Vice President Kamala Harris went to the U.S.-Mexico border soon after she and President Biden took office, even though she had characterized such visits as empty politics. President Obama also toured the border, though he came to see the trips as little more than photo ops. Donald Trump used the border when he was president to galvanize support for his anti-immigration policies, signing his name on his “big, beautiful wall” with a Sharpie pen. As the immigration debate grows polarized, a trip along the 2,000-mile frontier has become compulsory political theater for leaders who want to show they care about immigration. The imagery — the wall, Border Patrol officers, crowded detention facilities — serves as a potent backdrop for drawing attention to the crisis or for attacking political opponents. On Thursday, both of those factors will be at play when President Biden and Trump both make trips to the border, reports the New York Times.
Trump will travel to Eagle Pass, Tex., where he will speak about crimes by migrants and blame Biden for surging crossings. Biden, 300 miles away in Brownsville, plans to speak with border agents and call out House Republicans who took their cue from Trump and thwarted a bipartisan border bill that would have cracked down on unlawful migration. “It ’s a relatively new phenomenon, where you go and make a big deal of the border at the border,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian. “As long as this remains an issue, we’re going to have presidents who either go to make a political point or if they don’t go, are pressured to do so.” Immigration has become one of Biden’s biggest political liabilities as millions of migrants overwhelm the underfunded and underresourced system, something Republicans like Trump are keen to highlight. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday found that Americans are most likely to name immigration as the most important U.S. problem.
Komentar