The two White House hopefuls debated on ABC television on September 10, 2024, but their mentions of Latin America were mainly dedicated to the issue of migration. Credit: Michael Le Brecht II / ABC
By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 24 2024 – Migration, trade, the defence of democracy, the confrontation with China and the collapse of multilateralism are issues that shed more doubts than certainties on Latin America’s expectations of the imminent presidential elections in the United States.
Interest and tension have grown after dozens of polls and bookmakers have shown similar chances of victory for Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, particularly in a few decisive states.“After Washington’s retreat from the wars it got into in the Middle East, there is resistance among people to getting involved in the world’s problems, which weakens the liberal democratic order”: Vilma Petrash.
Latin America has been treated by many US administrations as its ‘backyard’, but it is now commonplace that Washington’s international priority lies far from the region.
Nevertheless, “we should not underestimate the ways in which Democrats and Republicans are different”, warned Tullo Vigevani, former professor of international relations at Brazil’s Paulista State University.
“For example, their proposals and policies are very different on the environment, in general and in relation to Latin America; on renewable energy and biofuels – particularly in the case of Brazil – and regarding human rights and some authoritarian trends in the region”, Vigevani told IPS from Sao Paulo.
Even if some governments are more sympathetic to Harris or Trump, Vigevani believes that both Washington and the region’s capitals will seek understandings and a relationship as normal as possible, after the 5 November election.
Migrants in the Mexican border city of Tijuana approach the barrier that closes access to the United States. Credit: Alejandro Cartagena / IOM
Migration rules
Among the campaign issues, such as economy and employment, taxes, health, wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and the opposing personalities of both candidates, migration stands out, with Latin American countries being the main expellers of migrants to the United States.
“It is a sensitive issue for Americans, whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents. It affects the immigrant population, the millions of refugees, and therefore the countries of Latin America,” Vilma Petrash, a Venezuelan professor of political science and international relations at Miami Dade College, told IPS.
Of the 336 million people living in the United States, 46.2 million were of foreign origin in 2022, according to the non-governmental Pew Research Center; 49% are already U.S. citizens, 24% are legal permanent residents, and the rest, more than 11 million people, are unauthorised immigrants, eight million of whom are from Latin American and Caribbean countries.
In fact, the United States is currently home to 65 million ‘Hispanics’, as Latin Americans are called in the country, according to different reports, and they have become a desired prize for the two candidates.
Trump, who pushed for the construction of a wall on the southern border during his presidency (2017-2021), now offers massive deportations of illegals – one million immediately, according to his vice-presidential candidate, James Vance -, and to contain irregular border immigration even by using the military.
They are “the enemy within”, Trump has said, and has stigmatised migrants: he said that criminals from Venezuela have left their country for the United States, “leaving Caracas as one of the safest cities in the world”, or that Haitians “are eating the pets” in the northern industrial state of Ohio.
Harris, who is the current vice-president and lead programmes with which president Joe Biden also tried to address causes of migration, such as poverty in Central America, has said that the immigration system “needs reform”, without going into details.
Whichever side wins, the controls will predictably increase, and Washington’s announcement that it will not renew in 2025 the temporary stay permits (parole), which allow Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans to enter and remain in the United States for two years, was a warning sign.
The US aircraft carrier USS Nimitz sails through the Arabian Gulf. Credit: US Army
The United States isolates itself
The migration issue shows the United States’ willingness to isolate itself, to withdraw, instead of taking a proactive approach, as a great global power, to solving problems in the region and the world.
According to Petrash, “after Washington’s retreat from the wars it got into in the Middle East, there is resistance among people to getting involved in the world’s problems, which weakens the liberal democratic order. Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policies are a case in point”.
The expert said from Miami, in the southeastern state of Florida, that there is also a lack of consensus over foreign policy, and in general over governance, to the point that a part of the population still, countering evidence, supports the version that it was Trump and not Biden who won the election four years ago.
