Razor Wire on the Rio Grande - Pt. 2
Recent developments have placed the issue of immigration toward the center of American politics.
[Note: This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. Read Part 1 here.]
In recent years, many conservatives and Republican politicians have started using the word “invasion” when referring to the migrant crisis along the US-Mexico border. Typically, that word is used in the context of war, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the US invasion of Iraq, but no one seems to be seriously arguing that the US has been invaded in that sense. Instead, the claim appears to be more about some sort of cultural invasion, as if someone is deliberately sending massive amounts of immigrants into the US in order to fundamentally alter the country.
This belief is not entirely baseless. Not so long ago, the idea that more immigration into the US would bolster the Democratic Party’s voter base, and therefore Democrats should support lax immigration laws, was openly talked about by political strategists. Recently, however, this has become impermissible to say, as those who do point out this historical fact tend to get conflated with those who espouse the belief that US citizens are being “invaded” or “replaced” by immigrants, and often get smeared as racists or white supremacists.
To be clear, there are certainly many people who promote some form of this replacement theory from a place of xenophobia or even outright racism — and it has helped to inspire some people to act violently — but that doesn’t necessarily mean, or even imply, that every person who’s in favor of tighter border restrictions is a violent racist with no other reasoning for their views besides bigotry or hatred.
While I don’t think it’s fair to describe someone who uses the word “invasion” in reference to the border crisis as inherently racist or xenophobic, I do think it comes off as a bit hyperbolic. As I said before, for most people that word likely invokes thoughts of war, and because of that I’m willing to bet it often gets used intentionally, particularly by Republican politicians, as a means of fearmongering to drum up support for said politicians and their preferred policies.
However, regardless of what one chooses to call it, there is a crisis currently taking place along our southern border, and recent developments have placed this issue toward the center of American politics.
Texas Takes a Stand
One Republican politician who has often referred to the migrant crisis as an “invasion” is Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, and he has also kept the spirit of many of former-President Donald Trump’s immigration policies alive by enacting similar policies of his own.
In March of 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a border security initiative ran by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department. Under the initiative, thousands of Texas National Guard troops were deployed to the Texas-Mexico border and were authorized to make arrests for immigration-related crimes (which, regardless of how one feels about the initiative, is arguably a much better use for a state’s National Guard than sending them overseas to fight in unconstitutional wars).
As was discussed in the first part of this series, Abbott’s efforts to combat illegal immigration have also involved shipping migrants from shelters along the southern border farther into the country, primarily to Democrat-controlled areas such as Washington DC, New York City, and Chicago.
Last summer, the government of Texas began placing large buoys in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas, as a sort of floating barrier in an attempt to deter migrants from illegally crossing the river. Another tool Texas has been using while trying to secure the border is razor wire, which has been used in concert with the floating barrier.
Abbott has used emergency or disaster declarations in order to implement many of the steps his administration has taken. This has fueled critics of Abbott, many of whom have questioned if he truly has the authority to enforce such policies. While other states such as Arizona and Florida have taken similar actions on immigration, it’s Texas that has really been leading the charge when it comes to challenging the Biden administration’s border policies.
The divide between Texas and the federal government widened greatly in January when the Texas National Guard seized control of a roughly 2.5-mile area in Eagle Pass, Texas, which has been a popular crossing point for migrants trying to enter the country. The Biden administration responded by requesting the Supreme Court to intervene.
The situation escalated even more after it was reported that three migrants, a woman and two children, drowned as they were attempting to cross the Rio Grande shortly after Texas took control of Shelby Park.
On January 22, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the federal government was allowed to cut down the razor wire that had been preventing Border Patrol from accessing the area. As the Associated Press (AP) put it, the ruling “is a victory for the Biden administration while the lawsuit over the wire continues.” Notably, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, voted in favor of the Biden administration; a decision which, as independent journalist Glenn Greenwald recently explained on his show System Update, was likely based on Supreme Court precedents that have granted the federal government control over immigration policy.
In response to the Supreme Court’s order, Governor Abbott released a statement in which he claims that President Biden has “refused to enforce” current immigration laws “and has even violated them.”
Later on in the statement he says that the framers of the US Constitution “foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border.” He then cites Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution “which promises that the federal government ‘shall protect each [State] against invasion’” and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, “which acknowledges ‘the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.’”
