Kamala Harris Bolsters Right-wing Immigration Narrative at Debate

On the presidential debate stage Tuesday, former President Donald Trump spewed reliably racist and lie-riddled diatribes about towns being taken over by “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, for her part, didn’t bother to counter the sentiment, the central ideological violence at the heart of Trump’s message. Harris, albeit in the predictably moderated tones of a Democratic border authoritarian, upheld the right-wing lie that immigration — the migration of poor people, that is— should be stopped.

Both candidates purported to offer diametrically opposed visions for the country’s future. When it came to immigration and the U.S. border, however, only one narrative was available throughout the night: Immigration is a social ill, if not a criminal endeavor, to be deterred as much as possible.

Harris upheld the right-wing lie that immigration — the migration of poor people, that is— should be stopped.

Andrew Muir, the ABC news anchor and debate moderator, set the bleak, hyper-nationalist tone. He opened the discussion on immigration with a lengthy question posed to Harris.

“We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration,” he said, noting that, since President Joe Biden “imposed tough asylum restrictions” last June, the numbers are down.

“Why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act?” he asked Harris “And would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?”

This narrative of a “border crisis” was taken for granted from the jump – specifically, that it is a “crisis” for the U.S., not the desperate people who have fled their homes and must face brutal, unforgiving barriers to seek refuge here. Harris answered Muir accordingly, treating migration as a problem of criminality to be policed and fought.

“I’m the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings,” she said. “The United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported.” The bill, she noted, “would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border” and “allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl.”

The border bill in question was indeed one of the most draconian in recent memory. Harris’s only problem with the legislation, she said on Tuesday, was that Trump had allies in Congress kill it. Meanwhile, Biden’s executive order, cited approvingly by Muir, lowered crossing numbers because it effectively shuttered the southern border, even to asylum seekers — an affront to international humanitarian law and, more to the point, an echo of Trump’s ban on asylum.

The only characters in current migration narratives mentioned by the cable news host and the Democratic nominee were gang members, traffickers, fentanyl pushers, and “illegal” border crossers. Obscured totally from view: the hundreds of thousands of people risking their lives to cross the border to find safety and better lives in the wealthiest nation on earth – a nation that bears significant historic responsibility for much of the political turmoil that has driven people in their millions to flee violence, repression, economic devastation and climate catastrophe in Northern Triangle countries, Haiti, and elsewhere in the first place.

Even typical liberal shibboleths about our “nation of immigrants” were absent on Tuesday night. So, too, was any reckoning with the deadly consequences of hardened border policy. As many as 80,000 people have reportedly died trying to cross into the U.S. through the Southern border in the last decade.

The reality in which a Democratic candidate would advocate for opening borders is, of course, a distant cry from our current cruel and nationalist political quagmire. Harris, the centrist Democratic candidate, does not even mention the economic and social interests served by welcoming migrant workers into the U.S., as the existing population ages and the need for workers, particularly in the care sector, only grows.

From an electoral point of view, too, centrists bending rightwards – appealing to white resentment – has in the last decade only served to strengthen far-right leaders and parties, from Italy, to France, to Germany.

Immigrants, of course, should be welcomed as a point of ethical and humanitarian necessity – of global justice – not only in service of the U.S. economy or electoral maneuvering. As Tuesday’s debate made clear, however, that when it comes to border politics, inhumanity is a point of bipartisan agreement.

Border Rule Race to the Bottom

This race to the bottom on “law and order” border rule is not new. As I’ve previously noted, the Biden-Harris administration is not simply borrowing Republican talking points to appeal to disaffected conservatives. Harsh border policies have been the standard of Democratic administrations for three decades, dating back at least to Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House.

Clinton’s 1996 immigration laws significantly expanded the United States’ ability to detain and deport migrants with even minor criminal convictions. President Barak Obama relied, like Harris since, on the racist, classist narrative of only targeting “criminal” migrants, and deported some 3 million people — earning the moniker “deporter in chief.”

Biden’s administration followed suit, shuttering the border this year; introducing a policy in early 2023 to immediately eject asylum-seekers from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who cross the border without having previously applied for asylum in a third country; and overseeing the increased use of solitary confinement for thousands of detained migrants.

While Democrats will participate in this bigoted race to the bottom, it should not be lost on us that Republicans – especially Trump and his allies – will always win. Harris’s grim picture of gangs and trafficking was met by Trump’s obscene, unfounded repetition of the lie that immigrants from Haiti are stealing and eating people’s pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said, parroting a lie posted by vice presidential candidate JD Vance and other right-wing online grifters like Elon Musk about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. On the debate stage, Trump grew ever more outlandish: “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

The racist myth sits within a legacy of vile slander faced by Haitians in the West, ever since Haitians liberated themselves from the yoke of French colonialism in the world’s only successful revolt by enslaved people. Trump and his followers need not know the specific history of racist backlash to play into its violent afterlives.

Muir, the host, did note – in one of only a few mealy-mouthed fact checks – that, no, there were no credible reports of any such incident in Springfield. Yet when the stage is set to treat Black and other migrants of color as de facto criminals, neither Muir nor Harris, nor anyone involved in Tuesday’s performance – or in this entire election – is a bulwark to the dehumanization to which immigrants are subjected.

The rhetoric around the “border crisis,” from the far-right to the liberal center, suggests that the pressure of global migration is bearing down on the U.S. This is hardly the case.

The overwhelming majority of displaced people in the world are internally displaced or in refugee camps near their countries of origin. By comparison to the U.S.’s so-called crisis, around 1.5 million Syrian refugees currently reside in Lebanon, where the total population is only 5.5 million.

I’m not suggesting that, even for a global superpower, it does not take resources and work to settle millions of newcomers into a country, but these are questions of resource distribution priorities. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent an estimated $409 billion on immigration enforcement agencies alone, and tens of billions more on deterrence strategies like barriers and walls.

Prioritizing the economic security of our collective lives, and the lives of those who enter the country, rather than “securing the border” through militarized violence, would see such sums better spent.