The border and immigration are issues that are on voters’ minds. At Tuesday’s presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris should approach the issue more savvy, playing to her party’s strengths and framing it in a way that portrays former President Donald Trump’s views on immigrants as a degradation of truly American ideals.
Trump said in December, “Illegal immigration poisons the blood of our nation.” With this openly bigoted language, Trump has blatantly brought authoritarian impulses into the heart of the country and poisoned the Enlightenment values that make America a beacon of democracy. During the Trump administration, people have seen migrant children locked up in abhorrent detention centers.
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Harris and Democrats frequently defend Republican attacks on immigration and border security. But they can and should make it clear to voters that it is patriotic to support America’s tradition of welcoming immigrants. At the debate, Harris should use the opportunity to lay out the legislative path to solving the problem, then move on to a more fundamental approach that appeals to more latent, abstract and instinctive feelings – and to the higher and more enduring values of Americans.
Harris and the Democrats can and should make it clear to voters that it is patriotic to support America’s tradition of welcoming immigrants.
By committing to signing the recent bipartisan border bill that Trump undermined for his own political gain, Harris can claim to be acting in the public interest, both in the literal and practical sense of stemming the tide of border crossings, while simultaneously portraying the issue as stemming the tide of dissolving, un-American ideological extremism and culturally permissible autocratic impulses.
Many observers felt that the recent Democratic convention was an attempt to wrest patriotism from the right, highlighting the immigration story as an essential part of the American dream. Opposing Trump’s poisoning of enduring values is another claim not just to patriotism but to tradition that, if skillfully delivered in debate, could expose MAGA as an anomaly.
Presenting this as a two-pronged solution would appeal to and engage Democratic skeptics who see Democrats as ineffective or negligent on the border but have grave concerns about Trump’s demagogic excesses and the extreme policies he and his allies hope to push in a possible second administration.
Brad Evans and Henry Giroux, co-authors of American Fascism: Fourteen Deadly Principles of Contemporary Politics, argue: “Fascism operates at the level of desire: the desire for power, the desire to control, the desire to humiliate, the desire to hurt. … Fascist desire simultaneously seduces and colonizes, embodying a ruthless appropriation of power and the loss of control over one’s own sense of self-determination.”
The word “colonized” is prescient in this context, as it speaks to an ideological colonization that is at least as threatening to the well-being of society as the actual influx of migrants at the border.
Those who employ fascist tactics often do so for cynical reasons—they don’t really believe that the enemies they target are as evil or as powerful as their rhetoric suggests. Still, there comes a tipping point where rhetoric becomes policy. That’s where Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now.
This is the real blood poisoning of the country. And Harris can make it clear to the American people that Trump, his party and their policies are the real “invasion” of American society.
