For days now, US politics has been roiled by an incredible rumour, mentioned in the middle of last week’s presidential debate: migrants in Springfield, Ohio are kidnapping and eating cats, dogs and even geese at local ponds. The two parties have reacted in familiar ways. Republicans fell into hysterics, playing up the cartoonish depiction of Haitians as wild dog-eaters; Democrats, in turn, gleefully mocked their opponents as racist fearmongers. Lost amid the partisan furore, however, is any mention of a solution to the perennial problem facing the US: an uncontrolled border and a desperately flawed immigration system, which neither conservatives nor progressives ever came close to fixing.
Critics from the centre-left may be right to fault Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for “creating stories”, but they are yet to articulate how they would improve the flailing status quo. Kamala Harris may assert that Trump “doesn’t have a plan”, but it is the Democrats who have fallen short in this respect, despite their best efforts to pivot to the Right on the issue. It begs the question: what can Harris do, beyond her usual rhetorical acrobatics, to reclaim the border issue from Republicans once and for all?
The solution has to go beyond the realm of policy to win over voters. Rather than simply coming up with yet another wonkish 10-point plan, Democrats must figure out a way to convince both the American public and themselves that the border must be defended, that ordinary citizens are right to be concerned, and that order and predictability in the immigration system are positive goods.
First, it is important to establish an honest account of what’s gone wrong over the last eight years. For there can be no resolution to the border crisis without acknowledging that Trump and Biden together share the blame. But where to begin? There can be no hiding from the fact that the Biden era witnessed the worst upticks in irregular migration in recent history, with more than 10 million encounters at the southern border according to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This amounts to a 1,240% increase since 2021 and a backlog of more than 591,000 individuals in the shambolic CBP app’s mass parole programme. All the while, a misguided strategy of documenting those crossing the border — or “managing the flow” — as opposed to trying to halt the flow of irregular arrivals has resulted in a virtual open invitation to economic migrants from Central America and elsewhere to crowd the US asylum system.
Harris should start by admitting the failures of her own party. In 2021, she was made Biden’s spokesperson on the border. But she was hardly the “border czar” the GOP make her out to be. The role gave her little to no actual responsibility over policymaking, which remained in the hands of DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. So rather than pretending her stint in the job was a success, she could admit that the present course is wrong and unsustainable. This would go a long way toward distancing herself from the Biden record — something she has already begun to do in other policy areas.
Indeed, given the Republican’s consistent failings on immigration, Harris does not have to stay on the defensive. The most remarkable aspect of tracing the volume and trajectory of irregular migration flows to the US is not the cleavages but rather the continuities between the Biden and Trump administrations. Contrary to the former president’s claims of presiding over the “lowest illegal immigration in recorded history”, Trump’s four years in office saw an effective decrease in deportations from the Obama era according to data collected by Pew Research. As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2020, near the end of the Trump era: “Barack Obama’s ICE arrested and deported more than twice as many people during his first term in office.”
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SubscribeOh man, I was kind of having a rough day, but this article really cheered me up. Nothing like a good laugh to chase the blues away!
WTH is the author talking about? These stats are easily accessible. Border encounters from 2007 to 2020 were under 500,000 every year, with the exception of a spike in 2019 to 800,000. Since then, border encounters have shot through the roof, to more than 2 million in 2022. This is the last year stats are available, but we know they were even higher in 2023 and 2024.
And what’s up with the term irregular migrants? It makes it sound like illegal aliens have irritable bowel syndrome.
The young aparatchik is trying to impress the party. That he isvpushig contrived, anti-factual nonsense is because the facts support none of the narrative he is,spinning out of whole cloth..
I see Mike is still running the same old comedy routine! He even got in the comments last time for some quality ranting and raving!
https://unherd.com/2022/12/biden-can-win-on-immigration/
Typical democrat denialism. The reports of pets and park animals being caught and eaten is true. Instead the democrat denials paints a delusional picture pretending that the border invasion, enabled by Harris, was somehow not her actual strategy. Invasions are not accidental.
Just like catching ducks out of a park, or the neighbor’s cat, cooking it and eating it, is not an accident.
“Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and half years…” so too could Harris retort “Why hasn’t he done it? Where is that ‘big, beautiful’ wall that Mexico was going to pay for?”
It was my impression that the Biden administration stopped it. These sort of articles are really quite loose with facts and objectivity.
A fun and useful exercise is to visit archive(dot)org to look up website snapshots that were taken on the day US news articles were actually published.
On March 24 and March 25, 2021, US news articles are quite clear that President Joe Biden placed Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of overseeing and securing the Southern Border of the US. It was her signature role in the Biden administration at the time.
As an ABC News article (from the above date) stated about Kamala’s new border role in the Biden Administration:
With this point cleared up, perhaps we should measure Kamala’s actual performance, and ask her why the southern border crisis has deteriorated on her watch and under her command? Or is this too much to ask for?