Illegal immigration is the ultimate lightning rod. Few political issues can be so clearly visualized, demonized and presented as “easy to fix”.
Donald Trump, from his first steps in federal politics, wallowed in hyperbole to address the subject. Nine years later, his June 16, 2015 comments in Trump Tower still resonate.
Announcing his candidacy for president, he stunned everyone by asserting that “when Mexico sends its citizens, they don’t send the best; they bring drugs; they are rapists. And some, I suppose, are good people.”
Time has not softened him. His post-verdict statement in New York ten days ago was replete with allegations of Venezuelans coming from “psychiatric institutions and insane asylums,” Chinese who “look like soldiers,” and Congolese, freshly “freed from prison…and brought to the United States.”
FROM OBVIOUSLY ABSURDITY
Tirelessly relayed by conservative media, his profanities and other exaggerations ended up being embedded in Americans’ perceptions of their border with Mexico.
Even Hispanic voters – Latinos – are more likely, according to pollsters, to think that Trump’s presidency has helped the country more on immigration and border security than Biden’s.
That’s not all: African-American men under 40 admit to being worried about competition for jobs from newcomers. Enough to sound the alarm among Democratic strategists who do not forget that Latinos and young blacks were at the heart of Joe Biden’s winning coalition in 2020.
EXAGGERATED, BUT NOT QUITE WRONG
Complicating matters for the US president is that clearly more people have attempted to enter the US since he has been in the White House. Just in fiscal year 2023, which runs, in fact, from October 2022 to September 2023, nearly 2.5 million border “encounters” have been recorded.
In response, Joe Biden used his presidential powers this week to block most asylum seekers from entering the United States. They will have to stay in Mexico or return to their country of origin until the number of daily arrests drops to 1,500 for seven consecutive days.
On certain days last December, more than 10,000 arrests were made by American border guards.
TOO OR TOO LITTLE
It is a question of seeing if this immigration policy, the most restrictive ever imposed by a Democratic president, does not come too late for voters concerned about the influx of migrants. Donald Trump, who managed to set the tone in this debate, only mentions closing the border in passing; putting an end to “the invasion of the southern border” is obvious to him.
Going further, he now promises to carry out the largest deportation operation of undocumented immigrants in American history: between 15 and 20 million people, some in their thirties and even older, entered illegally with their parents and having known nothing other than the United States.
The discourse of “open borders” ended up imposing itself to the point of pushing President Biden to choose to go against the tide of the ideas he put forward four years ago.
Has the exasperation of a portion of voters reached such intensity that Donald Trump’s extreme proposals will become the new benchmark? Not only will Joe Biden have failed to make gains among those who have had enough, but he will have alienated defenders of asylum seekers, horrified by his latest decisions. Loser on all counts.
