Kamala Harris’ Latin America policies: a few clues and a lot of uncertainty

Andres Oppenheimer

As we get close to the November elections, experts are scrambling to figure out what would be Democrat Kamala Harris’ policies toward Latin America if she becomes president. She has said very little about the region, but people who have worked with her gave me some preliminary clues about her positions.

First, she is likely to be more hard line on immigration than President Joe Biden was during his first three years in office, because, among other things, U.S. public opinion has shifted significantly to the right on this issue.

Although the flow of undocumented migrants has plummeted this year, 55% of Americans want immigration levels to be reduced, the highest number since 2001, according to a recent Gallup poll. Much of the anti-immigration sentiment is due to a surge in unauthorized border crossings in 2022 and 2023, and to Republican candidate Donald Trump’s false claims that migrants are driving up U.S. crime rates.

In her recent speeches and in a CNN interview, Harris did not spend time debunking Trump’s lies and exaggerations about immigration, such as his frequent claim that the United States is being “invaded” by migrants who allegedly steal American jobs and murder record numbers of people.

Instead, Harris accused the former president of asking Republican legislators to sabotage a bipartisan Senate bill that would have established the toughest controls on the border to date. Harris told CNN that Trump effectively killed the bill because he wanted to keep his narrative of an immigration “crisis” alive as a campaign issue.

(For the record, official figures show that undocumented migrant border crossings fell by about 40% since last year’s highs, homicide rates have gone down to their lowest levels in about 50 years, and there are labor shortages in industries that employ migrant workers.)

When pressed about what she would do on immigration, Harris told CNN that she would support and sign the failed bipartisan bill to drastically reduce unauthorized border crossings, and vowed to “enforce our laws” against border crossings.

Trump supporters claim Harris is trying to hide the fact that she failed in her alleged role as Biden’s “border czar.” But the Harris campaign counters that the vice-president was never tasked with trying to control the border, but rather with reducing the “root causes of migration” in Central America, namely poverty and violence.

On other issues, Harris has also moved to the center — or wants the world to believe she has — since she became vice president in 2021, after running a failed progressive campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 and serving as a Senator and California attorney general.

Ricardo Zúñiga, who was the Biden Administration’s special envoy to Central America’s Northern Triangle countries and worked closely with Harris in 2021 and 2022, told me that she is much more pragmatic and less ideological than many people think.

“I understand her reputation from her time in the Senate, but those are not the best guidelines of how she looks at problems,” Zuñiga told me. “In the times that I worked with her, her questions were always about problem solving.”

Harris’ record

During her years in the Senate from 2017 to 2021, Harris said she would have voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1992, as well as against the Obama Administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, citing environmental, labor and women’s rights concerns.

In 2020, she was among the few senators who voted against the renegotiated NAFTA deal with Mexico and Canada, which was re-named USMCA, on mostly environmental objections.

On Cuba, the Harris 2020 presidential campaign said in response to a questionnaire from the Tampa Bay Times that she favored ending the U.S. embargo on the island and empowering Cuba’s civil society. But as vice-president, she is not known to have pressed for relaxing U.S. sanctions on Cuba.

On Venezuela, Harris sent a letter to opposition leaders Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia and Maria Corina Machado on Aug. 16 in which she strongly criticized the Venezuelan regime. Harris said in her letter that “the international community, particularly the countries within our shared hemisphere, must remain vigilant and vocal in condemning” Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro’s abuses.

Roberta Jacobson, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and Biden Administration border coordinator who worked closely with Harris in 2021, said in an Americas Quarterly magazine podcast that “It would be a mistake to judge her (Harris) by her Senate record alone.”

Jacobson added, “I think the four years that she has spent as vice president are ones in which she has learned an enormous amount. She has spoken to something like 150 world leaders, and she has gone to something like 21 countries.”

Several former U.S. officials who worked with Harris told me that her experience as vice-president helping put together an international coalition mostly in Europe and Asia to support Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion would probably mark her overall foreign policy if she becomes president.

“She is truly committed to the idea that the United States cannot do it alone, and needs alliances with other countries to get things done,” Rebecca Bill Chavez, who was Harris’ Western Hemisphere adviser and co-director of her foreign policy team during the 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, told me.

The fact that Harris’ father was born in Jamaica, and that she vacationed there as a child, may also make her focus on the Caribbean, several former aides told me. Harris made an official visit to the Bahamas last year to announce a $100 million Caribbean aid package, and organized Biden’s meetings with Caribbean leaders at the 2022 Summit of the Americas.

Bill Chavez, who now heads the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington D.C., added that Haiti would be a priority for Harris. “She is tracking the humanitarian crisis in Haiti incredibly closely,” Chavez told me.

But unlike Biden, who traveled to Latin America 16 times during his eight years as vice-president, Harris has had relatively little contact with the region. She spent one day each in Guatemala and Mexico in 2021, meeting with their respective leaders, and traveled to Honduras in 2022.

If she wins, Harris is likely to be more focused on environmental, labor and women’s issues, but few people who know her expect her to depart significantly from current U.S. policies.

Harris’ biggest asset for Latin America would be that she is not Trump: She would not demonize Latin American immigrants, nor promise the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, nor impose tariffs that would mostly hurt Latin American producers and U.S. consumers.