Abbott’s statement — which ends with him saying that he had “already declared an invasion…to invoke Texas’ constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” and that “That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary” — led to claims that he was “defying” the Supreme Court. This is an inaccurate framing of the situation, however, as the Supreme Court only ruled that the federal government is allowed to cut down the razor wire Texas installs, it doesn’t specifically order Texas to stop putting more razor wire up.
This caused the situation to become more or less a stalemate. Texas is technically allowed to continue putting up razor wire, but the federal government can just continue to cut it down. The dramatic framing that Texas is “defying” the Supreme Court has helped fuel speculation that this could all eventually lead to a much more serious confrontation between Texas and the federal government.
Rumors of Civil War
Almost immediately following Abbott’s response to the Supreme Court, 25 Republican governors, including Governor Spencer Cox of my home-state of Utah, signed a joint statement backing Texas’ attempts at securing the border and echoing much of what was said in Abbott’s statement.
Not long after that, 26 Republican Attorney’s General and the Arizona State Legislature signed onto a letter addressed to President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in which they demand that the Biden administration “enforce the law and protect the border.” The letter ends by bluntly telling Biden and Mayorkas: “If you cannot bring yourselves to enforce the law, get out of the way so Texas can.”
In February, Republicans in the US House of Representatives impeached Mayorkas, “casting a historic vote that marks the first time a Cabinet secretary has been impeached in nearly 150 years,” according to CBS News.
The article goes on:
Under two articles of impeachment accusing Mayorkas of "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law" and a "breach of public trust," House Republicans took the rare step toward removing Mayorkas from office…The vote came a week after an initial attempt failed.
…
It's highly unlikely that Mayorkas would be removed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, where a two-thirds majority would be required for conviction. Senators of both parties have criticized the House for holding an impeachment vote in the first place, knowing it will fail in the upper chamber.
This conflict between Texas and the federal government, and it’s spillover into other states and then into Congress, has led to speculation that the US is on the verge of a second civil war.
With how polarized our country has been in recent years, this is something people have been speculating on for some time now — long before this recent stand-off between Texas and the federal government. Personally, I don’t think it’s such a far-fetched idea. For example, if the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 was actually the “insurrection” that our political and media establishments claim it was, I think it’s very possible that a civil war could have potentially started then.
Violence tends to spread, and if a violent altercation between Texas and the federal government over this issue were to occur, it could cause the situation to escalate, and then continue to escalate until it eventually leads to all-out war.
However, even though it’s not outside the realm of possibility, the idea that this spat between Texas and the federal government will result in armed conflict is a sensationalist one.
I think a major driver of the division we have in this country is the tendency of all sides of any given topic to respond to every issue in the most dramatic way possible. Could the current situation escalate to the point of violence? Yes, it’s possible, but it could also lose prevalence in the news cycle, and in the minds of average Americans, while it quietly gets resolved through the legal system. I would even argue that the latter scenario is probably far more likely to be what ends up happening.
Sensationalizing this situation does nothing to address the route causes of the problem, and it only further stokes the political tension that exists within this country. Calls from Texas Democrats for Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard aside, this situation was probably never going to result in armed conflict, and it will likely come to some sort of peaceful resolution long after everyone has stopped talking about it.
None of that is to say that this conflict between Texas and the Biden administration isn’t significant — it certainly is, and it could be years before the ramifications are fully understood. All of this is also taking place during a presidential election, and because of that we’re already seeing some of the effects this situation is having on US politics.
Biden’s Change in Tone
As I highlighted in the first part of this series, Biden spent his 2020 presidential campaign railing against many of Trump’s immigration policies. At the time, criticizing Trump’s stance on immigration was a useful talking point. It may have alienated the average Republican voter — who was never going to vote for Biden anyway — but it likely helped sway many Independents who viewed Trump’s policies and rhetoric on immigration as overly harsh.
This year, however, the opposite may be true. With the massive influx of immigrants the US has seen over Biden’s term in office, even some Democrats have started calling for tighter border restrictions, which has put Biden in a difficult position. This trend has been developing for some time, but the recent situation with Texas has only accelerated it.
In early February, “A bipartisan group of senators unveiled a long-awaited border security bill…that links a plethora of immigration-related provisions to funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan,” as Reason reported at the time. The bill was “the culmination of four months of negotiations.”
It was during those negotiations that President Biden’s rhetoric on immigration began to sound more like his predecessor’s. In a statement put out shortly before the bill was formally proposed in the Senate, Biden said that “What’s been negotiated would…be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country.” Biden then said that the legislation would give him “a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed,” which he would use “the day I sign the bill into law.”
