The debate revealed how comfortable America is with hating immigrants – Mother Jones

A member of the Texas delegation holds a sign during the Republican National Convention. Matt Rourke/AP

During the ABC News During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump repeatedly addressed the issue he believes will win him the November election: immigration.

That meant a flood of derogatory remarks about migrants. He falsely claimed that they “are pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”; he said immigrants coming in “are at the highest level of criminality.” Trump couldn’t even resist repeating the unspeakably racist lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating pets. (The last of these led to a bizarre interaction: the moderators fact checking(Call in which he discussed the former president’s claims about eating animals, Trump interrupted him to say, “People on television are saying my dog ​​was taken and used for food.”)

But when it came to framing immigration, Trump ultimately had the last word on the debate stage, both literally and figuratively. Just before the head-to-head concluded, the former president used his closing remarks to define the issue in his own perverse terms: “What these people have done to our country, perhaps worst of all, is allow millions of people, many of them criminals, to come into our country, and they are destroying our country,” he said.

The entire debate about immigration, to the extent that it occurred at all, existed within Trump’s noxious idea. The only political points made onstage about immigration were about enforcement.

Vice President Harris hinted at an agenda focused on border security and reviving a now-defunct, bipartisan, comprehensive Senate immigration bill that would have added 1,500 Border Patrol agents to the force and raised standards for asylum claims. That proposed legislation, which the Biden administration described as the “toughest” border security measure in decades, has somehow become synonymous with compromise on immigration, despite doing little to advance Democrats’ long-held promises of legalization for undocumented populations. (Trump torpedoed the bill to prevent Democrats from winning a victory on a seemingly intractable problem.)

Trump’s misleading generalizations about “migrant crime” went largely unchallenged, both by Harris and the media. Sometimes they were even amplified. In response to J.D. Vance’s defense of Trump’s Springfield lies after the debate, CNN commentators eagerly pushed back against criticism that the media had failed to report isolated incidents of migrants committing violence. “There have been all kinds of stories and all kinds of reporting on immigrant crime, and every state is a border state,” Chris Wallace said. (He failed to note that data shows immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.)

On stage, Trump didn’t have to consider how he would carry out his potentially catastrophic and inhumane plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants en masse from the United States. He ranted only about “millions of criminals” and “terrorists” coming into the country to vote for Democrats. Trump also didn’t answer the question of why he had killed a bipartisan deal that would have satisfied the Republicans’ wish list of border control measures without providing a path to legalization for the undocumented. Instead, he dodged the question by disputing Harris’s rejection of his rallies’ crowds before moving on to pet-eating immigrants.

It goes without saying that the contrast between Harris and Trump on all fronts, including, and especially not so much, immigration, is crystal clear. For one thing, she does not propose building sprawling detention camps to hold thousands of immigrants or promise to deploy the military to police the border. But when given the opportunity to further emphasize that distinction to her advantage, Harris did not seize it. She did not criticize Trump’s plan for mass deportations or dispute his repeated claims that migrants commit crimes and pose an existential threat to the United States.

When asked about the Biden administration’s border policy, Harris, who has a proven track record as an advocate for immigrants, responded instead Donning her prosecutorial hat, Harris linked immigration to crime by touting her experience in taking on “transnational criminal organizations that traffic in weapons, drugs and people.” Attacking Trump for wrecking the bipartisan border deal, Harris said, “He preferred to target a problem rather than solve a problem.”

Given the current state of the immigration debate, that might just be the safer strategy when it comes to such a polarizing issue. But immigrant rights advocates and groups have long disputed the idea that immigration is inherently a burden for the Biden administration — and Harris, for that matter — and have urged it to take an unapologetically pro-immigrant stance and go on the offensive against the Republicans’ xenophobic agenda.

Before the debate, I spoke with Michelle Ming, political director at the immigrant youth-led United We Dream network. On Monday, the political and electoral wing of the organization endorsed Harris, saying in a statement that the goal is to block another Trump presidency and prevent mass deportations. “We know the fear that our communities have lived with under his presidency, and just the uncertainty of getting through another day in this country without being detained, deported, arrested,” Ming said. “We have this deep, deep realization that we cannot go back to that, our communities cannot survive another four years of that.”

Still, that doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly endorse Harris. “I think Kamala Harris needs to stand there and really differentiate herself from Trump, rather than trying to be more Republican than Trump on immigration, which is frankly something she’s trying to do now, or something the Democrats are telling her to do,” she added. “That’s not a winning strategy.”