What Kamala Harris Should Brag About at the Southern Border This Week
Beyond crediting Harris for setting the vision for the Root Causes Strategy, which is the first time the federal government has used a public-private partnership model to tackle U.S. immigration challenges, Fantini-Porter says that the vice president has been intimately involved in moving the Central America program forward. He cites the example of Yazaki, a global auto parts manufacturer based in Japan. Fantini-Porter says Harris personally invited Itaru Motobayashi, the executive vice president of Yazaki North America, to the Summit of the Americas in 2022, held in Los Angeles, to pitch him on investing in Central America “as a path to secure their supply chain,” he recalled. In a follow-up meeting with Harris, Motobayashi committed to investing $30 million in a new wire harness manufacturing facility in the western highlands of Guatemala, which opened in 2023 and resulted in more than 7,000 jobs in a region known for a high rate of exit migration.
“And importantly, that factory also contributes to an integrated supply chain between the United States and Central America,” said Fantini-Porter. “Those car harness parts go into cars that are then manufactured and sold in the United States. You end up having this integrated supply chain benefit that helps not only reduce migration but also create jobs in the United States and supports the geopolitical conditions that are so important right now to the Americas in terms of challenging Chinese incursion in this region.”
So why isn’t Harris touting her success in addressing the root causes of migration? No doubt she believes—or her advisers believe—that the less she talks about immigration, the better. But trumpeting her accomplishments in Central America, as well as her support for the bipartisan reform bill that Trump ordered Republicans to block, will show voters that she pursues real solutions—rather than using immigration as a political cudgel like her opponent does—and it will help voters understand that the border crisis requires a two-pronged approach of enforcement and economic development.
