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In dueling visits to the Texas-Mexico border, President Joe Biden and Donald Trump each tried to make the case that they’re the person best positioned to handle immigration amid polls showing voters trust the latter more despite his chaotic and sadistic tenure presiding over the nation’s enforcement infrastructure.
Biden should use this as a definitive breaking-off point to differentiate himself from Trump, not in who can be the toughest, but who can craft real solutions to benefit the country.
The answers aren’t at the Rio Grande, they are at the Potomac. Going to the border to look around is not going to give anyone policy information that they couldn’t get from a brief, particularly the current and former U.S. president (not that Trump was known to really read briefs anyway).
That goes double for touring with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as Trump did; Abbott’s main contribution to the immigration policy landscape over the last two years has been mainly an aggressive campaign to push the boundaries of the law and wrestle control from the federal government itself.
Ideally, what these visits could do is give the candidates a feel for the realities on the ground, far away from the chittering of the New York Post and Fox News — a border that is by all metrics very well guarded, by the Border Patrol and its arsenal of technologies including drones and sensor towers.
Many migrants are actually seeking to turn themselves in, asking for asylum protections under the law; if these processes are chaotic or too open-ended, it is because of the failures of our own bureaucratic and legal systems, not anything these asylum seekers did.
