Combating the Nativist Narrative
Week of November 6, 2023
Republicans look to extract permanent anti-immigrant changes in short-term funding bills and some Democrats are considering paying the ransom with our asylum system:
The details of a deal and a path forward are still unclear but reportedly, a bipartisan group of Senators are looking to hash out their deal over the weekend that could reward hard-right governing by ransom. The deal Republicans are offering is a false choice and the proposals on offer would not alleviate pressures at the border in the immediate or the long term. Instead, the Republican proposal would greatly expand chaos and cruelty towards migrants in a way that would come at the direct expense of the American people. The deterrence-only approach on offer from Republicans hasn’t worked, and real solutions to address the challenges of migration would be to fix the broken system. We know how this slapdash nativist policy-making will likely only end in a bad and permanent policy. As Rafael Barnal at The Hill explains, “There are tangible political parallels between 1996, when then-President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) as part of a last-minute budget deal with Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to avoid a government shutdown. That deal, cut between a moderate Democratic president and a populist Republican speaker, fundamentally changed the way immigration law is enforced in the country, aggressively raising the ante on undocumented immigrants. Advocates say IIRIRA is proof that tough deterrent measures don’t work: The undocumented population of the United States ballooned following its implementation.” But this is exactly the trap hard-right Republicans are hoping Democrats walk right into as a Breitbart headline captures “Republican Speaker Mike Johnson on Migration: ‘We’re Going to Force the Issue’”. Congress should and could advance bipartisan solutions to provide smart resources at the border that make the existing process work better while keeping communities safe, including: asylum processing, reducing backlogs and work permit waiting times, resourcing states, localities, and community shelter and support services, and bolstering access to legal counsel. Passing the short-term funding is important but Republicans won’t be satisfied no matter how much Democrats give away here, and they should do better than to fight on terrain not of their own choosing.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: As Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, succinctly put it: “Democrats should stand strong and not reward Republicans’ extremism, brinkmanship and attempt to make permanent policy changes via a short-term funding vehicle. We need to modernize our entire immigration system to deliver solutions for 21st-century migration. Yet that process and the policy particulars cannot be defined and determined by a Republican Party that is trying to shoehorn cruel, chaotic, and sweeping deterrence measures into the supplemental while blocking the larger reforms we need.”
The right continues its escalating equation of migrants as a terror threat:
As we have noted here for the past several weeks, the nativist narrative machine has been using the Israel-Hamas war as the prism to sharpen their demagoguing about migrants and the border as an imminent terrorism threat. While there are concerns about the threat of foreign-inspired terrorism, there is absolutely no evidence of a plot at the southern border connected to Israel-Hamas as the conspiratorial rhetoric from the right suggests. Instead, the terrorism fearmongering is about advancing a nativist political and policy agenda graphed with thinly veiled racist undertones. Take the GOP presidential debate where Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott all made the false equation of migrants at the southern border as a terrorism threat. Scott claimed, “I believe there are thousands and thousands of ‘sleepers cells’” already in the US, operating not on evidence but just belief. DeSantis simply asserted, “terrorists have come through the southern border” without any qualifiers. DeSantis was making the same misleading leap as his fellow Republicans, equating those flagged and apprehended on the terrorist watch list as an active terror threat. Sen. Ted Cruz gave an illustrative example of this week, claiming: “With the radical Islamic terrorism sweeping the Middle East, border security is now more important than ever. Just last year, 736 people on the terrorist watch list tried to get into our country — and those are just the ones we know about.” First and foremost, the numbers Sen. Cruz and others point to are those who have been intercepted by CBP, a fact that is indicative of the department doing its job. They also represent an extremely small fraction of the number of border apprehensions, .008%. Most of those numbers are flagged in an overly broad system riddled with errors and not indicative of individuals plotting terror attacks, with the vast majority of them flagged at ports of entry, not attempting an unauthorized entry. For those who have been apprehended in between ports of entry, almost all – well over 90% – are ex-FARC members from Colombia post-peace process. This does not mean these are not individuals of concern but they are clearly not the threat that Sen. Cruz and the nativist narrative machine are implying that it is. But the anti-Arab sentiment generated by the misleading information is building towards more radical calls from the presidential candidates as they promise ethnic immigration expulsions. DeSantis, Scott, and Donald Trump have all called for revoking the Visas of students who, in Trump’s characterization, have “joined in the pro-jihadist protests.” While there may be individual cases of concern, campaigning on characterizations of student Visa holders as pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism is an alarming political message. Pushing the boundaries of potentially deadly extremist rhetoric once again, DeSantis used the debate stage to call for ethnic deportations promising that he would “deport the people who have come from the Middle East, particularly under Biden.”
