Washington Post: Trump shows alarming ignorance when it comes to foreign aid
Michael Gerson, columnist for the Washington Post

“…[Foreign assistance] is generally designed to improve conditions within foreign countries that can give rise to global threats. This role is obvious, say, in fighting infectious diseases. It is better to deal with an Ebola outbreak as close as possible to the source, rather than waiting for the threat to arrive in Georgia or Kansas. But this is equally true when it comes to a flow of refugees. … If U.S. policy does not address the functional collapse of criminal-justice systems in places such as the Northern Triangle, [otherwise known as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the countries in Central America where President Trump proposed to cut foreign aid,] it is not seriously addressing the problem of illegal migration. … [T]he lack of justice leading to everyday violence has become a global problem, with consequences that spill up on many shores, including our own. … It would make far more sense to double assistance for these programs — designed to support local reformers, not to impose American solutions — than to end them. But an absence of vision is one cost of ignorance” (4/1).