its own interest to do more, alongside its allies, to disempower the region’s Mafias and Mafia states and the illegal economies on which they rely. If they don’t, mass forced migration will continue, and the United States will face the consequences.

GOLDEN DAYS A little over a decade ago, Latin America did not look poised for a mass exodus. The region looked like a success story. After emerging from the economic chaos of the 1980s, the region’s real GDP had grown, on average, at over three percent for two decades straight. Independent central banks virtually eradicated hyperinflation. The percentage of the population below the poverty line fell from 46 percent in 2000 to 29 percent in 2013. Income inequality fell in 15 of 18 of the region’s countries over the same time period.

The political changes were even more remarkable. Once an autocratic sea with democratic islands, Latin America became the inverse. “Fully free” countries outnumbered “partly free” countries by 2010, according to Freedom House, and only one country, Cuba, was classified as “not free.” Coups and guerilla insurgencies, widespread as recently as the early 1990s, largely ceased. The international environment—the high commodity prices of the 2000s and the end of the Cold War just over a decade earlier—were partly to thank for these economic and political advances, but a suite of remarkably successful homegrown institutional reforms, including peace accords, antipoverty programs, and reformed electoral tribunals, proved as crucial to the region’s progress.

By the mid-2000s, a mass exodus from the region did not just seem improbable; Latin American immigration to the United States was in fact slowing dramatically. Mexican undocumented immigration, which soared in the late 1960s as Congress slashed guest worker visas, remained high throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and only began to decline in the 1990s, became net negative after 2006 due to slowing Mexican birth rates and a stronger domestic economy. By 2008, the United States’ undocumented population was declining, and by 2011, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) apprehensions of unauthorized migrants at the border had fallen to around 300,000 annually, down from more than 1.6 million in 2000. The share of the U.S. public describing “illegal immigration” as a “critical” threat decreased. But the calm wouldn’t last.

ECONOMIES OF SCALE Amid Latin America’s undeniable successes, one problem, in particular, festered: organized crime was booming, thanks to growing demand for illicit drugs and goods from consumers in the United States, Europe, and within Latin America itself. Mafias and cartels made billions trafficking and selling drugs and illegally mined gold to buyers abroad. Within the region, as economic growth upped consumers’ purchasing power, they thrived off growing markets for stolen merchandise, contraband imports, and drugs, as well. Although Latin American governments, often at Washington’s behest, cracked down, the Mafias and cartels learned to outsmart them. They infiltrated states, while some state actors learned how to enlist criminal organizations for personal and political gain.

Neither big criminal profits nor the intermingling of criminal and state actors were entirely new for Latin America: powerful drug cartels had operated in parts of the Andes, Central America, and Mexico since the 1980s. What changed in the 2010s was the scale of organized crime. Criminal profits soared because of soaring global demand for gold, cocaine, and unauthorized passage across borders, with criminal groups exploiting the last to build a human smuggling industry. And after nearly three decades of coexistence, connections between crime and opportunistic state actors deepened and became more widespread, in extreme cases producing Mafia states like Venezuela and Nicaragua, where criminal groups and governments became practically indistinguishable. During the 2010s and early 2020s, more and more Latin Americans found themselves living at the mercy of extortion gangs or under governments increasingly paralyzed or co-opted by crime, while criminal groups‘ conflicts migrated to once-peaceful countries and subregions of countries, destabilizing them in the process.

