50+ Economists Rebuke Top Dem Senator for Denying Harmful Impacts of US Sanctions

More than 50 leading political economy researchers on Wednesday published a letter exhorting U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez to "stop spreading the false narrative that there is no association between economic sanctions and the economic and humanitarian crises in countries targeted by those sanctions."

The scholars' intervention comes in response to a recent exchange between Menendez (D-N.J.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and nearly two dozen House Democrats.

In a May 10 letter, U.S. Reps. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), and 19 of their colleagues—a combination of lawmakers whose jurisdictions lie near the southern border and progressives from around the country—urged President Joe Biden to reverse Trump-era sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela in order to ease economic crises that have contributed substantially to increased emigration from the two countries.

"Economic sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba are a big part of the reason for why so many citizens from those countries are abandoning their communities to seek better living conditions in the U.S."

The following day, Menendez condemned the call. In a letter to Escobar and Grijalva, Menendez denied that U.S. sanctions have played a key role in pushing tens of thousands of Cubans and Venezuelans to leave their homes and asserted that blame for the ongoing exodus lies entirely with the nations' respective presidents, Miguel Díaz-Canel and Nicolás Maduro.

Wednesday's letter—signed by economists Ha-Joon Chang and Jayati Ghosh, historian Greg Grandin, and sociologist Saskia Sassen, among others—debunks the senator's claims. As the academic and policy experts told Menendez:

Unlike Rep. Escobar's letter, your letter fails to cite any research or evidence supporting your central claim that U.S. economic sanctions have not been a significant driver of migration from Cuba and Venezuela. This is hardly surprising, as there is in fact no serious research supporting this claim. In contrast, as a recent report on the human consequences of sanctions has highlighted, dozens of peer-reviewed academic studies document the substantive negative—and often lethal—effects of economic sanctions on people's living conditions in target countries.

In August 2017, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who sought to topple Maduro's elected government, began to unilaterally impose sanctions on Venezuela in violation of international law as well as the charter of the Organization of American States and other international treaties the U.S. has signed. While Trump's bid to provoke regime change in the South American country was unsuccessful, U.S. sanctions "killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans in just their first year (2017-18), and almost certainly tens of thousands more since then," according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank where four signatories of Wednesday's letter work.

In the wake of Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaido's failed U.S.-backed coup in August 2019, Trump moved to further strangle the Venezuelan economy—and ultimately, its population—by enacting a full economic embargo. Trump's executive order froze all Venezuelan government assets and outlawed transactions with them, including the state's central bank and oil company.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has long drawn attention to the deadly consequences of U.S. sanctions and in June 2021 implored the Biden administration to end "all secondary and sectoral sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the Trump administration." Biden, however, continues to uphold his predecessor's devastating blockade.

Wednesday's letter cites two recent, peer-reviewed studies—both authored by Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez, a signatory who currently teaches at the University of Denver—that document how U.S. sanctions against Venezuela have caused widespread economic hardship and helped fuel displacement.

"The first demonstrates how U.S. sanctions on Venezuela's oil industry contributed to a major drop in oil production, which has historically accounted for 80-95% of the country's export revenue; and therefore the country's ability to pay for imports, including food and medicine," the letter points out. "A second, forthcoming peer-reviewed paper shows that the recent sharp decline in Venezuela's oil revenue has led to massive cuts in imports of food and inputs for agricultural production, which in turn has been the major factor behind widespread hunger and malnutrition."

In Cuba, meanwhile, Trump rejected Obama-era efforts at normalization and initiated an intensified crackdown on the small island nation. Throughout his White House tenure, Trump implemented more than 240 punitive policies against Cuba even as its people endured acute shortages of food and medicine during the Covid-19 pandemic. One of his administration's most "despicable" actions, according to critics, was its eleventh-hour decision to put Cuba back on the State Department's list of "State Sponsors of Terrorism" (SSOT), a move that has undermined the international provision of economic aid.

Despite Democratic lawmakers' pleas and Biden's own campaign pledge to reverse his predecessor's "failed" approach to Cuba, the Biden administration imposed additional economic sanctions against the island following anti-government protests in July 2021 and has so far refused to remove the country from the SSOT blacklist.

While the May letter from House Democrats acknowledges that other factors besides U.S. sanctions have contributed to economic challenges in Cuba and Venezuela, it stresses that "experts widely agree that broad-based U.S. sanctions—expanded to an unprecedented level by former President Donald Trump—are a critical contributing factor in the current increase in migration."

In their Wednesday letter to Menendez, the economists wrote, "Rep. Escobar and her colleagues are correct: Economic sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba are a big part of the reason for why so many citizens from those countries are abandoning their communities to seek better living conditions in the U.S."

"If you truly believe in protecting the human rights of ordinary Cubans and Venezuelans," they continued, "you should stop leveraging your considerable power in the Senate to maintain the cruel measures that cause profound human suffering, fuel humanitarian emergencies, and push many more people to migrate to the U.S."