Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration pushes Kamala Harris’ party to the right

Migration has been a key element in Donald Trump’s discourse since 2016, when he proposed building a wall on the border with Mexico. Even so, now more than ever, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants in major U.S. cities since spring 2022 is conditioning next Tuesday’s elections on both sides of the political spectrum. The Republican discourse, which associates migrants with insecurity and describes them as drainers of scarce resources, such as housing or food aid, has greatly influenced the Democrats: Kamala Harris’s position is now noticeably tougher than during the 2020 campaign. The importance that voters ascribe to this issue shows, however, a partisan gap: for 90% of registered Republicans, immigration is “very important,” compared to 68% of independents and 50% of Democrats, according to a recent Ipsos/Langer poll for ABC News.

The image of chaos and lack of control projected by Republicans regarding what is happening in Democratic cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, or Denver has pushed many politicians in Harris’s party to defend sealing the border because the backflow of overflowing migrant centers is already reaching suburban areas. While 64% of all New Yorkers believe that the crisis has worsened in the last year, the majority of residents of these residential neighborhoods consider it “very serious,” according to an August poll by Siena College.

With his well-known xenophobic narrative, Trump last Sunday himself reiterated his promise to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants not far from Times Square, which, he claims, has been “taken over” by undocumented immigrants. In two years, 210,000 foreigners have arrived in the Big Apple, chartered by the Republican governors of the border states to put pressure on the federal government. Chicago, Boston and Denver have received about 50,000 each. They are the perfect scapegoat, sacrificial victims on the altar of votes, no matter what party they are from.

“Immigration has become a national concern, especially for Republicans. The peak was after December, when the border reached record levels. But it has remained high, and so Republicans are particularly concerned, even more so than in 2016 when Trump made immigration an issue,” Lydia Asad, director of Social Research at the Gallup polling firm, recently explained. “They both want people to enter the country legally, but once they arrive, that’s where the biggest partisan divide occurs: Republicans in favor of sending people back, versus Democrats and independents, so you could say that the border is a much hotter issue today than it was in 2016.”

The data linking undocumented migrants to crime refutes the Republicans’ accusations, but although the number of entries has plummeted in recent months and immigration pressure in New York seems to have stabilized, the crisis also carries its own shameful aspect: it has highlighted the seams of social services and specifically, the capacity of the city’s shelter system, already strained since the pandemic. Local homeless people and immigrants are eking out a living in an almost Darwinian struggle for scarce public resources, while politicians try to profit from the situation. The current immigration crisis has been an added factor to the Republicans’ maximalist narrative, while the opportunism to adapt reality to the discourse, or vice versa, has modulated that of the Democrats.

“Immigration is a key issue for Republicans because the migration crisis is now stressing communities across the U.S., not just in border states. Democrats would love to talk about any other issue, but they find it difficult in the midst of an invasion [sic] on the southern border,” explains Republican political consultant Chapin Fay.

Beyond the current situation, the migration crisis refers to a structural phenomenon with two aspects: rooted in the particular geography and history of the United States, in its economic strength as a magnet for its neighbors, and, globally, in a much broader problem that few countries can avoid. “Now, the majority of those arriving are Africans. Venezuelans are already here, very few are coming now,” explains Natalia Méndez, whose restaurant in the Bronx is an institution for refugees.

“Every day we prepare a 100-liter pot of soup to distribute. When it runs out, if there are still people outside, we make another one… But we also have 200-liter pots, even 400-liter pots,” says Méndez, who is undocumented despite having arrived in the U.S. 30 years ago from Oaxaca (Mexico). Her children, dreamers, help her in the kitchen and with the distribution, “sometimes also of clothes, because they arrive with only what they are wearing.”

Fixing a “broken system”

One of Harris’s most repeated promises when asked about the border is “to fix a broken system.” “The immigration system is broken, but it’s not new, it’s been broken for many years,” Méndez adds, referring to her own family experience. “I have never been able to return to my country because if I leave, I wouldn’t be able to come back here. I can’t vote, but I couldn’t tell you which of the two candidates is the most suitable to fix this system, which needs a comprehensive and fair reform: we are talking about human beings. Trump has at least been loudly warning us of everything he intends to do, so no one can say they were fooled,” she says, shrugging her shoulders regarding the other option.

In the city that was forged by immigration, the port of entry to the United States for millions of exiles and the dispossessed, Méndez says she has seen “migrants arrive with shackles on their ankles, put on them by migra [the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service].”

On the ground, the scene is changing day by day: from the hundreds of foreigners camped out for weeks at Boston airport, who were eventually evicted, to the convenient diversion of buses full of migrants arriving in Chicago so as not to mar the Democratic convention in August, to the crossing of the border with Canada on foot by thousands of people in search of better living conditions. From the requisition of hundreds of hotels in New York to house the new arrivals, or the occupation of the public roads around overflowing establishments, to the tide of illegal immigrants — the vast majority of them women — carrying babies on their backs while selling sweets on the subway.

They no longer do this, due to increased surveillance on the subway system and the intervention of social services, but now it is easy to find them, every two blocks, surrounded by their offspring, with a cardboard box full of chocolates as their only source of income.

Giordana, a 43-year-old Ecuadorian, spends her afternoons squatting on a sidewalk in Manhattan, with her two children and two grandchildren, all of whom are in school. The woman, who arrived six months ago, says she cannot aspire to a conventional job with a set schedule: “The children leave school at 2 p.m. and someone has to pick them up and be with them. We cannot pay anyone to look after them because what my daughter [the mother of two of the children] and I earn is not enough.”

A block away, outside a supermarket where several customers approach to give them food, a Venezuelan family — father, son, daughter-in-law, and a one-year-old granddaughter who crossed the Darién Gap aged five months — asks for help. The father, a worker at a state sugar mill who fled the country after a strike, is waiting for his asylum request to be processed so he can work; the four of them live in a shelter (families have an easier time finding accommodation than migrants who travel alone). “We left Venezuela eight years ago. We lived in Colombia and then in Ecuador, from where we fled because of gang violence: a gang asked us to give them money to let us live in the neighborhood. In our building, they killed a Venezuelan who refused.” They are waiting for their papers to move to Pennsylvania, where they have relatives.

Other papers are those of the ambitious bipartisan bill to “fix” the border — in reality another ratcheting up of security — whose processing was frustrated by Trump for electoral leverage and which the Democrats brandish, as a lost opportunity, whenever the issue comes up. A legislative deadlock that the uncertain result of the polls can turn into a quagmire or a hell, the territories furthest from the promise that so many migrants expect when they begin their journey to nowhere.

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