Republicans tried and failed to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday as part of their plan to use the southern border as a cudgel against President Joe Biden in 2024.
A lot of this is just political posturing. Republicans have every interest in making it seem as though Biden’s immigration policies (despite not being particularly permissive to migrants arriving at the border) have led to unmitigated chaos and that returning to the restrictionist agenda of former President Donald Trump is the answer.
Trump made this clear when he reportedly urged Republicans in Congress to turn against the bipartisan Senate border security bill scheduled for a vote Wednesday so that he could keep the issue alive through the presidential election. His supporters have largely fallen in line.
But that Republican maneuvering aside, there’s a deeper question: Is there actually a border crisis?
I would say yes, but not in the way that Republicans would describe it.
What Republican rhetoric on the border gets wrong
If there’s a single word that dominates Republican rhetoric on the border, it’s “invasion.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott invoked it in court when defending the concertina wire he has illegally strung along the border in Eagle Pass. So has Trump at his campaign rallies: “This is like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. … They’re taking over our cities,” he said at an event in Nevada in December.
The word conjures vivid imagery of the US under threat from a foreign adversary, and that’s a deliberate misrepresentation of what’s happening at the border. Russia invaded Ukraine. Migrants are not invading the US under any similar understanding of the word. But Republicans have long demanded further militarization of the US border, and an “invasion” would seem to demand such a military solution.
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