Border Hysteria Is a Bipartisan Delusion

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

49% : The prospect of such an order also follows the same expansion of executive authority that Trump used during his presidency to institute a host of similarly draconian -- and similarly ineffectual -- border security measures.
34% : "Trump was, well, Trump -- cueing up one unhinged, hate-filled talking point after another.
34% : "Our mainstream political press doesn't consider it sporting to disrupt such heavy-breathing campaign theatrics with dry recitations of fact, but nevertheless, here goes: There is no immigrant crime wave -- let alone a hostile armed "invasion," as racist thugs such as Abbott and Trump routinely proclaim -- for the simple reason that immigrants commit crimes, and violent crimes in particular, at far lower rates than the native-born US population.
32% : President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump each spent Thursday staging demagogic photo ops on Texas's southern US border.
32% : In reality, as Jason Houser, a former Biden official with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, recently explained, asylum crackdowns do precisely nothing to diminish the volume of immigrants crossing the border, and indeed will serve only to further increase it.
30% : (Stalwart students of Trumpian scaremongering on the issue might recall the fatal shooting of Kate Steinle from the blood-and-soil rhetoric of campaign 2016; after Trump had seized on that case as an exemplar of a mayhem-enabling immigration system, the actual investigation found that Steinle was shot inadvertently while the undocumented defendant was foolishly playing with a loaded gun he found.)
28% : That was the guiding logic of the disastrous 1994 crime bill Biden co-sponsored in the Senate, and has produced similar gruesome liberal capitulations on a host of other policy fronts, from income support for the poor to the privatization of public schools to the deregulation of the financial sector.
25% : Biden was in Brownsville, and Trump was in Eagle Pass -- the site of a hard right nativist convoy mustered earlier this month in support of Gov. James Abbott's barbed-wire insurrection -- but both candidates were occupying the same symbolic authoritarian ground.
16% : Should Biden lose in November, Trump would thus have a Biden-sanctioned precedent close to hand as he sets about creating the nativist police state, replete with detention camps and rolling deportation squads, that he's already plotting out for his second term.

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