Americans urgently need to hear an open, honest conversation about immigration: its pros and cons, what drives it and what can be done to manage it, both at the southern U.S. border and beyond. A presidential election campaign offers a stellar opportunity for America’s leaders to engage in this debate. Unfortunately, that opportunity will be missed.

Driven by Donald Trump’s tried and tested strategy of stirring up grievances among his embattled base, the conversation about immigration over the course of the campaign will be littered with nonsensical attacks against his opponent. “Under border czar Harris, illegal aliens are pouring in by the millions and millions and millions,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina recently.

Before Trump permanently poisons the well, it would be useful to review not just what Vice President Harris did and did not do — but also the broader policy choices made and how they might be improved in the next administration.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, including for the Republican Party and its boss, Trump, who vetoed the last best chance to address the chaos at the border by blocking an immigration control strategy crafted this year by both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate.

President Biden shares some of the blame, too. Failing at first to understand the magnitude of the challenge, he focused in the early days of his term on establishing a sharp contrast with Trump’s draconian (and often illegal) crackdown on immigrants.

Harris’s role in the Biden administration was hardly that of a “czar.” She was handed a task that sounded enormously consequential but was, at the end of the day, pretty irrelevant to the crisis at hand: addressing the “root causes” of migration mainly in the Northern Triangle of Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

In 2019, the Northern Triangle seemed like a big part of the story. Trump threatened Mexico with tariffs unless it stopped Central Americans from arriving at its border with the United States. He persuaded Mexico to hold migrants from the region while U.S. courts assessed their applications for asylum. But the number of migrants from these countries reaching the southern border has fallen by half since 2021. They account for under one-fifth of the total.

Dealing with the “root causes” of migration should be part of a long-term strategy. Harris’s proposal to engage “with government, with the private sector, with civil society and the leaders of each in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to strengthen democracy and the rule of law and ensure shared prosperity in the region” is sensible. It does not, however, add up to fixing the border mess now.

Luring businesses to invest in Guatemala is, in fact, a great idea. If the Guatemalan economy manages to offer its citizens a decent standard of living, fewer are likely to head north. But fixing the Guatemalan economy will take time. Tackling crime in Central America would also help.

This is not to say that Harris has done a stellar job with her “root causes” portfolio. She has not visited any country south of the border since a trip to Honduras in January 2022. Her understanding of the task at hand came into question when she flew to Guatemala and told Guatemalans “Do not come.”

Her “failure,” however, belongs to the nation. It is testament to the resistance in Washington, in the White House and among Democrats and Republicans in Congress, to think carefully and speak transparently about what immigration really is about and how the United States should adapt to its inevitability.

If Harris becomes president, hopefully she will have the guts and the foresight to bring immigration to the fore. That she ultimately failed to plow through the root causes of immigration and sow the seeds of Central America’s economic and social rebirth is irrelevant to the task at hand.