Democrats and Kamala Harris should lean into her campaign slogan when it comes to ‘border security’ politics: ‘We won’t go back’ to demonizing immigrants.
The Democratic Party, and its presidential nominee Kamala Harris, should stop touting “border security” and offer a new approach to the immigration debate, one firmly rooted in American values of justice, opportunity and truth-telling.
The contrast with Donald Trump should be easy to sell: The former president is promising to enact the “largest mass deportation” in the nation’s history and issue an executive order denying birthright citizenship to any child born of residents who are in the country without papers. These actions would have a devastating impact on millions of people, many of whom have been in the United States for decades. It would wreak havoc on our economy, which is not just dependent on immigrants with and without papers, but bolstered by them. And it would tarnish beyond repair our moral standing as a human rights leader around the world.
While the Republican Party’s embrace of exclusion is frightening, equally troubling is the Democrats’ embrace of policies that falsely equate border security with more restrictive asylum regulations, including President Biden’s executive order in June that closes the border to asylum applicants when numbers reach certain limits. The hope seems to be that a somewhat less cruel approach than mass deportation will satisfy those sympathetic to immigrants but also pull some would-be MAGAistas away from the xenophobic abyss.
Harris seemed to play into this strategy with her now infamous 2021 remarks telling Guatemalans: “Do not come . If you come to our border, you will be turned back.” Although it may have been more a statement of fact than a threat, it revealed a serious lack of understanding about the forces leading migrants to leave their homes. It also hurt her — and the administration’s — credibility with immigrant communities; a “big blemish,” as a political scientist at UC Irvine told The Times.
