Latin American policy, immigration loom as Trump-Biden flash point

U.S. policy toward Latin America is having an outsized impact on the election, as Democrat Joseph R. Biden woos Hispanic voters in key swings states by vowing to reverse President Trump’s hardline immigration policies and offer refuge for some 200,000 Venezuelans who have fled to the U.S.

With the exception of Mr. Trump’s NAFTA renegotiation, which Mr. Biden and other Democrats have backed, the two candidates differ almost across the board on issues tied to the region, with the former vice president likely to seek a return to Obama-era rapprochement with Cuba, move away from conservative populists like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and push fighting climate change as a hemispheric rallying point.

But analysts say immigration looms as the flash point issue.

In addition to giving “temporary protected status” for Venezuelans, the Biden campaign says it would immediately reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protections for immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children illegally, and establish a pathway to some form of legal status for more than 10 million people.

A number of central and South American countries have spent the past three years bristling at the Trump administration’s hard lines on immigration and trade, taking umbrage with a variety of issues including Mr. Trump’s wall building, his methods in cracking down on refugees and illegal border crossings.

“The immigration issue resonates across Latin America,” said Michael Shifter, who heads the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank and teaches at Georgetown University. “The whole ’children in cages’ and family separation issue, all those images, were very powerful and distressing to Latin Americans.”

The result, he said, has been “tremendous outrage” in several countries that has “eroded good will toward the United States and set back U.S. relationships.”

Some say the ill feelings have hampered a key Trump objective in the region — curbing rising Chinese and Russian influence in the hemisphere and confronting leftist authoritarian regimes in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

“U.S. soft power in the region has taken a serious hit under Trump because of his bad treatment of immigrants and because of his denial of climate change,” said Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow with the London-based think tank Chatham House.

“Latin Americans see Trump’s border wall as a symbolic middle finger not just to immigrants but to the region as a whole, and this matters on things like China,” said Mr. Sabatini. “It essentially neuters the president’s ability to build truly trustworthy alliances around U.S. national interests such as that of countering China’s rise in the region.”

“As a result, most of our countering China policy in the region amounts to finger-wagging,” Mr. Sabatini added.

Even before Mr. Trump took office, Washington has struggled to deliver an effective alternative for investment-starved Latin American countries to state-backed, low-interest development loans from China — loans that can come with significant political strings.

In 2017, Mr. Trump signed into law consolidating a key credit agency of the U.S. Agency for International Development with a newly revitalized Overseas Private Investment Corporation to boost overseas U.S. development financing.

The catch, according to Mr. Sabatini, is that the funding vehicle hasn’t yet delivered in volumes that could counter China as the go-to funder of Latin American development projects, such as bridges and railroads and the expanded Panama Canal.

Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have had their successes beyond NAFTA — Venezuela is isolated and bankrupt due in large part to U.S. sanctions, relations with new leftist Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have been unexpectedly warm, and Central American nations have signed on to a new regime to accept their nationals caught trying to cross into the U.S. illegally.

In the Trump administration’s ill-fated push at the United Nations last week to extend military sanctions on Iran, the lone vote in support at the Security Council was cast by the Dominican Republic.

A Biden break

A Biden administration would be widely expected to use U.S. aid and financial clout to pressure Latin American and other nations into aligning with his climate change agenda. His campaign website vows that a President Biden would ensure that OPIC and other U.S. lending arms “significantly reduce the carbon footprints of their portfolios.”

But Mr. Biden may face trouble just where Mr. Trump has found some unexpected allies, including a crop of more socially conservative, pro-market leaders. Exhibit A: Mr. Bolsonaro.

Known as the “Trump of the Tropics,” Mr. Bolsonaro ran on a boldly pro-American and pro-Trump platform in 2018, even emulating Mr. Trump in style and rhetorical tone. Both countries have been staggered by the coronavirus crisis, but at a presidential level, Mr. Trump had clearly bolstered ties with what is by far the Latin America’s most powerful economy.

Mr. Trump last year designated Brazil a “major non-NATO ally,” allowing Brasilia to purchase more sophisticated U.S. weapons and pursue deeper military-to-military coordination with Washington.

“The Trump and Bolsonaro administrations seem to be mutually supportive, and that goes to the heart of things like building the economic relationship, as well as defense and space cooperation,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and Americas Society. “These are things that have, on a bipartisan basis, been on the U.S. agenda for a long time.”

The relationship is likely to take a hit if Mr. Biden wins in November, according to Mr. Farnsworth.

Another obvious area of difference is Cuba.

Mr. Trump moved swiftly in 2017 to re-impose limits on U.S. travel to Cuba that the Obama administration had loosened as part of its historic detente with the Communist Caribbean leadership. The Trump administration has also increased the number of Cubans deported from the U.S. tenfold, according to The Associated Press.

“The Biden people — and many are the same literally as were in the Obama administration — want to reverse Trump’s Cuba policy,” said Mr. Farnsworth. If Washington is “seen to be less punitive to Cuba,” the argument goes, “it would help the U.S. engaged more positively with other countries in the region.”

But Mr. Farnsworth added he was skeptical, noting that Latin American countries — like nearly all others around the world — generally pursue their own interests whether they agree with a particular U.S. policy or not.

He added that the past four years have demonstrated the region’s willingness to work with Mr. Trump as a “very transactional” U.S. leader. Guatemala, he noted, was one of the few countries to join the U.S. in relocating its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

While Mr. Farnsworth said there is no proof of a quid pro quo, the Trump administration was noticeably quiet when Guatemala subsequently closed a U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission, to heavy criticism from private rights groups.

More broadly, analysts said, Mr. Trump’s Latin American policy — even on issues such as drugs, transnational crime and terrorism — was viewed heavily through the lens of immigration. The administration held up aid to deal with instability in the North Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras specifically to win concessions on immigration.

A President Biden will clearly be looking through a very different lens, and his campaign website even highlights a $750 million aid package to those countries Mr. Biden helped pass when he was vice president.

“The Trump administration has delayed, reduced, or diverted assistance to Central America — a counterproductive policy that has been rejected by congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle,” the website says.