This shift primed the region for a new type of mass migration: not the cyclical, labor-driven migration of young people from Mexico that spiked from the 1970s to the 1990s but the collective escape of millions from the predatory rule of Mafias and Mafia states. It started in Central America’s northern triangle, where post–Cold War success had been shallowest. Corrupt and inept governments in Guatemala and Honduras failed to halt an epidemic of gang violence and extortion. CBP apprehended over 250,000 northern Central Americans, including nearly 70,000 unaccompanied children, in fiscal year 2014, and over 500,000 in 2019, of which a majority arrived in family units. The prevalence of solo children and families suggests that this was not simply labor-driven. It was mass escape from life-threatening danger.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which hit Latin America’s economies harder than those of any other region, accelerated outmigration from countries plagued by Mafias and governed by Mafia states. By 2020, over five million Venezuelans had already left for neighboring countries. They fled an economic crisis that persisted because there was no way to remove the country’s leaders, who had fused with organized crime groups to enrich themselves, while repressing dissent. As the pandemic battered the region, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, leaving directly from their country or from neighboring ones, trekked north through Panama’s Darién Gap, where Haitians and Ecuadoreans were also fleeing their countries’ gangs. Meanwhile, unauthorized migration from Mexico increased substantially for the first time in 20 years, with 90 percent of migrants reporting that they left because of violence, extortion, or organized crime. Criminal groups both drove much of the migration and made a several-hundred-million-dollar business out of it, taxing migrant smugglers, charging migrants fees, and kidnapping them for ransom.

IT TAKES TWO The shocks reverberated in the United States. Driven largely by the arrivals of Latin Americans, net immigration to the United States rose to 2.6 million people in 2022 and 3.3 million in 2023, well above the yearly average of 900,000 from 2010 to 2019. Contrary to claims by some Republicans that the spike in immigration drove inflation, housing shortages, and increases in crime rates, the post-2020 arrivals had negligible effect on inflation, contributed little to the post-pandemic increase in rents and housing costs, and did not depress blue-collar wages in the aggregate or increase crime rates. But many Americans were alarmed by a border and asylum system in evident disarray, stress on public services and budgets, and highly publicized individual cases of crimes committed by new immigrants. A smaller share simply opposed rapid but all-but-irreversible demographic change. (Latinos accounted for 91 percent of U.S. population growth from 2020 through mid-2023 and are forecast to make up a quarter of the U.S. population by 2050.) The upshot: a majority of the country came to favor decreasing immigration, and saw “illegal immigration” and the border as a defining election issue (and one of Democrats’ biggest failures).

Biden pivoted to the right on the border. He used the pandemic-era measure Title 42 to deport more people than Trump did in his first term. After Trump’s opposition stopped the passage of a bipartisan border security bill, Biden issued an executive order sharply curtailing asylum. As Mexico also stepped up efforts to block migrants from reaching the U.S. border, monthly CBP apprehensions at the southern border dropped by 65 percent from October 2024 to December 2023, dipping below the number of apprehensions during Trump’s final months in office. But none of these developments did much to change public opinion. In a September poll, registered voters still trusted Trump on the border over Kamala Harris by a 21-point margin. Exit polls on Election Day told a similar story, with Trump’s pledge to secure the border ranking highly among the reasons voters supported him.

Despite some voters’ perceptions, however, Latin America is not unilaterally destabilizing the United States. The organized crime crisis is a two-way street. The United States and Latin America have destabilized each other by failing to take effective action against networks of transregional illicit goods consumers and suppliers that span the hemisphere. The United States has not significantly curbed domestic drug demand or the trafficking of U.S.-made firearms into Latin America, which bankroll and arm the region’s biggest Mafias and cartels. And Latin American governments have often failed to weaken these groups or curtail their predatory behavior toward society.

Pan-American disorder has reigned as a result. As the cocaine, illegal gold, and migrant smuggling booms continue, the region’s criminal organizations and Mafia states remain commercially robust. Despite the dip in border apprehensions, migration through Panama’s Darién gap rose in September. None of these trends are fleeting. They are the new normal for the Americas, with major consequences for the United States.

MAKE THE AMERICAS SAFE AGAIN Trump’s reelection injects uncertainty into issues as varied as the war in Ukraine, the future of Taiwan, the direction of NATO, and trade with China and Mexico. Since Trump remade the GOP and sidelined much of its establishment, bipartisan consensus on many of these key foreign policy issues has frayed. The United States now changes not just president and ruling party every four to eight years but also philosophies of U.S. global leadership. These partisan swings undermine the country’s capacity for global leadership, unsettling allies and emboldening adversaries.

