This text is taken from the American Election Mail. To subscribe, click here.
“We’ve lost control! We have to close the border.” Sitting at his exhibitor booth at the Texas Republican Party convention, political columnist George “El Conservador” Rodriguez unpacks his anti-immigration rhetoric without taboo or complex. “Yes, it’s inhumane to [rejeter] children and families at the border, but I’m sorry, we can’t accept everybody. We have to stand up and say, ‘Wow, first and foremost, we’re going to take care of our people.'”
A commentator for various media outlets, including Fox News, this sixty-year-old Texan of Mexican origin, who also hosts his own AM radio show, is not kind to immigrants who come to “colonize the United States.” He even has his own theory about the “laziest” among them who, rather than coming to fill the labor needs as was the case before, take advantage of welfare. “The welfare check is equivalent to the salary earned by an undocumented immigrant,” he says. “So why work if you get the same amount for doing nothing?”
The former official said he drew this conclusion, which has not been verified, from a study he conducted while working for the Reagan administration’s Justice Department in the community relations and immigration awareness sector.
Welfare needs to be cut and employers who hire illegal immigrants punished, Rodriguez said. “We have enough poverty as it is.”
Grand Old Party activists are not the only ones concerned about immigration, although they are by far the most likely to give it importance (48% of Republicans versus 8% of Democrats, according to a Gallup poll).
According to the same survey conducted in April, illegal immigration was then, for a third consecutive month, cited by American respondents as the number 1 problem in the country.
Since then, an Ipsos poll shows that this crucial issue alternates with inflation as the top concern of Americans, particularly in swing states, especially Arizona, which borders Mexico. And, unsurprisingly, this issue is the most divisive.
Immigration is political
In his small, air-conditioned office in Eagle Pass, a Texas town right on the border with Mexico, immigration lawyer Cesar Lozano keeps repeating: immigration is political. “We would like the laws [sur l’immigration] are simply applied, but there is always a political aspect to it,” he said.
An immigrant does something wrong? Republicans will use him as a “test case” and imply that migrants are a threat. “Even though 99.9% of immigrants are not like that,” adds the lawyer, who does not hide his Democratic connections.
Last February, in the state of Georgia, the murder of college student Laken Riley by an illegal Venezuelan immigrant was seized upon by Republicans and Democrats for political gain. Joe Biden, who referenced the tragic death of the 22-year-old woman in his State of the Union address, was accused of trying to score campaign points. For their part, Republicans, who hold the majority in the House of Representatives, had just passed the Laken Riley Act, a bill to allow the arrest and detention of any undocumented immigrant committing crimes related to theft, which Democrats deemed “demagogic.”
According to Carlos Heredia, an economist and associate professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City, immigration is also an important issue between the two neighboring countries. So far, it has been used as a “bargaining chip” with the left-wing Mexican government, which will now be led by the new president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
This will continue regardless of who ends up in the White House, believes the researcher specializing in immigration issues between Mexico and the United States. “The idea is that the Biden administration avoids getting involved in the day-to-day affairs of Mexican politics and, in exchange, Mexico will stop and send as many Central American and Caribbean migrants as it can further south.”
Security threat
In 2023, the United States saw 3.2 million migrants cross its border with Mexico to the south, a number that continues to rise.
Last December, when border services recorded a record of more than 302,000 entries, President Biden sent a group composed of his secretary of state, his immigration chief and his homeland security adviser to discuss the problem with their Mexican counterparts.
For Americans, immigration is also and above all a matter of national security, believes Carlos Heredia. “Even trade negotiators know that, deep down, real immigration talks are about security.”
It is by brandishing the security threat that the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, justified an investment of more than 10 billion US dollars so far to militarize the border and protect it against what he called an “invasion” of migrants.
Last year, he even chartered buses to send thousands of them to cities known to be Democratic, including New York. “They were lied to and then dumped on the street. Beyond the legal aspect, politically, this operation was a big mistake,” says Cesar Lozano.
The lawyer laments that for some time now, Eagle Pass and its approximately 30,000 inhabitants have been used as a “stage” for “propaganda by Republicans and anti-immigration groups.”
Many Republican figures — including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump — came to observe the construction of a second wall, made of shipping containers, and the installation of buoys and barbed wire in international waters, measures that the federal government is contesting before the Supreme Court, arguing that states do not have these powers.
“I’m not saying there is no crisis,” says M.e Lozano. But he notes, once again, that this crisis is being “used” for political purposes. “We have to remain very human in the way we manage it,” he believes. “If Trump comes to power, I fear he will want to deport everyone, even legal immigrants.”
Cesar Lozano also wants to point out that even the people who are currently living without papers in the United States initially had, for the overwhelming majority, legal status. “It’s just that when their visa or work permit expired, these migrants stayed.” All the while continuing to fuel, in spite of themselves, a debate that, for its part, is not about to expire.
This text is taken from the American Election Mail.
This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-The duty.