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Yesterday was a bit of high political drama as President Biden and Donald Trump simultaneously paid visits to the southern border in Texas, 266 miles away from each other, Biden in Brownsville and Trump in Eagle Pass. Their leadership approaches couldn’t have been any different, of course.
Trump and the GOP are once again seizing on immigration as their tip-of-the-spear campaign message, claiming that our nation is under threat from undocumented migrants (it is not), and President Biden is doing his damnedest to fight disinformation on the issue while projecting strength in the face of the GOP’s bumpersticker philosophy jousting.
In Brownsville, the President talked up the bipartisan border deal that got pretty obviously scuttled by Senate Republicans in deference to Trump, whose racist immigration rants have become his signature song. He also encouraged Trump to join him in calling on Congress to act.
Some on the left are angry at President Biden for this perceived olive branch, and respectfully, that makes no sense to me. It’s a smart political move. He knows Trump isn’t going to engage in good faith on this issue, and he knows there are moderates who will be won over that someone in this debate is attempting to meet the other halfway.
We’ve arrived at a predictable cycle in the immigration debate: the Republican Party spreads lies and half-truths about undocumented migrants, political media pretends to kinda sorta push back against the disinformation (but not really), and most Democrats weakly fumble in attempting to mollify concerned moderates who don’t understand that this is a contrived issue.
Anyone old enough to remember the 2018 midterms—approximately 20 years ago, it feels like—will recall the conservative media panic over “migrant caravans” that were about to invade the United States. The day after the midterms, that issue quickly faded away and the next clown cause took its place to stoke outrage.
See, the Republican Party doesn’t really have any good ideas on how to “protect the border” for the simple reason that the border is too big to protect.
The U.S-Mexico border is nearly 2,000 miles long. Barring some unforeseen advancement in extraordinary technology, it is impossible to “protect” the border. Even assuming a wall that long could be built—for several reasons, notably cost, it cannot be built—the entire stretch of border would still need to be actively monitored.
You can scale these walls and cut through them. Seriously. Someone’s gotta be there to prevent that from happening, right?
Let’s be generous for a second and pretend there’d only be need for a skeleton crew (say, five personnel) for every two miles along this hypothetical wall. That works out to about 5,000 personnel being actively deployed at any given moment, but these folks need sleep. So, at about a standard 40 hours a week, we’re actually looking at 20,000 personnel, at least, being actively deployed to monitor the border.
So, presumably, after we’ve built this giant wall, which, in itself, is quite expensive, there will be the far more complicated task of comprehensively guarding the wall and repairing it over time. Forever.
No one should understand this better than Trump. Remember his famous campaign pledge? He would get the wall built, and Mexico would pay for it.
Trump came into office in 2017 with a federal trifecta: the presidency, the House, and the Senate were all under GOP control. In fact, the Republican majorities in Congress were more than enough to get done whatever the hell needed to be done in order to build the wall.
Everything was in place to act on his main campaign pledge. Four years later, the Trump administration had built just 52 miles of new primary border barriers, although he often takes credit for “500 miles” because about 90% of that were repairs to existing primary and secondary border barriers.
Basically, this man talked so much shit about the border and the non-existent “migrant crime wave” and how only he could take care of it, and yet, after voters gave him every lever of power he needed to do just that, only an additional 2.7 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border had new barriers by the end of his term.
(Oh, and Mexico didn’t pay a dime, of course.)
I mean, really, think about that. Trump could have singlehandedly ensured the wall got built in those first two years of his presidency, but he didn’t. Far from it.
Why?
I think it’s pretty obvious:
Donald Trump and the Republican Party know that it’s an impossible task to comprehensively “protect the border” and stop the immigration of undocumented migrants. It ain’t gonna happen. There’s just too much border for it to be feasible.
Trump and the GOP partly don’t want to solve this issue because it’s an incredibly potent vehicle for racist propaganda and electoral strategy. Part of the allure of this topic is that it’s very easy to message on in bad faith, replete with blatant disinformation, because it can’t actually be “solved” and thus, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
And they partly don’t want to “solve” it, which would mean mass deportations and asylum refusals, among other things, because they know that the American economy would collapse without undocumented migrants. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated the influx of new immigrants, documented and undocumented, will strengthen the U.S. economy by $7 trillion more over the next decade than without this labor force otherwise.
