Immigration is once again at the center of speeches, headlines and public conversation in the United States. For the first time in five years, it tops the list of Americans’ worries, according to Gallup’s monthly poll released Monday. One in three mention the entry of undocumented migrants as the most important problem in the country, a sharp increase compared to the 20% recorded in January.
In view of these data, President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, went on Thursday to two border points in Texas, Brownsville and Eagle Pass, to stage two radically opposite conceptions of the migration issue. Their speeches, 500 kilometers apart, only coincided on two points: both described the migration situation as a problem and blamed their rival for not acting accordingly.
From Brownsville (Texas), Biden accused Trump of torpedoing the migration pact reached by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, one of the most restrictive in history. After four months of negotiations, the measure was on the verge of passage until Trump entered the scene, used his influence and ordered lawmakers to reject it. If it had become law, the former president would have lost one of his main arguments to attack Biden, whom he wants to continue to accuse of “allowing an invasion” with his “open borders policy”.
The president addressed Trump directly on the issue: “Instead of telling congressmen to block the law, join me,” he said in his speech, after holding meetings with members of the Border Patrol and immigration authorities . “We can do it together. We both know it is the toughest, most efficient and most effective immigration law this country has ever seen. Instead of politicking, let’s approve it”, he challenged the tycoon.
The bill agreed between the two parties included strong limits on asylum applications, an expansion of the Border Patrol’s powers to detain migrants and a large increase of $20 billion in resources for more agents and better equipped at the border, and for the detection of fentanyl, which has the main gateway to Mexico. In addition, the law would have given Biden the ability to temporarily “close the border” if it becomes overcrowded, he boasted in his speech in Brownsville.
500 kilometers to the west, in Eagle Pass, Trump stuck to his usual xenophobic, dehumanizing and apocalyptic rhetoric: the same one he used to get to the White House in 2016. He referred to migrants as “invaders,” “criminals”, “rapists”, “drug dealers” and “terrorists” and said that “the United States is being invaded by the migrant crime of Biden”, who has “the blood of countless innocent victims” on his hands.
His words lack statistical evidence. The cases of migrants committing crimes do not, in relative terms, exceed the cases of native-born Americans. A recent study of Texas Department of Public Safety data shows that the homicide conviction rate in that state is 2.4 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, compared to 2.8 for the US-born. Immigrants who entered the country legally maintain the lowest conviction rate, at 1.1 per 100,000 people.
Data from New York, one of the main receiving cities, also does not support Trump’s alarmist claims: although more than 170,000 migrants have arrived since April 2022, the crime rate has remained stable .
In parallel, gunshots, which are the second leading cause of unnatural death in the country after suicide, kill approximately 10.6 people per 100,000, and in more than 80% of cases the executioner is white and born in the United States. However, more and more are uncritically applauding the words of the former president, who last month went so far as to say that migrants “contaminate the blood of the nation”.
The locations chosen by Biden and Trump to campaign in Texas were all intended. The tycoon went to Eagle Pass, which in recent months has become the hottest spot on the border with Mexico. There were almost 150,000 migrant arrests in December, a figure that dropped to 68,000 last month. Republicans use this data, which does not represent the number of entries but the number of times immigrants are detained, to create their apocalyptic imagery. An imaginary that has pushed the Democrats towards more restrictive positions.
Eagle Pass is also the playing field of the battle between the Federal Administration and the Government of Texas, of Republican Greg Abbott. Disregarding the Constitution, which gives border powers to the federal government, Abbott hamstrung the Border Patrol, deployed thousands of state National Guard troops, built miles of concertinas along the border and placed giant buoys along the river bravo The Biden Administration sued these actions in the Supreme Court, which in January ruled in its favor and allowed it to remove the concertinas that interfered with the actions of the Border Patrol.
For his part, Biden went to Brownsville, which was the corridor most used to cross illegally for nine years, but where such cases have decreased dramatically in recent months. In January, there were 50.8% fewer border apprehensions than in the same month in 2023.
However, the national figures show a very different reality: the number of “border encounters” has set records during the three years of Biden’s mandate. Specifically, 1.73 million in 2021, 2.37 million in 2022 and 2.47 million in 2023, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The data, which is well above the peak of one million during Trump’s tenure, is, along with his old age and his lapses, the major obstacle to his path to re-election in November.