Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration pushes Kamala Harris’ party to the right | Elections 2024

Migration has been a key element of Donald Trump’s discourse since 2016, when he proposed building a wall on the border with Mexico. Yet now more than ever, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants in major U.S. cities starting in the spring of 2022 is shaping next Tuesday’s elections on both sides of the political spectrum. Republican discourse that links migrants to insecurity and portrays them as drains on scarce resources such as housing or food aid has had a major impact on Democrats, with Kamala Harris’ stance now noticeably tougher than during the 2020 campaign. But the importance voters place on the issue shows a partisan divide: A recent Ipsos/Langer poll found that 90% of registered Republicans consider immigration “very important,” compared with 68% of independents and 50% of Democrats. for ABC News.

The image of chaos and lack of control projected by Republicans about what is happening in Democratic cities like New York, Chicago, Boston or Denver has pushed many politicians in Harris’s party to advocate closing the border because the backflow of overcrowded migrant centers has already begun . reach suburban areas. While 64% of all New Yorkers believe the crisis has worsened over the past year, a majority of residents in these residential neighborhoods consider it “very serious,” according to an August poll conducted by Siena College.

In his famously xenophobic narrative, Trump himself last Sunday reiterated his promise to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants near Times Square, which he claims has been “overrun” by undocumented immigrants. In two years, 210,000 foreigners arrived in the Big Apple, invited by Republican governors in border states to put pressure on the federal government. Chicago, Boston and Denver received about 50,000 each. They are the perfect scapegoats, sacrificial victims on the altar of votes, no matter what party they are from.

“Immigration has become a national issue, especially for Republicans. The peak came in December, when the border reached record levels. But it remains high, which is why Republicans are particularly concerned, even more so than in 2016, when Trump made immigration an issue,” Lydia Assad, director of social research at research firm Gallup, recently explained. “They both want people to come into the country legally, but once they arrive, that’s where the biggest partisan divide arises: Republicans are in favor of sending people back, versus Democrats and independents, so you could say the border is a much more pressing issue today.” . than it was in 2016.”

Data linking undocumented migrants to crime refutes Republican accusations, but while the number of arrivals has fallen sharply in recent months and immigration pressure in New York appears to have stabilized, the crisis has a shameful aspect: It has exposed the seams of social services and, in particular, , the capacity of the city’s housing system, which is already strained in the wake of the pandemic. Local homeless people and immigrants eke out a life in an almost Darwinian struggle for scarce government resources while politicians try to take advantage of the situation. The current immigration crisis has become an additional factor to the Republican maximalist narrative, while opportunism, aimed at adapting reality to discourse or vice versa, modulates Democratic opportunism.

“Immigration is a key issue for Republicans because the migrant crisis is now putting pressure on communities across the US, not just in border states. Democrats would like to talk about every other issue, but they find it difficult to do so in the midst of an invasion (sic) of the southern border,” explains Republican political consultant Chapin Fay.

Beyond the current situation, the refugee crisis is a structural phenomenon that has two aspects: rooted in the geography and history of the United States, in its economic power as a magnet for its neighbors, and, on a global scale, in the much broader problem that few countries can avoid this. “Now the majority of arrivals are Africans. Venezuelans are already here, very few are coming now,” explains Natalia Mendez, whose restaurant in the Bronx is a shelter for refugees.

“Every day we prepare a 100-liter pot of soup for distribution. 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 Mendez, who is undocumented despite coming to the US on 30 years ago from Oaxaca. (Mexico). Her dreamer children help her in the kitchen and in handing out, “sometimes clothes too, because they only come with what they’re wearing.”

Fixing a “broken system”

One of Harris’ 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 years,” Mendez adds, citing his own family experience. “I could never go back to my country because if I leave, I won’t be able to come back here. I can’t vote, but I can’t tell you which of the two candidates is best suited to fix this system that needs comprehensive and fair reform: we’re talking about people. Trump at least warned us loudly about everything he was going to do so no one could say he was duped,” she says, shrugging at the other option.

In a city that was created by immigration, a port of entry into the United States for millions of exiles and the dispossessed, Mendez says she has seen “migrants arriving with ankle shackles on them migration (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).”

On the ground, the situation is changing by the day, from hundreds of foreigners camped out for weeks at the Boston airport who were eventually evicted, to the convenient diversion of buses full of migrants arriving in Chicago so as not to overshadow the Democratic National Convention. in August, thousands of people crossed the border into Canada on foot in search of better living conditions. From the requisitioning of hundreds of New York City hotels to house new arrivals or the occupation of public roads around crowded establishments, to the flood of illegal immigrants – the vast majority of them women – carrying babies on their backs and selling candy on the subway.

They no longer do this due to increased surveillance of the subway system and intervention by social services, but they are now easily found every two blocks, surrounded by their offspring, with a cardboard box full of chocolates as their only source. income.

Jordana, a 43-year-old Ecuadorian woman, spends her days squatting on the sidewalk in Manhattan with her two children and two grandchildren, all of whom go to school. A woman who arrived six months ago says she cannot apply for a regular job with a fixed schedule: “The children leave school at 2 p.m. and someone has to pick them up and be with them. We can’t pay anyone to look after them because what my daughter (a mother of two) and I earn is not enough.”

A block away, near a supermarket where several shoppers are approaching to feed them, a Venezuelan family – father, son, daughter-in-law and one-year-old granddaughter who crossed the Darien Gap at age five months – is asking for help. . The father, a state sugar factory worker who fled the country after a strike, is waiting for his asylum request to be processed so he can work; four of them live in a shelter (it is easier for families to find housing than for migrants traveling alone). “We left Venezuela eight years ago. We lived in Colombia and then Ecuador, where we fled because of gang violence: the gang asked us to give them money so we could live next door. A Venezuelan who refused was killed in our building.” They are waiting for documents to move to Pennsylvania, where they have relatives.

The other documents are those of an ambitious bipartisan bill to “fix” the border (really another security boost) that was derailed by Trump for electoral leverage and which Democrats brandish as a missed opportunity whenever the issue comes up. A legislative impasse that the uncertain outcome of the polls could turn into a quagmire or hell, territories furthest from the promise so many migrants expect as they begin their journey to nowhere.

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