Fear is a primary motivator for the Republican base, and the foolish moral panic over the non-existent “migrant crime wave” makes for excellent propaganda, which draws considerably more fundraising and electoral sting in much of the country.
I don’t think all conservatives or all Republicans are included in the above. There are reasonable adults on the right who simply want common sense measures in place to prevent the rare demonstrably dangerous immigrant from entering the country. That is entirely reasonable, and I agree with it.
We should have sensible border security policies in place, but folks, I gotta tell you: when I think of national security or the economy, undocumented migrants aren’t among the first ten concerns that come to mind for either.
I grew up in Texas, as did generations of my family before me. I grew up around undocumented migrants. I had classmates and friends and neighbors who were undocumented.
And I’ll tell you something that I think is especially weird about many Republicans in Texas: they’ll say “illegal immigration” is a problem, except when it comes to the undocumented migrants they personally know. Oh, that guy? He’s good people. Leave him and his family alone. They’re not bothering nobody.
They are aware of this paradox, and they don’t seem to care that it’s hypocritical. I grew up around a lot of these kind of conservative folks, and I don’t find this complicated stance of theirs especially heartwarming. I think it’s ridiculous and frustrating.
There is no “border security crisis” to our south. If anything, there is a humanitarian crisis that should be all-too-easy to address with the kind of supposed “Christian values” that are consistently shoved down our throat by Republican politicians.
Somehow, “pro-life” means forcing 11 year-old rape victims to give birth but not welcoming desperate and hungry migrants with open arms, recognizing that our Savior, too, was a migrant on this earth.
Selective Christianity is a hell of a thing. These folks seem to (inaccurately) deploy the Bible as a weapon for their own misguided judgment but never seem to read what Christ said constantly about our collective duty to the poor and the otherwise vulnerable.
Christ never said: “For you shall welcome migrants with love, provided they properly navigate the needlessly and insufferably byzantine process of U.S. customs and immigration, often via repeated attempts, often without success and offered a dubious and illogical explanation as to why.”
No, Christ was very clear about being kind and generous to the most vulnerable among us, regardless of nationality.
Sure, this is all very easy for me to say because I’m not running for president. My job is to fight disinformation and highlight the hypocrisy of bigots and offer you, my readers, a reasonable top line analysis of all this.
President Biden is fighting a far different battle. He knows how quickly clumsy messaging can escalate into calamity and sabotage what might be the last ever fair presidential election we’ll have in the event that Trump should prevail.
The mass communications in all this are a minefield, and I think there are a lot of well-meaning progressives who are losing sight of the big picture: we have to make it through November and this discourse is extremely delicate and taking an aggressively progressive approach on this issue, especially without Congress, is very foolish.
The President, the wise man that he is, looks for every opportunity to win over moderates. Yesterday’s statement directed at Donald Trump was not an olive branch; it was an incredibly smart way of getting a lot of moderate voters to ask: wait, what is Trump’s plan on this issue and why didn’t he get it done the first time around? Where is his legislative proposal? Where are his ideas?
And also, it gets some moderates to recognize that the President is at least trying to work with his opponents while Trump just keeps insulting his.
All of this is frustrating, no doubt about that. It’s enraging and exasperating and heartbreaking. We should be welcoming undocumented migrants as a boon to our society and economy. We should be prioritizing human rights, especially in the echoes of a hundred thousand church sermons every week on Christ’s love.
We are a better country because of our undocumented siblings.
We’re also stuck in a discourse that is held hostage by zero-sum pronouncements rooted entirely in racist views and completely detached from the data.
In taking the basic adult responsibility of acknowledging that our current politics are chaotic and often unpredictable, it should be much easier for those of us who are reasonable adults, regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum, to have more grace with each other on this issue.
We should be educating each other and contextualizing what the next eight months mean for the future of our democracy.
Let’s just get to November. Let’s beat Trump. Let’s beat this goddamn guy first and then turn our attention to fixing the mess he created.
Because if we don’t do that, what happens next on this issue will be far worse than any of us can imagine, and undocumented migrants deserve a hell of a lot better than performative arguing that ultimately leads nowhere.
We’re Lucky To Be the Destination of Migrants