Harris and Trump Have Similar Immigration Strategies
Harris and Trump Have Similar Immigration Strategies
An Analysis of the Continuity Between Trump and Biden’s Immigration Policy
Yesterday, Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris delivered a “closing argument” for her campaign for the presidency. “Politicians have got to stop treating immigration as an issue to scare up votes for an election,” she said, referencing Trump’s plan to deport between 15 to 20 million people. But her “solution” to mass migration does little to change the current realities of US immigration policies, which many have criticized as inhumane. “I will work with Democrats and Republicans to sign into law the border security bill that Donald Trump killed,” she said, positing herself as even harsher on immigration than Trump.
With less than a week until US presidential elections, immigration remains a top issue for US voters, especially among those who support former President Donald Trump as their candidate. According to the Pew Research Center, 82% of Trump supporters list immigration as a very important issue (this trails the economy, the top issue for both Trump and Harris supporters, with 93% of Trump supporters listing this as a very important issue).
According to YouGov, there is a significant gap between Trump and Harris supporters in terms of how much of a priority immigration is. 77% of Trump supporters rate immigration as a top three issue, while only 14% of Harris supporters consider it among their three most important issues in this year’s election—the largest gap between any of the issues YouGov polled, which includes the economy, health care, crime, and social issues.
In responding to conservative attacks that claim that the current Democratic administration is “soft” on the border, Harris has also attempted to outcompete Trump for who is toughest on migrants. Harris has bragged that a so-called “border security” bill pushed by the Biden administration was endorsed by the US border patrol. Harris has also pledged to continue funding the border wall by hundreds of millions of dollars.
“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,” she continued. “And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States,” she asserted during the last presidential debate.
However, this does not change the reality that Trump’s promise to conduct mass deportations of 15 to 20 million people is a major threat. This plan could lead to widespread family separations that could have ripple effects through the entire Latino community in the US, potentially impacting one in three Latinos in the country. Trump’s campaign has defied expectations in his borderline fascistic rhetoric this election cycle, hurling debunked allegations that Haitian migrants are eating other peoples’ pets in Ohio and that Venezuelan migrants are terrorizing tenants in Colorado.
In fact, Trump dubbed his mass deportation plan “Operation Aurora” after the controversy over a building in Aurora, Colorado that was claimed to be taken over by a Venezuelan gang—which turned out to be a falsehood spread by the building’s landlord who had neglected the property for years.
“The border will be sealed. The invasion will be stopped. The migrant flights will end and Kamala’s app for illegals will be shut down immediately, within 24 hours,” Trump has said of his first day in office.
In a video published by Radio Jornalera, Julieta, a Mexican immigrant and part of the Day Laborer Network (NDLON), debunks racist myths spread by both Trump and his vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance. “Migrants come to find security and a job,” Julieta articulated. “You say that immigrants are bad for the country, but you know who is bad? The liars and the racists.”
But would a Harris administration look significantly different than a second Trump administration? Both Biden and Harris have come under fire by the left for perpetuating not only Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, but many of his same policies.
Biden perpetuated Trump’s immigration policies
While Harris has made attempts to differentiate and distance herself from Biden as a candidate, nothing changes the fact that she serves as the Vice President of the current administration. This is the same administration that has continued to expand the US-Mexico border wall, even waiving federal laws in order to do so.
Earlier in October, the Biden administration announced that it will not renew a program that allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua to stay legally live and work in the US.
Biden’s administration has expelled five times as many migrants as Trump, although a key factor is that far more migrants have crossed the border during Biden’s presidency than during Trump’s, with 2.2 million unauthorized border crossings in 2022, compared to just over 300,000 in 2017. Notably, under the Biden administration, naturalization of immigrants applying for citizenship increased, as well as total refugees admitted, and the number of immigrants permitted to enter the US through immigration parole.
Yet, Biden has also made it more difficult for asylum seekers to find safety in the US. “Seeking asylum is legal and a human right, long recognized in both US and international law,” writes the International Rescue Committee. “The current administration’s June 2024 executive order and ‘Asylum Ban’ rule run contrary to this.” In June, Biden issued an executive order shutting down the US-Mexico border, which temporarily suspends the processing of most asylum claims at the southern border when the seven-day average of crossings exceeds 2,500. Biden extended this asylum ban in September. In response, Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, stated that “This rule is illegal, as we have explained in our pending lawsuit. Today’s announcements do nothing to address the ongoing violations of law.”
These latest asylum restrictions are only one of several that Biden has enacted throughout his administration. On May 11 of 2023, Trump’s Title 42 expired, which had used the COVID-19 emergency as an excuse to swiftly expel migrants at the southern border. Biden moved swiftly to replace Title 42 with a “transit ban” that placed impossible demands on migrants seeking a better life in the United States. Migrants would have to apply for asylum in each country they pass through before reaching the United States, and be rejected, before they can be eligible in the US.
The Biden administration’s crackdown on Haitian immigrants has also been shocking to many, especially following the images circulated of border patrol officers chasing Haitian migrants on horseback with whips.
The Democratic Party administration has also received backlash for its approach to detaining child migrants, a practice which had sparked controversy during both Trump and Barack Obama’s administrations. “No kids in cages” became a straightforward demand of the immigrant rights movement. However, Biden has not ended the practice, and instead reopened two detention facilities for undocumented immigrant minors in 2021, which had been shut down by Trump’s administration following protests and interventions by Democratic Party lawmakers.
US policies cause mass migration
No major establishment candidate has denounced what many refer to as the true causes of mass migration via the US-Mexico border: economic and political destabilization of countries in the Global South, caused by the United States itself.
The US’s undermining of the economic and political sovereignty of other countries has historically been a chief cause of mass migration. One such example are the 2017-2018 migrant caravans originating from Central American countries such as Honduras, where socioeconomic conditions had deteriorated following a US-backed military coup in 2009. This is especially true for Trump’s newest scapegoat, Haitian migrants, who have endured decades of US-backed coups, invasions, and neoliberal labor exploitation. The US has devastated Haitian local agriculture in favor of creating an economy of imports that benefits US industry, while blocking Venezuela from supplying Haiti with much-needed fuel.
In recent years, the strict unilateral coercive measures imposed by the US on countries that defy US interests, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and over 30 others, have inflicted serious devastation onto targeted countries. This economic devastation in turn has fueled record levels of immigration out of these countries.
The Venezuelan migration that Trump so frequently references, is one such case. Venezuela has been facing US sanctions since 2014, but these measures intensified under the Trump administration in 2017 and were followed by a sharp increase in Venezuelan migration (not only to the US). “We began to experience the phenomenon of migration after the implementation of sanctions against Venezuela,” said Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil Pinto, “Then we saw a process begin of people leaving, trying to find a better economic income, because, of course, the sanctions have had an enormous economic impact on the country.” This view is not only shared by Venezuelan officials, but also by US lawmakers.
“Experts widely agree that broad-based US sanctions—expanded to an unprecedented level by your predecessor—are a leading contributing factor in the current surge in migration,” reads a letter penned last year by Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by Representative Veronica Escobar and including Nanette Barragán of California, Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona, Greg Casar of Texas, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
According to the US Office of Homeland Security, Venezuelan and Cuban asylum seekers make up the highest proportion of applications for asylum in the United States—two countries targeted heavily by US sanctions.
The Biden administration has refused to lift these measures and ease the economic burden on these two countries and given Trump’s track record of intensifying the sanctions regime on both Venezuela and Cuba, with 243 additional sanctions and the inclusion of Cuba to the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, neither candidate seems to be genuinely invested in addressing the root causes of why people risk everything to come to the United States.