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: There are critical nuances in this narrative that we must extract. There is, of course, no nuance over sympathies with Hamas, nor with Islamophobia or antisemitism, but there can and must be a separation between those calling for the humanity of Palestinians and Hamas and between migrants seeking safety in the US and individuals who wish to carry out political violence. In this challenging moment, the right is, however, bringing all the nuance of an individual paint swatch. The right is exploiting the real fear, pain, and confusion of this moment to advance their extreme nativist agenda, increasingly with rhetoric trends toward extremely dangerous ethnic dehumanization. The nativist narrative that equates migrants as a terrorism threat is not likely to dissipate in the near future, so we must be clear-eyed about the real threats that exist and not fall for the politics of fear and division the right is eager to trap us in.
No, the problem isn’t that we are too soft on migrants:
Listen solely to the right and you could easily be convinced that migrating to the US is akin to winning an all-expenses paid vacation that President Biden and DHS Secretary Mayorkas are personally handing out south of the border. Escape the right-wing fever dream back to reality and find desperate families fleeing for their lives, risking a harrowing journey north in the hopes of navigating a years-long complex vetting and legal system and facing nearly impossible other paths to legal immigration. Nor, despite the right’s endless shouting, is the border open. Moreover, the Biden administration hasn’t rolled out the welcome mat as Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) recently falsely asserted. The Cato Institute published a new report last week that found that under Biden, DHS is “removing 3.5 times as many people per month” than under Trump. The report also notes that “migrants were more likely to be released after a border arrest under President Trump than under President Biden.” While the Biden administration has granted TPS for some countries and made changes to the parole program to alleviate pressures along the southern border and preclude would-be migrants from making a deadly journey north, the administration has continued deportations to countries that DHS has also deemed unsafe to return people too. The notion that the US is “soft on migrants” simply isn’t true, nor has its prescriptive solution, harsh immigration crackdowns, been shown to work. It is abundantly clear to anyone with an honest assessment of the policy that a deterrence-only approach is ineffective. We cannot cruelty our way out of the challenge of forced global migration. Even the horrific Trump administration family separation policy, which was argued as amounting to “torture” failed in that regard. The lie coming from Republicans that the problems we face stem from a “soft on migrants” approach is just that, a lie. While those who work on the issue and, most assuredly, those who have gone through the process know can see the lie for what it is, but for most Americans who are unfamiliar, the lie can be a convincing and pervasive one.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Like the “soft on crime” political attack that has been deployed for decades, the “soft on migrants” attack isn’t about factual reality. Instead, it is a strategic racist maneuver that uses a coded racist appeal to activate voters’ legitimate concerns for personal and public safety. They are going to keep saying it, but that doesn’t mean anyone is required to believe it. This lie is used to justify harsher and more draconian immigration crackdowns that will not address the challenges of migration but send desperate people in more dangerous irregular migration routes that they say will only be fixed through a “tough on migrants” position. As an insightful piece translated into English from Maribel Hastings and David Torres of America’s Voice En Español notes about this vicious circle: “The reality is that Republicans do not want to solve the problem because doing so would erase their favorite political and electoral weapon: saying that the border is out of control and that migrants, including people seeking asylum, are ‘criminals,’ ‘terrorists,’ and responsible for the fentanyl crisis in the United States. It's been that way forever. But with the arrival of perhaps the most anti-immigrant Republican president in recent history, Trump, the lies, tricks, and disinformation intensified—along with the barriers to migration statuses and asylum.”
