Re: “Our View: Cutting aid won’t help stop southern border crisis” (April 3):

As a volunteer for the international development organization World Vision, and having sponsored several children from severely impoverished areas around the globe (plus twin grandsons who were rescued from grueling poverty in Ethiopia), I am relieved to see editorials like this one, educating the public on the problem with the administration’s intention to cut foreign aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. This decision cuts nearly $700 million in life-giving aid that funds much-needed development programs in these countries.

U.S. foreign assistance is distributed through organizations that administer programs aimed at long-term, in-country solutions to poverty and violence. These are the two primary reasons cited by families for leaving their home countries.

In El Salvador and Honduras, the nations where the U.S. Agency for International Development has the resources to accomplish their work, homicide rates have dropped by up to 78 percent. Cutting assistance can only lead to increased migration, the very issue the president seeks to prevent. Foreign assistance should not be used as an instrument to penalize the home countries of migrants.

Foreign assistance must continue to be used to improve and empower the lives of the most vulnerable so that children and families may safely remain in their home countries. In short, cutting aid is not the solution to the migrant crisis, and, in fact, would have the opposite effect entirely.

I would like to ask my elected officials in Washington – Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King and Rep. Chellie Pingree – to call upon the administration to reverse this decision and reaffirm the need for foreign assistance that addresses the root causes of poverty and migration, these funds are needed by the most vulnerable of families.

Carol Smith

advocate, World Vision

Wells