That’s not the only way in which the country’s current political dynamics impair its ability to lead. U.S. leaders risk losing sight of opportunities and threats abroad amid rising polarization and political discord at home. The United States now ranks below Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay based on Freedom House’s “freedom score,” a combined measure of political rights and civil liberties. A backsliding United States consumed by political infighting cannot credibly promise to lead. The backlash to mass immigration from Latin America is far from the only fault line in U.S. politics, but it is a major reason that the country has veered in a troubling direction.

Trump has an answer to the crises in Latin America. Call it a “border-first” foreign policy, which makes stopping the northward movement of refugees, migrants, and drugs the country’s top priority in the Western Hemisphere. During his first term, this approach produced policies like the “Remain in Mexico” and “safe third country” agreements, which, in a bid to reduce movement north, forced asylum seekers to await immigration court dates in Mexico and seek protection in unsafe countries in Central America, respectively. Obtaining cooperation from Latin American governments on migration has come at the price of silence on rollbacks of rule of law and democracy in the region. Democracy regressed in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador during Trump’s first term and, with the exception of Guatemala, continued to do so under Biden. Under the new border-first orthodoxy, Mexico and northern Central America have become to the United States what Turkey is to Europe: a de facto border wall. This approach is at least somewhat effective at lowering border apprehensions, but it doesn’t serve the United States’ interest in maintaining a stable neighborhood. By disincentivizing Washington from taking a firmer stance on democratic backsliding in these countries, it allows the erosion of democracy to continue, creating conditions that further empower criminal groups. Cartels and gangs have made territorial gains in Mexico and Honduras, two of the United States’ top partners on migration, amid recent rule of law rollbacks in both countries.

The organized crime crisis is a two-way street. This time around, Trump is promising an even more hard-line border-first approach: demanding Mexico “stop migration” through its national territory or else face high tariffs; using the U.S. military to deport millions of people; and threatening unilateral military strikes against traffickers on Mexican soil. Some analysts dismissed these promises as campaign trail theatrics. Aside from the great human costs of deporting millions to unsafe countries and trapping them there, the fiscal and economic costs to the United States would be enormous and the logistics daunting. The diplomatic costs of a military strike on Mexico, sure to alienate Latin American governments, could also be severe. But members of the administration have said repeatedly, before and after Election Day, that they are serious about these proposals.

Even if Trump executes his vision, it remains unclear whether harder borders will deter unauthorized migration if Mafias and Mafia states continue to spread. If a radical bid at deterrence does keep people in place, effectively shutting the porous borders that have served as the region’s pressure valve, it may result in greater political and social instability within Latin America. It’s also possible deterrence will not work. After the first Trump administration implemented child–family separation at the U.S.-Mexican border in 2018—one of the harshest deterrents imaginable—apprehensions of Central American migrants increased. The basic calculus, that the risks to one’s safety at home are so great that they outweigh those of heading north, has not changed for millions of Latin Americans. And it won’t until the Mafia states and Mafias are made less powerful and predatory.

Curbing the power of the region’s criminal groups and the governments with which they have aligned is the only real path to stopping the mass exodus. But it is a formidable task that would take years or even decades of consistent effort. It would mean pursuing bold new solutions to limiting the profitability of illegal gold and cocaine in partnership with other major consumer countries in Europe and Latin America at a time when their consumer base is more global than ever; curbing the flow of illegally trafficked U.S.-made firearms that equip Mexican cartels and other criminal groups to take on militaries and keep control of territory; and disrupting criminal groups’ finances, even as opaque Chinese money-laundering networks make it an increasingly difficult task. If authoritarian regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela remain stubbornly entrenched, it would also require expanding the already depleted capacity of neighboring countries to absorb their migrants and refugees. Without these steps, the age of pan-American disorder is likely here to stay.

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