During an interview with The Washington Post Thursday — his only sitdown with an American newspaper during the trip — Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina acknowledged that it will be up to President Obama and Congress to determine how the U.S. should respond to the influx of Central American migrants.

But “If they want to attack the root of the problem, I think that they need to think about making investments in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras,” he said. “The United States is spending about $20 billion on border security and other border crossings where they process children and where they treat them and all those other processes. We say that with just 10 percent of that money that you’re investing on the U.S. border, it could be spent at minimum in the three countries and I’m confident that it would be much more profitable than investing it on border security or border control with Mexico.”