Biden Admin Strikes Agreement with Yogurt Company to Help Address Illegal Immigration

The Biden administration recently struck an agreement with Chobani Yogurt (yes, you that read correctly) to help address the recent surges of illegal migration from the Northern Triangle countries.

The new move was announced by Vice President Kamala Harris and requires the company to “bring its incubator program for local entrepreneurs to Guatemala.” According to the Greek yogurt’s website, the incubator program “is a program for companies taking on broken food systems to bring better food to more people. In addition to investment, we give startups access to our network and expertise in order to scale up their operations and achieve significant growth.”

How the barely five-year old program and its focus on E-commerce, website design, and retail software will help address levels of illegal migration not seen in some 20 years remains unclear. But what is clear is that the Biden administration continues to spend its resources and time on initiatives that ineffectively address the root causes of illegal migration from the region.

In addition to its agreement with Chobani, the administration also struck agreements with 11 other American corporate companies including Microsoft, Mastercard, and Nestlé SA. Similar to Chobani, these companies will have a very minimal impact on addressing the root causes of illegal migration in the Northern Triangle.

Microsoft is expected to “expand internet access to as many as three million people in the region by July 2022.” But how it intends to expand internet access to people who have limited means to access it also remains unclear. Nearly half of the population in this region does not use the internet. And thinking that providing increased internet speeds will somehow curb illegal migration from this region is borderline inept.

Nestlé SA’s Nespresso sub-unit “plans to begin buying some of its coffee from El Salvador and Honduras with a minimum regional investment of $150 million by 2025.” Purchasing coffee will provide a minor boost to the local economies, but in the grand scheme it is unlikely to prevent people tens of thousands of individuals from fleeing this region. The vast majority of migrants from this region repeatedly indicate that they migrate to the U.S. to avoid local gang violence, to find better economic opportunities, or to reunite with family—all of which do not qualify for U.S. political asylum.

The Biden administration should be looking internally at the pull factors encouraging record rates of illegal immigration into the country. Migrants and human smugglers know full well that the southern border remains wide open. The Biden administration has halted the vast majority of southern border wall construction, brought back the infamous Obama-era “catch and release” policy, and is not removing the vast majority of family units and unaccompanied minors who enter the country illegally under the Title 42 public health order.

Once a migrant crosses the border unlawfully, they have virtually no chance of being removed from the country. Each agent in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is currently averaging one illegal alien arrest every two months and the agency’s 6,000-person unit deported fewer than 3,000 illegal aliens from the country in April—the lowest monthly total on record.

The Biden Border Crisis doesn’t stem from poor marketing of a start-up company, lack of high-speed internet, or not enough coffee being exported—it stems from systematic failure and corruption in the sending nations, and from Biden’s radical immigration policies and messaging that dismantled the nation’s border security and interior immigration enforcement.