U.S. Immigration Policy Is Lurching Right

If elected president, Harris will join a long line of Democrats all too willing to irreparably harm immigrant communities for political gain.

By Tina Vásquez, Prism

As we approach the presidential election, there has been a flurry of headlines feigning objectivity through euphemistic niceties. Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris “talks tough on border.” Harris and Democrats “walk a delicate—and harder—line” on immigration, which, if you didn’t know, is the party’s “biggest weakness” that they are trying to “turn the tables on.”

What do these headlines really convey? The easy answer is Democrats’ “hard-right turn” on immigration. But as a longtime immigration reporter, I know there’s also a more difficult answer: a mainstream media ecosystem that has never had the range, the nuance, or the know-how to report on immigration accurately.

The deeply partisan divide on immigration—one that frames Democrats as the party of open borders and Republicans as the nation’s hard line of defense against the invasion, swarm, influx, [insert your preferred racist language here] of migrants at the border—isn’t merely the creation of pundits and politicos. This rhetoric is also a media fabrication, solidified over decades of irresponsible coverage.

Much like borders everywhere, the cataclysmic conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border are man-made—and if Harris has her druthers, soon they may also be woman-made. If elected president, Harris will join a long line of Democrats all too willing to harm immigrant communities irreparably for political gain.

Because you see, it’s mostly a mythology that Democrats alone usher in more humane immigration policies. I came to more fully understand this when I first reported on immigration full time under President Barack Obama. I covered the administration’s full-fledged assault on Central American asylum-seekers in the form of fast-track mass deportations, the return—and expansion—of family detention, and enforcement operations targeting young people on their way to school. This was deeply unpopular work at the time, and readers often pushed back on the reporting. After all, how could a president who represented progress and adopted the English equivalent of “sí se puede”—a term “rooted in the struggle of working-class Latinos”—so seamlessly become the deporter-in-chief who brought back “baby jails”? To better understand Obama’s trajectory and the frightening machinery he wielded over immigrant communities, you have to revisit former President Bill Clinton’s 1996 laws.