POLITICS UPDATES
Election Reaction: Election night 2023 was a very good night for Democrats across the country, again exceeding expectations as voters across the country turned out in an election that was a resounding rebuke of the extreme anti-choice politics of Republicans. Despite national Republicans' obsession with anti-immigrant attacks, they mostly didn’t focus on the issue in competitive 2023 races. If Republican candidates, particularly in red states, believed the Stephen Miller strategy of hyper-aggressive nativist attacks was a silver bullet, they would have used it. They didn’t. But pundits, pollsters, and political observers are all sending the message that Democrats should be terrified of the immigration issue and that supporting anything short of a Republican or Republican-lite position is a huge electoral liability. But this conventional wisdom doesn’t, however, align with the electoral evidence. Anti-immigrant messages and opposition to immigration may well deliver for Republicans in a general election in 2024, we can’t predict the future, but all of the evidence from this year and the past years since 2016 (eg: 2018, 2020, and 2022) indicate that immigration works mainly to motivate the MAGA-fied Republican base in primaries and has more often than not, failed to deliver for Republicans in a general election. Read a full analysis HERE.
NY and NJ: The evidence continues to mount that the nativist attacks are not as potent as the right believes them to be. Last week, the New York Times featured two New York county commissioner races that they predicted would turn on immigration issues to the detriment of the Democratic candidates. In particular, the Times story focused on the Erie County executive race where “this fall in attack ads blanketing the airwaves in Erie County as Republicans try to turn the migrant crisis gripping the state into a political cudgel to flip perhaps the most important elected office in western New York.” The incumbent Democrat, Mark Poloncarz, “called those who refused to help ‘morally repugnant,’” and forcefully accused Republicans of “race-baiting” on the issue, The New York Times reported. Poloncarz won an “unprecedented” fourth term and secured it with a 20 points advantage. Read more from Gabe Ortíz HERE.
Trump and the also-ran GOP Presidential Candidates: This week, Donald Trump conducted a rare interview that wasn’t a right-wing media outlet when he was questioned on Univision. He doubled down on his cruel child separation policy while promising more travel bans. Trump has been doubling down on his extremism and pledging to go even further in a Trump second term. Plans to implement his authoritarian agenda, including immigration policy, have already been laid out in “Project 2025.” Meanwhile, the other candidates, not named Donald Trump, held their third debate on Wednesday night, largely repeating the same radical nativist positions as before in a slightly less chaotic scrabble. Beyond the misleading fearmongering about terrorists and DeSantis's call for ethnic-based deportations, DeSantis and Haley employed the “open borders” disinformation in their answers to the first question of the night. Vivek Ramaswamy and DeSantis both again called for summary executions along the border, with DeSantis working in his “stone cold dead” line into the debate. Haley called for invading Mexico to address the fentanyl crisis, an idea that would likely only exacerbate the problem as well as attacked TPS for Venezuelans. Ramaswamy made, at best, a childishly naïve promise to “seal the border” to address the fentanyl crisis, while Chris Christie promised to send the National Guard in between ports of entry despite recent reporting that such activity produced zero results for a colossal waste of money. DeSantis also made sure to get in the deadly white nationalist “invasion” conspiracy in there as well to round out the event to what can charitably be called a complete waste of time but, more accurately, described as a platform for disinformation and extremism and a threat to public safety.
WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE
Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent:
409 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”
68 original tweets about “open borders,” with Greg Abbott tweet having the most reach with 169.4K Views, 2.5K Retweets, and 8.9K Likes.
32 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Sen. Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 143.5K Views, 1.1K Retweets, and 3.1K Likes.
25 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Sen. Josh Hawley tweet having the most reach with 171.7K views, 3.8K Retweets and 9.4K Likes.