Presidential Cabinet Passes Executive Order to Address Root Causes of Immigration

The presidential cabinet today voted 24-0-1 to pass the “Address Root Causes” Act, which will create a sub-committee within the Department of Commerce to distribute $500 million of federal funds to NGOs to develop social programs in the five countries that send the most migrants to the U.S. Southern border. 

However, there seemed to be confusion about who exactly would benefit from the bill, with the authors collectively naming six countries: Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. 

The executive order, authored by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, aims to specifically help vulnerable populations in these countries in order to disincentivize migration to the U.S., as cabinet members raised concerns about not having the resources or infrastructure to support current levels of immigration. 

The vulnerable populations stated in the bill are “LGBTQI+ persons, survivors of gender based violence, religious minorities, and impoverished persons”. The NGOs “will be trained” on improving “vocational training, healthcare assistance, access to education, and local entrepreneurship” in the aforementioned countries. 

The committee, which is a pilot program and will be reevaluated after three years, will encourage local self-sufficiency rather than dependency on NGO help. 

The members of the Department of Commerce subcommittee will include State Department bureaucrats appointed by the cabinet and approved by Congress, as well as representatives from the countries themselves and representatives from the NGOs. 

Cabinet secretaries wanted to avoid the specter of American exceptionalism and overly controlling developing countries. Author Raimondo said that “using NGOs would be the best way to truly get help to people within the countries without having too much government interference from the U.S.A.” 

Along this line of thinking, the cabinet amended the act to include representatives from the countries they were aiding within the Department of Commerce subcommittee. Secretary of Labor Julie Su, who proposed the amendment, explained that she wanted to avoid the antiquated thinking that “since we’re America, we can just do all this stuff, and everyone will appreciate it.” 

The cabinet considered a large volume of amendments on topics such as oversight, preventing corruption, and government overreach, but the process was hastened by quick side meetings between the authors of the executive order and the authors of the amendments and a general willingness to work together and compromise. For example, after Attorney General Merrick Garland brought up that the original funding assigned, $50 million, was “essentially nothing,” the authors quickly agreed to increase it to $500 million. 

Said Su, “I was very, very happy with how the authors were able to just talk to the people who made the amendments,” saying it “really sped up the process because people recognized when their contributions may need some improvement.”

This article was written by Julia Critz.