Biden and Democrats Should Not Try to Match Trump and GOP's Cruelty on the Border

It’s now all-but confirmed: the 2024 US election will be a rematch between Joe Biden and former president/insurrectionist Donald Trump.

In truth, it has long been clear that would be the case. After all, some of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Trump’s favour make it increasingly unlikely that his legal troubles, which include numerous criminal indictments, will hamper his bid to return to the White House.

General election season is well and truly here. And it arrived just in time for last week’s State of the Union address (SOTU), in which Biden tried to lay out all the ways he is different from Trump.

The headlines since make it clear the consensus of the American punditocracy is he did so very effectively. I don’t disagree. Biden gave an energetic, passionate speech and contrasted himself with Trump numerous times.

“My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6”, he stated plainly and provocatively. “I will not do that.”

At the same time, however, Biden seemed to want to have it both ways on immigration, representing himself (not inaccurately) as tough on border policy while also claiming to be more humane than Trump.

He pointedly described how he was ready to sign a tough, bipartisan border security bill that would give Republicans essentially everything they want. But this bill was tanked in the House of Representatives by speaker Mike Johnson, a right-wing Christian, who refused to bring it to a vote because Trump and the Republicans generally are running their campaign on border issues by stirring up racist fears of migrants.

Yes, there have been unusually large numbers of unsanctioned crossings documented at America’s southern border in recent months. But the Republicans are selling a demonstrably false narrative that those crossing are responsible for a wave of horrific violent and sexual crimes. I want to be very clear, that narrative is itself false, and there’s more to it – these supposed crimes are then blamed on Biden’s supposedly weak border policies, in an insidious sort of one-two punch.

What’s worse, the signs are that this deceptive, racist tactic may work – a significant plurality of Americans, 28%, currently see immigration as the country’s biggest problem, according to a Gallup poll.

Republicans know this. And they would love to make the 2024 presidential election about immigration rather than reproductive justice, which is a losing issue for them.

And while Democratic candidates can’t avoid the issue of immigration altogether, they need to be very careful about how they talk about it. They must avoid playing into the Republican narrative that puts Black and brown people – both American citizens and undocumented immigrants – in danger of violence.

Unfortunately, Democrats often allow Republicans to frame their debates, and that failure has both a high political cost and a high human cost. With his border security bill and his discussion of it during his SOTU address, Biden called the Republicans’ bluff, to be sure, but he did so on their terms.

No matter how far Biden leans into their phoney fears and draconian prescriptions, Republicans will continue to paint him as “weak” and “soft” on the issue. There is no winning for a Democrat here – except by refusing to play the game.

This approach from the Republicans was evident in their official response to the SOTU, delivered by Katie Britt, a senator from Alabama whose over-the-top fear-mongering about migrants and sex-trafficking was simply bonkers.

As regular readers of openDemocracy are likely aware, too often those who claim to be anti-trafficking advocates are moved by inflammatory disinformation, or are themselves creators and purveyors of this disinformation. Take, for example, the QAnon conspiracy theory that a cabal of liberal and Hollywood ‘elites’ are organising the trafficking of children for sexual abuse and other nefarious purposes. In the US in particular, many anti-trafficking efforts are hyper-focused on sex-trafficking and run by conservative Christians whose ultimate goals include blanket bans on sex work and pornography, in addition to banning abortion and stripping rights from members of the LGBTQ+ community.

The Christian Right’s paternalistic efforts in this area, then, are clearly not about defending individual bodily autonomy for vulnerable people. Instead, they represent a longstanding authoritarian pattern involving the externalisation of community anxieties in a framework that requires both ‘victims’ to be saved and a scapegoated group of ‘villains’ to blame.

This dynamic, which here in America is deeply rooted in white supremacy and often focused on ‘protecting’ (white) women and children, oozed from Britt’s response to the SOTU, in which the senator misleadingly invoked an anecdote about a woman supposedly trafficked by drug cartels to back up her claim that “president Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace”.

The woman in question, Karla Jacinto, has now come forward to set the record straight, stating she was never trafficked by cartels or within the US, but was trafficked by a pimp in Mexico – from 2004 to 2008, when, wait for it, George W Bush was president.

Britt has become a national laughing stock due to the absurdly overwrought tone of her speech, but the racist invocation of “scary” migrants is deadly serious. For example, the US has a history of representing Black men as sexually aggressive, and this stereotype, along with concepts of ‘honour’ and white racial ‘purity,’ led to numerous lynchings, including the 1955 case of Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered in Mississippi after being accused of whistling at a white woman.

Today, we see echoes of the same dynamic in Trump’s rhetoric. He referred to Mexican migrants as “rapists” in 2016, and last year he asserted that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Biden denounced that rhetoric explicitly during his SOTU speech, but, in an unscripted back-and-forth with MAGA representative Marjorie Taylor Green, he referred to a murder committed by “an illegal” – a phrasing he thankfully later regretted.

In the US, people of Latin American descent have been subjected to a surge in hate crimes in recent years. When Democrats adopt racist Republican framing about the border and immigration, they fuel that hatred.

That would be unethical even if doing so was a vote winner for Democrats, but it isn’t.

While Biden calling out Republican hypocrisy on the refusal to pass his border security bill was necessary given the bill’s existence, I hope his administration and campaign will think carefully about the way they frame these issues going forward, instead of trying to compete with the hate and fear-based politics of their Republican opponents.