Is 'blocking movement' a measure of US aid success in Northern Triangle?

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — A congressional delegation visiting Guatemala in August met with NGOs and pressed them for data. The policymakers wanted to know how U.S.-funded foreign assistance programs were deterring migration. But providing such data poses a problem for many of the organizations operating in the region. Groups haven’t been collecting baseline data on migration because the programs they were implementing were not designed explicitly to deter migration. This makes it impossible to know if current U.S. assistance programs — which as of now will receive no further fund disbursements after U.S. President Donald Trump cut off aid to the region — are preventing people from leaving their country of origin. “To re-envision foreign aid as something whose primary purpose is to block movements means destroying it utterly and replacing it with something whose effect on development, on migration, and on the U.S. national interest is just completely unknown.” --— Michael Clemens, director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy, Center for Global Development “These programs are set up as development programs and they’re set up to enhance quality of life options for folks on the ground,” said Paul Townsend, Guatemala country director for Catholic Relief Services, who attended the meeting. “So to be able to do a legitimate job of defining indicators that are related to migration and then use those as part of the baseline monitoring, evaluations — that’s going to take some time.” While it is not clear if or when U.S. foreign assistance funds will flow to the region, it is clear there is an acute interest from the administration in deterring migration north to the U.S. border. Michael Clemens, who has studied the link between foreign aid and migration, said there are “enormous risks” attached to redefining the purpose of U.S. assistance in the Northern Triangle. “To re-envision foreign aid as something whose primary purpose is to block movements means destroying it utterly and replacing it with something whose effect on development, on migration, and on the U.S. national interest is just completely unknown,” said Michael Clemens, director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy at the Center for Global Development. “Many of the goals of foreign aid and the prevention of migration are strictly incompatible with each other. That is, the goal of development assistance is to foster development, and development typically goes hand in hand with migration,” he said. Clemens said this happens because interventions can increase things such as educational levels, aspirations, and international linkages, which are all positive metrics for development but can give people hope for a brighter future and a desire to move to where they perceive opportunity will be greater. This means the short term result of an impactful development program can actually boost migration rather than deter it. “Many of the goals of foreign aid and the prevention of migration are strictly incompatible with each other. That is, the goal of development assistance is to foster development, and development typically goes hand in hand with migration.” --— Michael Clemens, director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy, Center for Global Development The difficulty of data While politicians may desire data proving U.S. money is directly reducing migration levels, attempting to measure the impact of programs aimed specifically at deterring migration is complicated, Clemens said. Development intervention results can often take years, if not decades, to manifest. “There’s some evidence that foreign aid could support a short-term negative effect on migration pressure. Short term is the only thing that these politicians are interested in,” Clemens said, citing the success of some types of security assistance and some youth job training programs at demonstrating a swift ability to reduce migration levels. “Nearly all other forms of assistance for agriculture, for trade infrastructure, for public health, for family planning — which have generations of track record and many successes in the region — would be deemed irrelevant if the focus were to be entirely on blocking movement,” Clemens said. There are significant barriers to collecting proper migration data — if it was to be required by future U.S.-funded programs. Clemens said the ability to accurately track people, who could tire of responding to questions over time or lose touch with survey collectors as they move within their country, is labor intensive. It’s also costly and many projects don’t include a budget for conducting such surveys. Projects must be sure the sample size is large enough to be able to say with statistically significant confidence that one particular intervention had a direct result of deterring migration of a certain number of people, Clemens said. Research from the Migration Policy Institute has found that investing in economic and governance structures rather than development interventions that improve individuals’ assets or skills may offer better alternatives to migration in the long term, but also cautioned that the complexity of issues facing different countries makes drawing definitive conclusions about cause and effect impossible. “The problem is that some of the things that matter most for migration can’t be linked directly to it,” said MPI President Andrew Selee. “Migration’s also sensitive to other things: You can help people have a better harvest but politically the country is worse off and people decide to leave anyway because they don’t think there’s a future … So there’s always so many things happening that can influence people’s decision to migrate that you can’t know for sure if any given intervention is going to change that equation,” Steele said. The complexity of these drivers of migration is apparent in a recent study conducted by development implementer Creative in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The study found that even within the general category of “victimization” — a look at how different forms of violence, often cited as a driver of migration, impact people — there were different rates of intention to migrate in the three countries and even among different municipalities. The study examined 60 municipalities with the highest outflow of migration and measured the impact that things like robberies and extortion have on intention to migrate. “The contributing factors at this level that perhaps increase the likelihood and make Honduran women to migrate from La Ceiba in Honduras are not necessarily the same factors that oblige a woman in Guatemala City to take that decision,” said Rene Leon, senior associate at Creative Associates. Challenges for NGOs Creating migration deterrent programs could also pose tough questions for NGOs, which generally shy away from taking a position on the merits of migration and support the right of people to move freely to secure access to basic needs and safety. “We’re not against or for migration, but we want people, families to stay together … where they have something to eat, they have income, and they have protection. That’s our focus,” said Mary McInerney, Guatemala country office director for Save the Children. John Lundine, Guatemala country director for Plan International who was also at the August meeting with lawmakers, said the framework for program design in the region would be fundamentally altered if every project was to need to have a migration link. “When an organization wins a USAID program, it’s responding to a design from USAID. So USAID would design a health program, an organization responds, somebody wins, and then you implement that health program,” Lundine said. “If the funding were to come back on, I think it’s an issue and a challenge to design programs to meet this new goal of reducing migration.” The granularity of Creative’s data on causes of migration could provide a starting point for organizations such as CRS, Save the Children, and Plan International that may now be required to reorient their activities in the Northern Triangle around deterring such movement. “We should focus on high migration municipalities or areas if we are going to do programs that aim to curb migration,” Creative’s Leon said. “We have to think outside the box in terms of expanding economic programs and activities and interventions. Perhaps a regular development project — which are 5 years, which apply a lot of traditional interventions — will not solve ... the migration problem in the short term.”