I haven’t been closely looking into conservative claims of an ‘immigration crisis’ on the Mexican border. I know the situation is a mess, but after 20+ years of immigration panic, I have no confidence that they have any concerns that I would share, or that anything more than a band-aid solution is possible until the xenophobic wing of the GOP is removed from power. I wondered at my apathy, and hit on a couple of items that I want to write up here:
1. The current focus of immigration panic is the murder of Laken Riley, allegedly by an unpermitted immigrant. Of course, anyone paying attention knows that undocumented immigrants are less likely to be convicted of a crime than the general population. But leaving that aside, we can reject out of hand the proposal that a policy strongly affecting millions of people should be based on the crimes of one person. In fact, this assertion is just classic bigoted reasoning, and is grounds for immediately dismissing the opinion of whomever is making that argument*.
2. As I mentioned above, the xenophobes have been crying wolf about immigration forever, and they’ve been blocking any meaningful reform attempt for over 20 years by maneuvering to block bipartisan negotiations supported by the majority of Americans and Congress. The earliest one I remember is their defeat of the “comprehensive immigration reform bill”, supported by George W. Bush, which was negotiated from 2005-2007, but ultimately failed due to Republican opposition in the Senate (Note: Republicans controlled all three branches in 2005, Democrats gained control of the House in 2007). During the Obama administration, the xenophobes took out House Speaker Cantor in a primary election for the sin of simply discussing piecemeal immigration reform with Obama, even after Cantor had blocked the Senate’s “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013” , which had been championed by the bipartisan “Gang of Eight”. And this year, once again, they blocked a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate.
With all this history, it’s really hard to take anything seriously from this crowd. And that’s before even considering their easy acceptance of white supremacists, eugenicists, and religious bigots — and finally their support for the 2021 coup plot.
* A similar way to destroy one’s own credibility is to call unpermitted immigration an “invasion”; if a person doesn’t understand the difference between someone who wants to enslave them and someone who wants to work for them, I really can’t spare any more time for their opinions. Some other anti-immigrant arguments may reveal a more subtle error in thinking, but still depend on deep historical and political ignorance (if not being totally disingenuous). These include the Republican supporters who assert that they only oppose ‘illegal’ immigration, yet they invariably ally with the xenophobes who have blocked any efforts to modernize immigration law. A newer fallacy I’ve encountered is that “a nation without a border is not a nation”, by which they mean that national authorities must exert firm control over cross-border movement, not just administer laws within a territory — but of course, most historical nation-states did not have the means to prevent movement across their borders. (I guess Trump popularized this in 2016)