Policy On The Move

By midnight on December 21, 2022, Title 42 — the controversial pandemic-era public health law used to expel migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border — was scheduled to end by court order. Its termination was long overdue. But its end threatened to deepen an already acute crisis at the southern border, one that had consistently diverted attention from one of its most vulnerable populations: unaccompanied children.

Unaccompanied children (UACs) — defined as anyone under 18 in the United States without documentation and without a parent or legal guardian — were exempted from removal under Title 42 in early 2022. Yet their voices remained largely absent from the policy conversation. The Biden administration’s flagship response to outward migration from Northern Central America, the “Root Causes” strategy, paid lip service to education without delivering a coherent, measurable, or locally grounded plan for it.

This article argues that a serious investment in education is both the most sustainable tool available for reducing irregular migration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala — and the one most consistently underestimated by U.S. policymakers.

The Policy Context: From Obama to Biden

The 2014 migration crisis marked an inflection point. More than 68,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in a single fiscal year — a 76 percent increase from the year before. The conditions those children endured, including detention in facilities wholly unequipped to meet their basic needs, drew widespread condemnation. President Obama responded with emergency funding requests, immigration reform proposals, and a regional development initiative for Northern Central America. Partisan gridlock undermined all three.

The Trump administration took a different approach. Zero tolerance prosecutions, family separations, Remain in Mexico, and ultimately Title 42 represented a systematic effort to deter irregular migration through escalating legal and physical barriers. More than 16,000 children were deported to Mexico under Title 42 alone. None of these measures addressed the conditions driving people to leave in the first place.

President Biden entered office promising a different framework. Executive Order 14010 established the “Root Causes” strategy — a five-pillar plan addressing governance, economic hardship, violence, rule of law, and basic rights in Northern Central America, backed by a $4 billion funding request over four years. The ambition was real. The execution was not.

The strategy’s goals were too broad to be measurable. Its education provisions called for “improved access to quality education ensuring educational and vocational offerings reflect labor market needs” — without assessing existing barriers, evaluating current systems, or specifying what skills children actually needed to compete in a 21st century economy. It was, in practice, a thousand-foot view applied to problems that require ground-level solutions.

The Development Challenges Driving Outward Migration

The structural problems in Northern Central America are not new. Civil wars, authoritarian rule, natural disasters, and turbulent democratic transitions have destabilized the region for decades. Three intersecting challenges drive the persistent outward flow of people.

Governance. Trust in government is critically low across all three countries. The World Justice Project’s 2022 Rule of Law Index found that Honduras ranked lowest in the region at 36 percent, El Salvador at 42 percent, and Guatemala at 51 percent. Low institutional trust correlates directly with reduced tax compliance — which in turn limits the resources governments have to deliver services, including education.

Violence. Drug trafficking and gang activity have driven homicide rates to among the highest in the world: 37.6 per 100,000 in Honduras, 19.5 in El Salvador, and 15.3 in Guatemala. These networks depend on territorial control, extortion, and recruitment — including the forced recruitment of children. It is worth noting, however, that a 2021 LAPOP survey found that respondents in all three countries cited violence as a relatively minor motivation for emigration — suggesting that the primary drivers are economic rather than security-related, a distinction with significant policy implications.

Economic Stagnation. Foreign direct investment in the region remains low and uneven. In 2021, El Salvador attracted $313 million, Honduras $876 million, and Guatemala — the relative exception — $3.4 billion. Governments unable to collect taxes from a largely informal workforce are structurally dependent on remittances, foreign assistance, and external investment. That dependency constrains the public investment needed to break the cycle.

The Education Crisis

Education systems in Northern Central America have failed students and societies simultaneously. The dropout numbers alone are staggering: 900,000 in Honduras, 227,000 in Guatemala, and 49,000 in El Salvador — many driven out by gang recruitment, violence, and death threats. Students who remain in school are frequently not completing primary education, and secondary enrollment among 13-18 year olds is undermined by economic necessity, lack of supplies, and inadequate infrastructure.

The consequences extend beyond individual opportunity. Countries whose populations lack access to quality education are less competitive, less attractive to investors, and less equipped to meet the demands of a global economy increasingly dependent on technology, analytical skills, and adaptability. Northern Central America is losing its 21st century workforce before it is ever developed.

Why the United States Should Care

The region is too close, and too consequential, for the United States to treat education as a peripheral concern. Three interests converge here:

Migration management. The cycle of irregular migration at the southern border will not be broken by enforcement alone. Sustainable reduction in outward migration requires conditions in origin countries that make staying a viable choice. Education is foundational to those conditions.

Localization. A serious education strategy forces the kind of community-level engagement the “Root Causes” plan consistently avoided. Addressing barriers to enrollment, improving curriculum relevance, and building teacher capacity requires working with the people who actually understand local conditions — not applying regional templates from Washington.

Nearshoring. The Biden administration actively encouraged businesses to move manufacturing and supply chains closer to home. An investment in workforce development in Northern Central America directly supports that goal — creating a skilled labor pool in a region with existing trade relationships and geographic proximity to the United States.

Policy Recommendations

Nine targeted recommendations across the most critical issue areas:

Border crisis: Negotiate with regional actors to manage ongoing migration flows while creating additional legal pathways to citizenship for those already in or seeking entry to the United States.

Title 42: Cease use of the policy immediately and resist any court rulings seeking to extend it. The law is both unlawful and a band-aid solution.

Root Causes funding: Lobby Congress to earmark Root Causes funding outside the standard discretionary appropriations process to insulate it from political disruption.

Root Causes strategy: Redesign the plan around locally defined, measurable goals. Incorporate communities and on-the-ground actors in Northern Central America into the process — not as recipients of policy, but as architects of it.

Governance: Encourage private sector investment through U.S. public-private partnerships and ESG frameworks, reducing dependence on government-to-government aid for governance reform.

Violence: Strengthen independent judicial institutions through multilateral organizations, increasing accountability and reducing the space for gang activity and political corruption.

Economic development: Leverage proximity and existing trade relationships to expand nearshoring opportunities, supporting both domestic supply chain security and regional economic growth.

Education: Make education a stated foreign policy priority in Northern Central America, with dedicated investment in teacher training, infrastructure, and curriculum development aligned to 21st century labor market needs.

Unaccompanied children: Place children at the center of both decision-making processes and economic futures — ensuring that UACs are included in the policy conversations that directly affect them.

Conclusion

An investment in education is not a soft alternative to serious migration policy. It is serious migration policy. Children in Northern Central America are losing the opportunity to become productive members of their societies because of challenges that are, in large part, addressable. The Biden administration recognized this in principle and failed to act on it in practice.

The case for education-centered development in Northern Central America is not idealistic — it is strategic. The region’s problems have proven resistant to enforcement-only approaches for decades. A solution-focused strategy that builds the workforce, engages communities, and invests in children is both the most humane and the most pragmatic path available.

The 21st century economy will not wait for Northern Central America to catch up. Neither will the children who are already leaving.

This article was originally written as a research paper for IAFF 6358: Immigration and Weak States — Central America in Comparative Perspective at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, December 2022.

Johnnie Williams, M.A.