While Biden has consistently supported Ukraine in the war against Russia, and Israel’s current military offensive in the Middle East, his political action in favour of democracy in Latin America has been weaker, and Harris would continue this, although with revisions, according to Petrash.
This is despite the certainty that, for example, among the alternatives for containing regional migration, in which the exodus of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade stands out, is to promote a solution to the democratic crisis in that country.
As a result of its policies and omissions, its polarised political confrontation and doubts about its electoral system, and the rise of isolationism, the United States “would have to regain the moral stature necessary to help stem democratic backsliding in the region”, says Petrash.
These setbacks are expressed in left-wing governments with authoritarian tendencies, such as those in Nicaragua and Venezuela, but also in sectors that have backed right-wing presidencies such as those of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) in Brazil and the current administrations of Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.
Bolsonaro, Milei and Bukele have openly identified with Trump, whose sector harbours a far-right conservative current. For Petrash, this could favour a rapprochement with Latin American countries where there is a democratic backlash.
Unloading wind turbines from China at the port of Bahía Blanca, Argentina. It shows China’s penetration into the renewable energy sector in the Southern Cone, where it is already a major trading partner. Credit: Port of Bahía Blanca
China moves forward
Petrash points out that the United States’s international retreat was acute in Latin America, “its natural strategic zone”, after the failure of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative in 2005. “It abandoned its vision of free trade in the region and let China move forward with its enclaves,” she said.
China, “an economic, political and ideological rival, has sold itself as successful authoritarianism, and has taken advantage of Washington’s absences in Latin America to advance its quiet, pragmatic diplomacy,” says Petrash.
Trade between China and Latin America reached US$480 billion in 2023 after increasing 35-fold in 2000-2022, while the region’s total trade with the world increased four-fold, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Nevertheless, trade with the Asian giant is still far from the region’s trade with the United States, which in the same year amounted to US$1.14 trillion.
Relations between Latin America and China “have grown and even strengthened in strategic areas such as new materials for energy production, lithium batteries -South America has large reserves of the mineral-, or artificial intelligence”, Vigevani states.
Certification of Brazilian meat for export. Brazil is the largest exporter of beef and poultry, and very active in the World Trade Organization. Credit: Abrafrigo
Brazil and Mexico
Meanwhile, Brazil is concerned about Washington’s disdain – which will be evident if Trump wins – for multilateral institutions, starting with the United Nations and the proposed renewal of its Security Council in order to make it effective.
For Vigevani, this distancing from multilateralism is illustrated by the blockade, which Washington has maintained since 2020, on the appointment of new members to the dispute settlement body of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), initiated by Trump and continued by Biden.
“Even if relations with Brazil and Latin America in general look normal, this United States refusal raises doubts for the future, because it is saying it is not interested in multilateral organisations,” said Vigevani.
In the case of a Trump victory, the Brazilian professor points out, there are also unanswered questions about what his war and peace policies will be.
An example is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Trump has said that “ending this war quickly is in the best interest of the United States” and that he can achieve “a peace agreement in one day”, without offering further details, said Vigevani.
“It is important because, despite the war, Brazil has a strong relationship with Russia, and a very active participation in the Brics group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa),” Vigevani recalled.
According to Petrash, with Trump’s international policy, “the great power can be the bull in the china shop, and even more, the bull isolating itself in the china shop”.
At the other end of the region is Mexico, a partner of Canada and the United States in the trade agreement known as USMCA, which replaced in 2020 the North American Free Trade Agreement that has existed since 1994.
Along with maintaining the 3150-kilometre southern border of the United States, a destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants who cross the region each year, Mexico faces the campaign promise from both Harris and Trump that they intend to revise the USMCA as soon as they reach the White House.
Trump is expected to introduce tariffs and protectionist barriers, for example on Mexican production involving Chinese parts or technologies, and Harris is expected to increase environmental and labour requirements that favour industries with United States labour.
Whichever side wins, “with the new American policy of bringing companies back to the United States or to its partners in the USMCA, possibly the biggest issue now is the end of globalisation and the return to a developmentalist nationalism”, summarised Vigevani.