Kamala Harris visited the US-Mexico border in Arizona Friday (New York Times gift link) and gave a speech on immigration policy that ripped Donald Trump for stirring up fear and hate against immigrants as a campaign tactic while doing nothing to address real problems.
It was a hell of a speech! And Harris was definitely taking a bit of a risk by addressing what has so far been Trump’s top issue, and doing so without being the least bit defensive. Instead, Harris argued that once you take away Trump’s hateful bluster, there really isn’t much else.
Harris spoke at the Douglas, Arizona, campus of Cochise Community College, and was introduced by Theresa Guerrero, whose son Jacob died after using drugs laced with fentanyl. We’ve cued the video below to the beginning of Harris’s speech:
Harris balanced a promise to be firm on border enforcement with more traditional Democratic appeals to pragmatism and compassion. She said the US must enforce laws against illegally crossing the border, but we also need to respect human rights, recognize that we need immigration, and offer a pathway to citizenship for people who have lived, worked, and paid taxes here for years, especially our Dreamers, young people brought to the country as children.
If you want a thesis statement for the speech, here it is right here: “I reject the false choice that suggests we must either choose between securing our border or creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly, and humane. We can, and we must, do both. We must do both.”
Harris once again focused on how Trump deliberately torpedoed a tough, bipartisan immigration bill so he could run on stoking fear about the border instead. She pledged to sign it, if Congress will just pass the damn thing, but she didn’t stop there; she offered new details on how she would extend some of the executive measures that Joe Biden ordered in June, which have greatly reduced unauthorized border crossings. We’ll hit those policy proposals in a later post, because we really want to focus here on why this speech might just be a game-changer for how the immigration issue is discussed in this campaign.
No, we have no illusions that Trump will suddenly stop hatemongering or that Trumpers will realize he’s a charlatan. If anything, he’ll almost certainly ramp up the insane lies about immigrants, because that’s literally all he has. But Harris wasn’t speaking to Trumpers, and only partly to her own supporters. Rather, her remarks were aimed at persuadable people, and focused on just how empty Trump’s immigration rhetoric is.
Like any good practitioner of martial arts, she turned Trump’s seeming strength and momentum against him, and even if he doesn’t realize it, she left him flat on the floor.
Here’s her key indictment of Trump’s genuine emptiness when it comes to the issue: As president, he failed at doing anything to fix real immigration problems, but instead simply substituted hate for any kind of substance:
In the four years that Donald Trump was president, he did nothing to fix our broken immigration system as president. He did not solve the shortage of immigration judges. He did not solve the shortage of border agents. He did not create lawful pathways into our nation. He did nothing to address an outdated asylum system, and did not work with other governments in our hemisphere to deal with what clearly is also a regional challenge.
And then, this brilliant shoulder throw, tossing Trump’s record flat on its back:
And what did he do instead? Let’s talk about that. He separated families. He ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages, and tried to end protections for Dreamers. He made the challenges at the border worse, and he is still fanning the flames of hate and division.
And let me be clear: That is not the work of a leader. That is in fact an abdication of leadership. […] We cannot accept Donald Trump’s failure to lead.
Oh, it was good. “We should not accept scapegoating instead of solutions, or rhetoric instead of results.” As a Doktor of Rhetoric, I approve this message!
Harris didn’t just dismiss Trump as a paper tiger on immigration, though: She went on to call for serious immigration reforms that would actually address the problems at the border instead of pursuing a fascist fantasy of deporting everyone, which wouldn’t just be monstrous, but impossible to actually carry out.
“We must reform our immigration system to ensure that it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger,” Harris said, calling for a pathway to citizenship, protections for Dreamers, and reforms to keep farmworkers safe and able to seek permanent residency too. Yeah, that’s going to stir up rightwing tirades about “amnesty,” and she should damn well point out that when Ronald Reagan granted a similar path to citizenship for people who had been here for decades, it was a huge success.
We’re definitely going to have a LOT more to say about this speech. Make sure you watch it, and badger your friends to watch it too!
[NYT (gift link) / Zocalo public Square]
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