Trump vs. Nayib Bukele

Former president Donald Trump has lately said that he'd cut off aid to El Salvador if illegals kept coming to the US from that country. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has this reply (watch with closed captions if, like me, you don't speak enough Spanish to understand):

What Bukele is saying strikes me as reasonable. Ultimately, if you want the illegal migration to end, the countries that migrants are fleeing need to become places where people don't feel the need to leave.* On that score, several things have to happen at once. One is that American aid to these smaller governments probably has to continue, so I would disagree with Trump's stance and side more with Bukele. Second, Bukele (just as an example) needs to bust his ass and do way more than lock up gang members if he wants to stop El Salvadorans from fleeing his country. Rebuild the economy on a free-market template, avoid the temptation to do the stereotypical Latin-socialism thing, follow the example of Javier Milei, and turn El Salvador into an economic powerhouse. It can be done: South Korea is a tiny country, but it's in the top ten or fifteen economically, punching way above its weight. Korea does this, though, because it places a high value on both education and skills—something El Salvador will need to do if it hopes to drag itself out of the mire.

Where Bukele goes wrong, though, is in his contention that "walls don't work." Ask the Israelis how they'd be doing without walls to hold the barbarians back. Ask anyone who lives in a house with walls whether they'd trade their residence for a thatched hut open to the wind and rain and unsavory people. The reason the US/Mexico border wall didn't get very far during Trump's term is primarily that a cohort of Never Trump Republicans stood in its way. Too many of those scum-suckers are still around on Capitol Hill; if it were me, I'd declare a dictatorship and have fire teams purge every single one of those fuckers, which is probably why it's a good thing I'm not in charge. But should Trump win again this November, I expect the obstructionism from both Democrats and Republicans to continue. Anyway, should Trump manage to find a way to fund the completion of the wall (which, realistically, won't be completed by the end of his hypothetical second term), we'd see a drastic reduction in all the country-destroying illegal border-crossings.

In the meantime, Bukele isn't wrong to suggest that his and other Latin countries need to make their lands more palatable, more habitable, so as to cut down on the desire to leave. I think Trump is wrong to threaten (not that he's currently in any position to threaten anything) the withholding of aid to El Salvador. But maybe he sees something in Bukele that I'm not picking up on. I know a lot of leftists are upset with Bukele's attitude and actions: they call him a strongman, a Putin-like authoritarian, for his ruthless treatment of gang members. For the moment, at least, I'm not sympathetic to these wild-eyed accusers. You need to move strongly and with conviction when you're cleaning up gangs. But even after the gang problem becomes manageable, El Salvador has a host of other problems to deal with—many related to authoritarianism (see this resource, which gives the left's perspective).

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*According to the revamped view of Kamala Harris, this is what she spent her time doing, not "border czaring." She was looking into root causes of migration, see? She'd better have data and stats at the ready when it's time for the debate.