Read: Trump’s new red scare

The fact that the aid numbers are small doesn’t justify spending them per se, but there’s a strong consensus among Latin America experts that these cuts are counterproductive. It’s common to talk about push and pull factors in immigration. Pull factors are things that draw migrants to a new country: the promise of better work, for example. Push factors are those things that drive migrants to leave home: unstable politics, high crime, poor economies. Trump has worked to reduce one pull factor by trying to make it harder to get asylum, but he has limited options beyond that, because no president wants to make the economy worse in order to deter immigration (though Trump has been willing to risk hurting the economy to install protectionist tariffs).

But Trump’s decision to cut aid to countries that are major sources of immigrants to the United States seems likely to only increase the push factors, driving more people to attempt the journey as conditions in their home countries stagnate or worsen. As my colleague Peter Beinart writes, push factors have been badly overlooked in the U.S. political debate over immigration. There’s not much to suggest that Trump disagrees about the likely effects of cutting aid. Maybe he doesn’t care, or maybe he’s neglected to learn, which would fit with his general approach to policy.

Perhaps more likely is that increasing push factors is the point. Many of Trump’s decisions on border issues seem designed not to solve any problem. This includes Trump’s standing threat to close the border with Mexico; his decision to end DACA, a program that he has said achieves goals he favors; and most prominently, his decision to separate unauthorized immigrant families arriving at the border. None of these do anything to solve or reduce what Trump has called a crisis at the border. In fact, they are likely to only worsen the crisis. Separations, for example, became a costly and distracting circus, taking up already short space in detention centers and then necessitating a major effort to reunite families and restore the status quo ante when courts predictably rejected the policy.

Along similar lines, it’s more politically useful for Trump to be in a lengthy fight about building a border wall than it is to have actually built it. If and when the wall is built, it will become clear that it isn’t a panacea for immigration, but in the meantime, it’s a useful political wedge. The more migrants are coming toward the United States, the more Trump can warn of an “invasion” and inflame nativist fears that he thinks will help him win reelection. Trump isn’t really interested in solving immigration. A permanent crisis is more useful to him.

The same dynamic holds true on Obamacare. Last week, the White House told a federal appeals court that the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out entirely. Trump then announced that he was calling on Congress to produce a replacement for the law. The decision was reportedly made over the objections of Trump’s attorney general and secretary of health and human services, and it has received a chilly reception from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.