“For everyone who is demanding tougher border control,” Biden said later on in his statement, “this is the way to do it.”
It didn’t take long for the $118 billion piece of legislation to die, however. Despite including some of the sort of immigration reforms Republicans have long called for, the majority of Senate Republicans voted against it. One reason for this might’ve been that the bill didn’t go far enough on immigration, but another reason could’ve been the massive amount of foreign aid that the bill contained.
As reported by the Washington Examiner:
The bill included more than $60 billion to Ukraine to fight off Russia’s invasion, $20 billion to address the border crisis, $14.1 billion in security assistance to Israel, $10 billion in humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine, $4.8 billion to help Taiwan and Indo-Pacific allies, and an additional $2.4 billion to support U.S. Central Command operations in the Red Sea, according to details from the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The bill’s failure has been blamed on Donald Trump — the claim being he leveraged his influence over Republican politicians in order to sink the legislation so that he can continue to campaign on the border crisis. Regardless of whether that’s true or not — and it very well could be — this has led to an interesting situation, where Trump and Republicans are being criticized for failing to restrict immigration by Democrats who now claim they want to resolve a crisis that they have long pretended didn’t exist.
Shortly after the border deal failed, the Senate went on to pass what was essentially the same bill, except with the border funding and immigration reform stripped out of it. It’s unclear whether the $95 billion foreign aid package will pass the House, but it’s passage in the Senate highlights what the majority of our elected officials’ priorities are. Funding foreign wars and lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex appears to be at the top of the list, whereas addressing domestic issues that directly affect their constituents appears to be toward the bottom (if that even makes the list at all).
Regardless of how one feels about the border crisis, it should arguably take precedence in US politics over conflicts taking place on the other side of the planet. While many — though certainly not all — Americans still support the US government providing aid to Israel and Ukraine, immigration is becoming a top concern for American voters as we head into the 2024 presidential election.
According to a recent Gallup poll, “Significantly more Americans name immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. (28%) than did a month ago (20%).”
“Currently, 57% of Republicans, up from 37% in January, say immigration is the top problem,” the poll showed. “Independents show a modest uptick, from 16% in January to 22% now, while there has been no meaningful change among Democrats (9% in January and 10% in February).”
Another recent poll conducted by Monmouth University “found that 53 percent of respondents support backing a border wall, which the polling center says is the first time a majority of respondents supported the proposal since it started asking the question in 2015,” as reported by The Hill. The poll also “found that more than 8 in 10 Americans see illegal immigration as a very serious or somewhat serious problem”.
This trend is likely behind Biden’s change in tone on this issue, but his current rhetoric, and his support for the Senate’s failed border deal, still stands in stark contrast from his rhetoric during the 2020 campaign and his initial actions on immigration. It has also recently been reported by Politico that “The Biden administration is considering a string of new executive actions and federal regulations in an effort to curb migration at the U.S. southern border”.
In a recent trip to Brownsville, Texas, along the US-Mexico border, President Joe Biden said that it is “long passed time to act” and once again called on Congress to pass the bipartisan border deal that died in the Senate. During Biden’s remarks, he also called on former-President Donald Trump, who took a trip to Eagle Pass, Texas, on the same day as Biden’s border visit, to try and urge Congress to pass border legislation.
“Here’s what I would say to Mr. Trump,” Biden said during his trip to the border. “Join me, or I’ll join you, in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill. We can do it together. You know and I know, it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country has ever seen.”
Biden’s increasing shift on the border crisis, and his calls for Trump to help him push Congress to pass immigration reform, shows how hollow his stance was on this issue back in 2020. It also highlights just how much of a political problem the border has become.
There are no easy solutions to this problem, and both Republicans and Democrats will have to be willing to compromise some of their positions on immigration if Congress is ever going to pass some sort of border deal. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with immigration in and of itself, the current situation seems to be untenable, and American voters are beginning to demand that something be done about it.
In response to the massive amount of immigration the US has seen in recent years, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott chose to implement the sort of measures he claims will help solve the problem, and in doing so he brought the debate over immigration back to the forefront of US politics. Biden seems all too willing to change the positions he so ardently claimed to hold in 2020, but it’s unclear if this apparent shift is too little, too late for a country that, for once, seems to mostly agree on something. Namely, that we must find some sort of solution to this ongoing crisis.
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