A very early printed appearance of this redundant cliché was in H. J. Simson’s 1937 book British Rule, and Rebellion, about the Arab uprising in Mandatory Palestine. The author and Royal Scot officer used the term “root cause” to reject it: not because, in almost all contexts, either “root” or “cause” does the job just fine, but because rooting about in search of the hidden often entails missing the obvious. Deliberately, sometimes. “A policy of glossing things over.” This would also be the most charitable way to describe the Democratic Party’s decade-long stance on immigration.
After then–Vice President Kamala Harris visited Honduras in 2022 for the presidential inauguration of the cynical careerist Xiomara Castro, the White House made clear that “combating corruption and impunity remains at the center of our commitment to address the root causes of migration.” Well, then. Simply enforcing U.S. law would have made a splendid start, but for the Biden administration, doing so was — to use another member of the family of phrases that Kingsley Amis identified as “shreds of battered facetiousness” — a nonstarter.
Had Democrats been serious at any point about the roots (or causes) of emigration from Latin America, they would have suspected that socialist thuggery might have something to do with it. Harris trekked to Tegucigalpa because she was instructed to apply her meager abilities to the Northern Triangle. This was not even a year after the Department of Homeland Security announced a dubious Temporary Protected Status designation for Venezuelans in the United States, citing a “severe humanitarian emergency.” What severe humanitarian emergency? Severe humanitarian emergency has been the Venezuelan form of government since the Bolivarian Revolution. No? Not that root cause? No: had Democrats been serious about the causes (or roots) of emigration from certain latitudes, they might have concluded that since 2015, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left a country where political questions are decided not by votes but by variants of the AK-47. Doesn’t get much rootier than that. As the Venezuelan novelist Rómulo Gallegos says, “there are people who, between thinking and doing, go gray.”
So here we are: the first serious attempt to put serious pressure on the Venezuelan narcocracy. And it’s Trump’s War Department detonating dinghies in the Caribbean. Democrats (as well as Republicans) should continue to press the White House on the legality of these actions and its untidy reasoning for them. Law enforcement does not mean aerial summary execution — not in or by the United States. And if aerial summary execution is justifiable because we’re at war, then Congress should have a say in the matter.
And yet, and yet. To warn that antagonizing Venezuela’s cartels “risks destabilizing the region,” as Senator Jack Reed has done, is silly. We’re already there. A quarter century of Comandante Chávez, followed by Nicolás Maduro, has been plenty destabilizing. We’ve had a bounty on the head of state since 2020. Hostile confrontation with the narcocrats might be the only way to shake loose a government that has made the Bolivarian Republic unlivable for many of those who flee north. The Trump White House hasn’t made the case, to my knowledge, that its heavy-handedness is meant also to deracinate one of the root causes of the migration crisis in the Western Hemisphere. It should. Some of us could root for that.