“I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border… Do not come. Do not come.”
Kamala Harris, in 2021, speaking in Guatemala City
VP and Democratic candidate for President, Kamala Harris, is between a boulder (Trump’s sabotaging the bi-partisan immigration bill and blaming the border mess entirely on Harris) and a really, really hard place (Biden’s giving her a mandate she could never solve). With the likelihood of a meaningful bi-partisan immigration bill’s passage vaporized, especially if Harris wins the presidential race, she has a mega-mess on her hands with few genuine paths to stability. Trump loves ordering his acolytes in Congress to sabotage bipartisan bills that, if passed during the current administration, could be touted by Harris as an administration victory. The bill that might have seriously mitigated the chaos at the border, and now an extended childcare incentive bill, were appropriately GOP-cosponsored, then trashed by the same GOP “under Trump orders.”
The last time Congress found a bi-partisan solution to our continuing immigration issue came under the auspicious of then President Ronald Reagan, a lingering symbol of the Republican Party. Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (also known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act or the Reagan Amnesty Act) in 1986, creating a path to citizenship for almost 3 million undocumented workers who had moved to the United States before 1982. The law made it illegal for employers to knowingly hire individuals unauthorized to work in the United States and established a system for verifying the legal status of employees. The Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Border Patrol were provided with increased funding for the purpose of enforcing immigration law. IRCA also created new, separate visa categories for temporary agricultural work (H-2A) and temporary nonagricultural work (H-2B).
Even as Republican presidents, most notably George W Bush, attempted to get viable immigration reform on the books, their own party would have none of that. Republicans were beginning to realize that border chaos was good politics, and they could always count on Democrats to try and, with GOP resistance, fail to solve the problem. The GOP would always have an issue to rail against Democrats, even as they made a solution virtually impossible. And boy did Donald Trump capitalize on that unfortunate reality. Trump wants the border to be as messy as it can be… planning to use that chaos – which he could have mitigated – as one of his strongest campaign platforms. What’s worse, that campaign manipulation seems to be working.
In her current campaign efforts, Harris must recast her efforts – constrained by her Progressives, on one side, and Biden’s giving her an unwinnable task, on the other, exacerbated by Trump-mantra-driven congressional Republicans reveling in border photo ops and making sure no corrective legislative every carries a single GOP vote – in a continuing no-win effort. True, that as the summer months sear the path north to the US border, combined with Biden’s imposition of Trump-similar restrictions on asylum seekers, the number of border crossers has plummeted.
But as Los Angeles Times writers Kate Linthicum, Andrea Castillo, Patrick J. McDonnell and Kevin Rector noted on July 27th: “Now that she is the leading Democratic presidential candidate, Harris is facing renewed scrutiny over her record in the White House and her views on immigration more broadly… Harris was never in charge of immigration enforcement or border policy. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from painting her as a failed ‘border czar’ who is to blame for a record surge in unauthorized migration under Biden.
“‘Let me remind you: Kamala had one job. One job. And that was to fix the border,’ Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who ran for the GOP presidential nomination this year, said at the Republican National Convention this month. ‘Now imagine her in charge of the entire country.’… As for those on the left disappointed that Harris hasn’t been a stronger defender of migrants, some acknowledge that would be difficult in the current political climate, where concern over immigration has become a top issue for many voters.
“Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, has known Harris for decades and said her comments in Guatemala belied a track record of standing up for migrants earlier in her political career… ‘Why have you been put up to say this?’ Salas recalled thinking of Harris. ‘This is not who you are.’
“Manfredo Marroquín, an anti-corruption activist in Guatemala who met Harris there in 2021, said that she seemed sympathetic to migrants, but that it was clear ‘she was under pressure to show a hard line on immigration.’” So, ask yourself why so many immigrants have made the trek north in the last few years. Oddly, the number of Mexicans has tailed off to below 30%; most of the immigrants come from Central America and points south, with a few Chinese, Haitians, etc. thrown in for good measure. And notwithstanding MAGA disinformation to the contrary (they never have accurate statistic data, only anecdotal examples which can support just about anything), those who have crossed our southern border and live here have lower crime rates that incumbent Americans.
Ask yourself where those corrupting narco-cartels would be without massive consumer demand in the US for illicit drugs or if somehow the United States had not become their tsunami provider of guns, from mere pistols to AR-15s and more. Which political party made the purchase of firearms in the US so easy, even military-grade semiautomatic assault rifles? What’s it like to live in a country where cartel violence and the resulting drug-money corruption run rampant? And yet not a shred of blame is cast on the party that made such ultra-violence pervasive and uncontrolled – a force that has driven many from the Latin American homes in utter desperation seeking home in the land that was instrumental in creating their intolerable misery.
I’m Peter Dekom, and for decades since the Reagan era, the GOP has bet that if they can keep the immigration issue alive and well (even during Republican administrations – ask George W Bush), they will always have a rightwing issue to lure gullible voters.
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