Can’t fix the border mess? Fix Central America. That, in essence, is the Biden team’s battle cry as El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Mexicans flock to America’s southern border, creating a horror show complete with children in cages, Covid-filled crowded shelters, and terrorists sneaking in.

Vice President Harris, the White House would-be immigration czar, has declined to visit the border, opting instead to go after “root causes.” She’d rather address issues in Mexico and Central America, where Washington has little sway, than legislate immigration policy that can make a difference.

So what are those “root causes”? Administration officials from Secretary of State Blinken to our ambassador at the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, cite climate change as one top cause for this year’s influx of migrants.

So all we need to do is simply reverse climate change, and the problem will disappear. That’s like ordering the rain to stop when fixing your leaky roof seems too difficult.

It might be true that droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes and other phenomena linked to climate trends are a factor. Those trends, though, are decades in the making. They can’t explain why in March alone, 170,000 migrants overwhelmed border authorities. It was a two-decade record. Nor does it explain the extraordinary, unprecedented number of 18,000 unaccompanied children arriving at America’s door since January.

So there must be other root causes.

At the United Nations on Tuesday, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield told a conference on the “Humanitarian situation in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras” that people there “need security, economic opportunity, and access to food to feed their families. That’s what’s driving them from their homes. So ultimately, that’s what we need to address.”

How? America, she said, intends to work “with the UN and other donor countries to create private sector partnerships, to scale up the work of international financial institutions, and include multilateral development banks to address critical development challenges. That’s our plan.”

Got it? Translated from UN-speak, it means: Send cash to these poor southern countries, and people will happily stay there.

Experience bodes ill for such solutions. Latin American rulers are notoriously corrupt, and donors’ funds end up in their and their cronies’ pockets, rather than helping the needy. Additionally, criminal gangs controlling vast territories in these countries are likely to confiscate much of the international aid money.

What’s true is that the bleak situation south of the border — poverty, violence, corruption — has deepened since the pandemic’s onset. Meanwhile, America’s economic future looks rosier by the minute. They see the spectacle of record highs in Wall Street indexes. No wonder they want in.

Now, after hearing President Biden’s election-year promise to ease entry to America, they believe they can get in, too. No wonder crime cartels are adding profitable border smuggling of workers and unaccompanied children to their lucrative portfolios, which until now mostly included narcotics, murder, and intimidation.

Fixing it at the “root,” meanwhile, is problematic, because Washington’s influence in Central America and Mexico is limited at best.

“A recycled plan that did not work in 2014 will not work now,” El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele tweeted in response to Ms. Harris’ vague ideas. Leaders in other countries of origin largely rebuffed the Veep’s diplomatic attempts at resolving the, ahem, crisis.

Rather than pretending to mend those countries, Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden need to act where they can make a difference: in Washington. Even immigration lawyers can hardly decipher our byzantine immigration laws. How could Central Americans seeking relief from crime and poverty, or Mexican menial workers striving to improve wages do any better?

Who can blame a Guatemalan mother for saying “Biden told me I can come,” even as Press Secretary Jen Psaki calls on migrants to “stay home”? Or a Mexican day-wager suffering a whiplash last week, when Mr. Biden inadvertently used the word “crisis” to describe the situation at the border, and a day later Ms. Psaki insisted it isn’t a crisis?

Confused? Last week the White House announced that it would maintain the Trump-era annual limit of 15,000 refugees legally entering America? Hours later, following criticism from his left, Mr. Biden reversed course and pledged to raise the cap — but perhaps not as high as the 62,500 refugees he’d promised to let in when he was on the campaign trail.

The current confusion is only the latest in decades of failure at straightening out immigration policies. “The system is broken,” according to George W. Bush, the last president who, before September 11, 2001, seriously attempted to address immigration issues. Since then, Mr. Bush now says, “the issue has been exploited in ways that do little credit to either party.”

Can Democrats and Republicans agree on such things as affording citizenship to at least some of those who are currently undocumented? How about tightening controls at the border, including already-funded meaningful barriers? Or clarifying immigration rules? And, most crucially, why not create a sane temporary work program that would allow Mexicans to earn wages in America, and then return back home?

Campaigning on unity, Mr. Biden has so far been super partisan. Straightening the immigration mess requires bipartisan cooperation, mutual concession, and hard work. Striving to fix far away lands and ordering the weather to be nice is much easier.

Twitter @bennyavni