Kamala Harris Bolsters Right-Wing Immigration Narrative at Debate

On the presidential debate stage Tuesday, former President Donald Trump spewed reliably racist and lie-riddled diatribes about towns being taken over by “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, for her part, didn’t bother to counter the sentiment, the central ideological violence at the heart of Trump’s message. Harris, albeit in the predictably moderated tones of a Democratic border authoritarian, upheld the right-wing lie that immigration — the migration of poor people, that is — should be stopped.

Both candidates purported to offer diametrically opposed visions for the country’s future. When it came to immigration and the U.S. border, however, only one narrative was available throughout the night: Immigration is a social ill, if not a criminal endeavor, to be deterred as much as possible.

Harris upheld the right-wing lie that immigration — the migration of poor people, that is — should be stopped.

David Muir, the ABC news anchor and debate moderator, set the bleak, hyper-nationalist tone. He opened the discussion on immigration with a lengthy question posed to Harris.

“We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration,” he said, noting that, since President Joe Biden “imposed tough asylum restrictions” last June, the numbers are down.

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

This narrative of a “border crisis” was taken for granted from the jump — specifically, that it is a “crisis” for the U.S., not the desperate people who have fled their homes and must face brutal, unforgiving barriers to seek refuge here. Harris answered Muir accordingly, treating migration as a problem of criminality to be policed and fought.

“I’m the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings,” she said. “The United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported.” The bill, she noted, “would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border” and “allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl.”

The border bill in question was indeed one of the most draconian in recent memory. Harris’s only problem with the legislation, she said on Tuesday, was that Trump had allies in Congress kill it. Meanwhile, Biden’s executive order, cited approvingly by Muir, lowered crossing numbers because it effectively shuttered the southern border, even to asylum-seekers — an affront to international humanitarian law and, more to the point, an echo of Trump’s ban on asylum.

The only characters in current migration narratives mentioned by the cable news host and the Democratic nominee were gang members, traffickers, fentanyl pushers, and “illegal” border crossers. Obscured totally from view: the hundreds of thousands of people risking their lives to cross the border to find safety and better lives in the wealthiest nation on Earth — a nation that bears significant historic responsibility for much of the political turmoil that has driven millions of people to flee violence, repression, economic devastation, and climate catastrophe in Northern Triangle countries, Haiti, and elsewhere in the first place.

Even typical liberal shibboleths about our “nation of immigrants” were absent on Tuesday night. So, too, was any reckoning with the deadly consequences of hardened border policy. As many as 80,000 people have reportedly died trying to cross into the U.S. through the Southern border in the last decade.

The reality in which a Democratic candidate would advocate for opening borders is, of course, a distant cry from our current cruel and nationalist political quagmire. Harris, the centrist Democratic candidate, does not even mention the economic and social interests served by welcoming migrant workers into the U.S., as the existing population ages and the need for workers, particularly in the care sector, only grows.

From an electoral point of view, too, centrists bending rightward — appealing to white resentment — has in the last decade only served to strengthen far-right leaders and parties, from Italy to France to Germany.

Immigrants, of course, should be welcomed as a point of ethical and humanitarian necessity — of global justice — not only in service of the U.S. economy or electoral maneuvering. As Tuesday’s debate made clear, however, that when it comes to border politics, inhumanity is a point of bipartisan agreement.

Border Rule Race to the Bottom

This race to the bottom on “law and order” border rule is not new. As I have previously pointed out, the Biden–Harris administration is not merely adopting Republican rhetoric to attract disaffected conservatives. Stringent border policies have been a common practice of Democratic administrations for the past thirty years, dating back to Bill Clinton’s time in office.

Clinton’s immigration laws in 1996 significantly expanded the U.S.’s ability to detain and deport migrants with minor criminal convictions. President Barack Obama, like Harris now, used a racist and classist narrative of targeting only “criminal” migrants and deported around 3 million people, earning him the title of “deporter in chief.”

Following suit, Biden’s administration closed the border this year, implemented a policy in early 2023 to immediately remove asylum-seekers from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who cross the border without having previously applied for asylum in a third country, and oversaw the increased use of solitary confinement for thousands of detained migrants.

While Democrats participate in this prejudiced race, it is crucial to recognize that Republicans, particularly Trump and his allies, will always come out on top. Trump’s outrageous claims about immigrants from Haiti eating people’s pets play into a legacy of vile slander faced by Haitians in the West since their successful revolt against French colonialism.

Despite a few mild fact checks, neither Muir nor Harris, nor anyone involved in Tuesday’s performance or the entire election, stands against the dehumanization of immigrants. The rhetoric surrounding the “border crisis” suggests that the pressure of global migration is overwhelming the U.S., but in reality, the majority of displaced people are internally displaced or in refugee camps near their home countries.

While settling millions of newcomers into a country requires resources and effort, these are fundamentally questions of resource distribution priorities for a global superpower.

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