Building Barriers the American Way

It’s not only U.S. Republicans who support a tough political line on immigration. President Joe Biden is also adamant that he wants to continue building the wall at the Mexican border.

“If somebody were breaking into your house to do something bad, you would respond with force,” Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stated in June. “Yet why don’t we do that at the Southern border? If the cartels are cutting through the border wall, trying to run product into this country, they’re going to end up stone cold dead as a result of that bad decision[.]”

The harsh rhetoric DeSantis used in an appearance in the Texas border town of Eagle Pass has become normal among Republican candidates. The candidates currently campaigning to become Donald Trump’s Republican Party successor are doing their utmost to ape his hard-line stance on immigration. “Close the border,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley also insisted.

The fact that Haley’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from India apparently makes no difference — the same is true of biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has advocated deploying the U.S. military against the Mexican drug cartels.

It was only last week that Senate Republicans collectively blocked a $110 billion package of military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, having tied their approval to demands for yet tougher immigration legislation from the Biden administration.

When Biden’s predecessor, Trump, ran for office in 2016 with the slogan “Build the Wall,” it came across as a propaganda ploy to please the Republican Party’s extreme right. Now, though, the border wall is not merely an obligatory pledge for every presidential candidate’s 2024 election campaign, but an actual physical reality. During Trump’s presidency, hundreds of miles of wall were built, and nearly all the current crop of candidates, including Democrat Joe Biden, have pledged to continue building it.

2.5 Million People Attempt To Cross the Border

“Invasion,” “takeover,” “onslaught” — these are the kind of terms political figures like DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamy reach for when talking about migrants. This year, 2.5 million people were documented attempting to cross the U.S. southern border from Mexico; the actual figures are likely to be higher. In addition, more and more people from countries beyond Central and Latin America are trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico. From 2022 to 2023, about 24,000 Chinese citizens were detained along the border.

Far-right U.S. commentators utilize the high numbers of non-white people waiting for their chance to get into the country to stoke a generalized fear of foreign infiltration. During a recent TV debate between the Republican primary candidates, Ramaswamy accused the Democrats of deliberately allowing the U.S. to be infiltrated by non-white people in order to grab more political power for themselves.

This so-called “Great Replacement Theory” circulates among far-right groups all over the world and often features in the manifestos of far-right murderers. Implementing this “theory” in practice was, said Ramaswamy, “a basic statement of the Democratic Party platform.”