With the decline in immigration from Mexico, the debate has begun to focus on the “Northern Triangle” countries of Central America: Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
The treatment of immigrant trailers at the border, especially asylum-seeking families with children, has become a source of public discord during the Trump administration. With the coronavirus pandemic declining and a new president in office, people are moving north again and fears are mounting.
Most analysts agree that containing this flow will require strengthening the economies and institutions of these three complex nations. The next event in Global Atlanta’s Emory Executive Education-sponsored Latin American Crossroads series will explore how Georgia corporations and nonprofits are investing and partnering to help achieve this goal and drive economic development, such as how US governments best regionally Stability can invest.
Keynote / Introduction:
Charles Kuck, executive attorney, Kuck Baxter Immigration
Charles H. (“Chuck”) Kuck is the executive director of Kuck Baxter Immigration in Atlanta, Georgia. From 2008 to 2009, Chuck was National President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. From 2010 to 2014 he was also President of the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers. He is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Emory Law School. Previously, he served as an adjunct at the University of Georgia for 13 years. He was named again in 2020 by Chambers & Partners as one of the five best immigration lawyers in the world, in 2020 by Best Lawyers as “Best Lawyer Immigration” in Georgia and previously by Georgia as one of the “100 Most Influential Georgians” trending magazine. He has worked in immigration law for over 30 years, has spoken at numerous legal and business conferences on all kinds of immigration issues, testified in Congress on various aspects of immigration law and immigration reform, is widely quoted in the national press and appears regularly in national and local Television and cable news.
Panel:
Jim Reed, President of YKK Corp. of America, which operates a factory in El Salvador
Jim Reed is President of YKK Corporation of America, the parent company of the YKK Americas Group. There he is responsible for YKK’s business in the Western Hemisphere, which consists of 16 dynamic operating companies spread across six time zones and covering Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
Prior to becoming president, Jim was YKK’s chief legal counsel. Prior to joining YKK, Jim was the in-house counsel at Georgia-Pacific, LLC and was also the director of intellectual property licensing at BellSouth (and later AT&T). He was also an associate with Troutman Sanders LLP in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jim serves on the boards of directors of the World Affairs Council, the Atlanta Rotary Club, and the Japan-America Society of Georgia. He graduated from the University of Virginia and the University of Georgia School of Law and lives in Marietta with his wife Sheri and their three children.
JT Way, Professor of History at Georgia State University, author of Agrotropolis, a new book on Guatemalan urban development
JT Way is an Associate Professor teaching and researching Latin American history at Georgia State University. As a Central American, his major is Guatemala of the 20th and 21st centuries, on which he has published various articles and two academic books. The Maya in the Mall: Globalization, Development and the Emergence of Modern Guatemala (Duke, 2012) depicts the transnational development project against the activities of the working poor in Guatemala City from 1920 to the new millennium and shows how the largest city in Guatemala In Central America – where shantytowns and humble city and street markets border luxury shopping malls and affluent neighborhoods – there were such amazing contrasts. Agrotropolis: Youth, Street and Nation in the New City of Guatemala (University of California, 2021) examines the rapid urbanization of the agricultural landscape with the history of popular youth culture from 1983 to 2010. It shows how young people share ethnic pride, tradition, popular culture and “street culture “Used to challenge the nation’s caste system and create popular alternative nationalism, despite – and in dialogue with – the dire conditions they faced.
JT has traveled extensively in Latin America since exploring the region on a 14 month backpacking trip in 1991 and 1992. He later earned an MA in Latin American History from Tulane University and a second MA and Ph.D. (2006) from Yale. He likes to joke that he went to Guatemala in 2002 to do his PhD and “never came back” because he lived in the country until he joined HSE in 2012. During this time he founded and ran a United States international school and was a faculty member at the University of Arizona and taught courses for undergraduate and graduate students in Guatemala at CIRMA, the Center for Mesoamerican Research (Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, a prestigious social science archive and research center in Antigua, Guatemala). . At the time he moved to the HSE faculty, JT was serving as CIRMA director, a position he held from abroad until the first trimester of 2013. If global health conditions permit, he still spends several months a year in Guatemala and is currently working on a book on the causes of the flood of refugees from the Northern Triangle seeking asylum in the United States. He also regularly serves as an expert in asylum negotiations for Guatemalans and Hondurans.
John Burrough, CEO of Honduras Outreach International, a large nonprofit that provides educational, economic and health services in the Olancho area of northeast Honduras
John Burrough, raised in Pinedale, WY, attended the University of Wyoming, where he studied geophysics / nuclear and particle physics. He played for the Atlanta Falcons from 1995 to 1998 and then continued his career with Vikings and Rams. After retiring from the NFL in 2002, he entered the Atlanta housing industry. Always volunteering on Christian missions, John eventually switched business careers in 2014 when he responded to calls for full-time service at North Point Ministries and Global (X). Mr. Burrough is a member of several non-profit organizations including Operation One Voice (for wounded and fallen US special forces), Heart for Lebanon (for Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Lebanon) and remains connected to the professional athlete network in Atlanta. John, his wife, and two children love to serve together and have been on mission trips with HOI for the past 5 years.
Mr. Burrough joined HOI in 2019 as Chief Executive Officer. HOI (formerly Honduras Outreach) has worked to empower communities through faith and partnership in Central America for over 30 years. HOI works with communities to help them make sustainable transformations in health, education, agriculture, economic and community development, and spiritual life.
Monica Novoa, program manager and research faculty at Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, which is building innovation ecosystems across Latin America
Monica is a research faculty in the Economic Development Lab of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In this role she leads projects in Latin America and the Caribbean to strengthen regional innovation economies. Her areas of activity include the application of evidence-based principles of entrepreneurship and technology expansion concepts for the development of innovation ecosystems that support entrepreneurs and strengthen the industrial base of communities, countries and regions. She has led projects for various companies such as universities, university business incubators, nonprofits, business development agencies and the private sector in Puerto Rico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Panama.
Monica’s 15 year career includes economic development, entrepreneurship education and private sector management. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Monica was an Associate Director at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), where she led Stanford Ignite, an innovation and entrepreneurship program. Prior to Stanford, Monica was the director of the School of Management at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit college, and led a portfolio of educational and entrepreneurship programs. She also worked as a finance manager for a boutique intellectual property law firm in California. Monica began her career as a systems analyst at Margarita’s Tourism Corporation in the Venezuelan state of Nueva Esparta.
Monica holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the University of San Francisco in California and a Bachelor of Systems Engineering from the Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela.
