Kamala Harris strengthens the right-wing immigration narrative in the debate

In the presidential office During Tuesday's debate, former President Donald Trump regularly delivered racist and false tirades about cities being taken over by “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and detention centers, from mental institutions and asylums.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, made no effort to counter that sentiment, the ideological violence that was at the heart of Trump's message. Harris, albeit in the predictably moderate tone of a Democratic border authority, clung to the right-wing lie that immigration – specifically, immigration of poor people – must be stopped.

Both candidates claimed to have diametrically opposed visions for the future of the country. But when it came to immigration and the US border, there was only one narrative throughout the evening: immigration is a social evil, if not a criminal enterprise, that must be prevented as much as possible.

Harris clung to the right-wing lie that immigration – more specifically, immigration of poor people – must be stopped.

Andrew Muir, ABC news anchor and debate moderator, set the somber, hyper-nationalist tone, opening the discussion on immigration with a long question to Harris.

“We know that the number of illegal border crossings has reached a record high during the Biden administration,” he said, noting that the number has been declining since President Joe Biden “imposed tough asylum restrictions” last June.

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

This narrative of a “border crisis” was taken for granted from the start—specifically, that it was a “crisis” for the United States, not for the desperate people who fled their homes and must overcome brutal, unforgiving barriers to seek refuge here. Harris responded accordingly to Muir, treating migration as a criminal problem that must be policed ​​and combated.

“I am the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for arms, drugs and human trafficking,” she said. “The United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the U.S. Senate, has introduced a border security bill that I supported.” The bill, she noted, “would have put 1,500 additional border agents at the border” and “would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl.”

The border law in question was, in fact, one of the most draconian in recent history. Harris' only problem with the law, she said Tuesday, was that Trump had allies in Congress who killed it. Meanwhile, Biden's executive order, cited approvingly by Muir, reduced the number of border crossings by effectively closing the southern border, even to asylum seekers – an affront to international humanitarian law and, more accurately, an echo of Trump's asylum ban.

The only characters in the current migration narratives mentioned by the news anchor and the Democratic candidate were gang members, human traffickers, fentanyl dealers and “illegal” border crossers. Completely ignored: the hundreds of thousands of people risking their lives to cross the border and find safety and a better life in the world’s richest nation — a nation that has historically caused much of the political unrest that has driven millions of people to flee violence, oppression, economic devastation and climate disasters in the Northern Triangle countries, Haiti and elsewhere.

Even the typical liberal slogans about our “nation of immigrants” were missing on Tuesday evening. Nor was any discussion of the deadly consequences of the tightened border policy. According to reports, up to 80,000 people have died in the last decade trying to enter the USA via the southern border.

The reality in which a Democratic candidate would argue for opening the borders is, of course, a far cry from our current cruel and nationalistic political quagmire. Harris, the centrist Democratic candidate, does not even mention the economic and social interests served by welcoming guest workers into the United States as the existing population ages and the need for workers, especially in the care sector, continues to grow.

From an electoral perspective, too, the centrists' shift to the right – which appeals to white discontent – ​​has only served to strengthen right-wing extremist politicians and parties over the last decade, from Italy to France to Germany.

Of course, immigrants should be welcomed for ethical and humanitarian reasons – for reasons of global justice – not just because they serve the U.S. economy or electoral maneuvers. But as Tuesday's debate made clear, there is bipartisan agreement on inhumanity when it comes to border policy.

Race to the bottom in border rules

This race to the bottom on “law and order” border policy is nothing new. As I mentioned earlier, the Biden-Harris administration is not simply using Republican arguments to appeal to disgruntled conservatives. Hard-line border policies have been the standard of Democratic administrations for three decades, at least since Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House.

Clinton's 1996 immigration legislation greatly expanded the United States' ability to detain and deport migrants with even minor criminal convictions. President Barack Obama, like Harris later, relied on the racist, class-conscious narrative of targeting only “criminal” migrants and deported some 3 million people – earning him the nickname “Deporter in Chief.”

The Biden administration followed suit and closed the border this year. In early 2023, it implemented a policy that would immediately expel asylum seekers from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua who cross the border without first seeking asylum in a third country. It is also overseeing the increased use of solitary confinement for thousands of detained migrants.

Even if Democrats participate in this bigoted race to the bottom, we should be clear that Republicans – and here, especially Trump and his allies – will always win. Harris's dire picture of gangs and human trafficking was met by Trump with an obscene, baseless repetition of the lie that immigrants from Haiti steal and eat people's pets.

“In Springfield, they eat the dogs,” Trump said, repeating a lie posted by vice presidential candidate JD Vance and other right-wing online scammers like Elon Musk about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. On the debate stage, Trump got more and more outlandish: “The people that have come here. They eat the cats. They eat – they eat the pets of the people that live there.”

The racism myth is part of a tradition of vicious vilification that Haitians have faced in the West since they broke free from the yoke of French colonialism in the world's most famous successful uprising of enslaved people. Trump and his supporters do not need to know the specific history of racist backlash to understand its violent aftermath.

Muir, the moderator, noted in one of only a few sympathetic fact-checks that there were no credible reports of such an incident in Springfield. But if the stage is willing to treat black and other immigrants of color as de facto criminals, neither Muir nor Harris nor anyone else involved in Tuesday's performance – or in this entire election – is a bulwark against the dehumanization that immigrants face.

The rhetoric surrounding the “border crisis” – from the far right to the liberal center – suggests that the pressures of global migration are on the United States. But that is hardly the case.

The vast majority of displaced people worldwide are internally displaced or live in refugee camps near their countries of origin. By comparison, there are currently around 1.5 million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, although the total population is only 5.5 million.

I'm not saying that even a global superpower doesn't need resources and labor to settle millions of newcomers in a country, but these are questions of resource allocation and priorities. Since the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003, the federal government has spent an estimated $409 billion on immigration enforcement alone, and another ten billion on deterrence strategies like barriers and walls.

These sums would be better spent if the economic security of our collective lives and the lives of those coming into the country took priority over “securing the border” through military force.