US Elections: The road to the White House begins at the border | USA Elections

Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, went running on Thursday, February 22, at the University of Georgia in Athens. She never returned to her room. She was found dead that same day in a wooded area of ​​campus. The next day, José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan who crossed the border illegally in September 2022, was arrested and charged with the murder. At that time, the tragic event became a political weapon. “Corrupt Joe Biden’s border INVASION is destroying our country and killing our citizens!” Former President Donald Trump wrote on his social network, calling Ibarra a “monster.” Although studies deny the correlation between immigration and crime, Trump has recovered the xenophobic script that paved the way for him to the White House in 2016. The border has become a battlefield for the November presidential elections. The simultaneous visit of Biden and Trump to the banks of the Rio Grande on Thursday has certified this.

The agenda for the November 5 elections is loaded. The economy, abortion, insecurity, the age of President Biden, 81 years old (and to a lesser extent that of Trump, 77), the risks to democracy, the criminal accusations of the former president and even foreign policy, which few sometimes moves the electorate, they will influence the result. Americans, however, see immigration as the country’s main problem, according to a Gallup poll published this week. 28% of citizens (including 57% of Republicans), more than ever, cite it as the first problem after the avalanche of illegal arrivals during the Biden presidency, which set a record of 250,000 entries in December.

The labor market has absorbed (and needs) labor from abroad. Immigration partly explains the strength of the US economy and its unexpected resistance to rising interest rates. However, the massive arrival of immigrants has also caused the collapse of social services in many cities. Even Democratic mayors of cities like New York, Chicago and Denver have sounded the alarm.

The president of the United States, Joe Biden, during the visit to the border with Mexico, in Brownsville (Texas), on Thursday Kevin Lamarque (REUTERS)

Democrats are aware that immigration is a liability to Biden’s re-election. For this reason, the president has decided to go on the offensive, as shown by his visit to Brownsville (Texas) on Thursday. Wearing a black cap and no tie, he approached with border patrol agents to the shore of the Rio Grande, which serves as the natural border with Mexico. He also met with customs personnel, members of the asylum and reception services and immigration judges.

About 500 kilometers away, Trump peeked out from behind the wire fences on the bank of the same river in Eagle Pass, which has become ground zero in the political battle for immigration control between the federal Administration and the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. who accompanied the former president on his visit.

The two agreed on the diagnosis. The immigration system is broken and the situation is unsustainable: “It’s very simple. It is time to act. It is long past time to act,” said Biden, who briefly explained the core of the problem. Immigrants who cross illegally claim asylum when they are detained. “The process to reach a decision on an asylum application takes between five and seven years. You all know it here, but people in the rest of the country don’t understand it. “It’s too long,” Biden said. “That encourages more people to come to the country,” she added.

Democrats and Republicans agreed on a bill that provides more resources to immigration services and that, according to Biden, would allow cases to be processed in six months. Immigrants are willing to pay thousands of dollars to the mafias to cross north because they know that arriving guarantees them a long stay. If the cases speed up, “that would have a serious deterrent effect on those who come,” he said at the Brownsville Border Patrol command center before dozens of agents. “Six months, seven years… two different things,” he highlighted. “They are not going to pay the cartels thousands of dollars to make that trip knowing that they will be paid back quickly.”

The rule would also give the president emergency authority to temporarily close the border when the number of crossings exceeds certain thresholds and overwhelms the capacity of immigration services. However, when that law was on its way to being approved, Republicans backed down due to pressure from Trump. That allows Democrats to argue that their rivals do not want a solution, but rather a problem that benefits them electorally. “It was about to be approved. “Then, it was derailed by partisan politics,” Biden lamented in Brownsville before appealing directly to Trump.

“I understand that my predecessor is in Eagle Pass today. This is what I would say to Mr. Trump: Instead of playing politics with this issue, instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me, or I will join you, in telling Congress to approve this bipartisan border security bill,” he told him, appealing for a compromise and agreed solution.

Political commitment and respect for the law is not Trump’s idea. When the former president said a few months ago that, if re-elected, he would be dictator for a day, immigration was one of the objectives: “We are going to close the border and we are going to drill, drill and drill. After that, I am not a dictator.” And just as in the 2016 campaign he accused Mexico of sending “rapists” and “criminals,” this time, Trump, son, grandson and husband of immigrants, uses xenophobic rhetoric with echoes of Nazism in which he says that immigrants They are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

Former President Donald Trump, at the border with Mexico in Eagle Pass, on Thursday. Go Nakamura (REUTERS)

In Eagle Pass on Thursday, the former president used the murder of Laken Riley to say that Biden “has [en sus manos] the blood of countless innocent victims.” “The monster accused of death is an illegal alien immigrant let into our country and released into our communities by corrupt Joe Biden,” he said.

Condemning the murder as a heinous crime, Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an organization that supports immigrants, notes by email that “the way Trump is using this tragic event for political gain is disgusting.” “It is strategic racism; a hackneyed tactic from a well-known playbook with the sole purpose of turning this tragedy into fodder for a political objective and the narrative that migrants and asylum seekers are dangerous threats when the facts prove otherwise. “In study after study, the facts are clear: immigrants have lower crime rates than the rest of the population,” she adds.

The former president, however, is willing to take that strategy to the limit for his electoral benefit: “They come from jails and they come from prisons and they come from mental institutions and they come from asylums and they are terrorists,” he said in Eagle Pass. “The United States is being invaded by Biden’s migrant crime. It is a new form of vicious violation of our country,” he continued. Those carrying out the “invasion,” he said, are “men of fighting age” who look like “warriors.” “This is like a war,” he said. It is, of course, a political war.

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