“America is not, never was, a charitable institution.”
In my opinion, the best helping hand America has to offer is to help our neighbors in this hemisphere to develop their own nations as productively as possible. There are an amazing amount of natural resources in this hemisphere, and lots of opportunities for nations to grow and prosper.
Think about Mexico. It has a fabulous climate for growing food. It has people willing to work hard (just look at the people in the USA doing manual labor.) It has coastlines with beaches. It has OIL. It, like most countries south of our border, also has a corrupt government with suppresses individual enterprise and allows lots of crime. That has to change before those countries will have a prosperous middle class.