At a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Donald Trump rolled out a new attack on Vice President Kamala Harris that showcased his well-known fondness for high-toned discourse: Her handling of immigration reveals her as not just weak, but also dumb.
The former president luridly claimed that Venezuelan gang members were “plotting to conduct ambush attacks” on American cops, then added: “All the while Harris and Biden sit in the White House and try to figure out who is dumber.” He proceeded to blame “Border Czar Harris” for a series of crimes by migrants, even though President Biden tasked her with addressing the root causes of Central American migration, while the Department of Homeland Security secures the border.
Unfortunately for Trump, unpublished DHS data shows that border encounters between ports of entry plummeted again to approximately 57,000 in July, according to an official familiar with the numbers. The data, which is preliminary until its official release in the coming days, was also leaked to CBS News and The New York Times. This is the fifth straight month of declining border crossings and the lowest monthly figure of the Biden administration. According to the Times, nine separate months during the Trump administration saw more border crossings than July under Biden did.
These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way. It’s self-evident that declining migrant apprehensions counter Trump’s claim that the border is out of control due to alleged Biden-Harris weakness and stupidity. But it’s also important to dwell on why the numbers are falling, because this will demonstrate even more clearly that Trump’s ongoing attacks over this issue are nonsense—and that the truly “dumb” approach is Trump’s.
The dropping border numbers are often attributed to Biden’s new executive actions, announced in June, that effectively suspend asylum-seeking when border encounters rise above certain thresholds. The idea is that, if migrants can’t seek asylum here, it disincentivizes making the trek to the border to try to apply for it.
But there’s another reason for the dropping numbers: Mexico. As many immigration analysts have noted, Mexico has intensified its crackdown on migrants journeying north, bussing them back to the southernmost part of the country. That has served as a major impediment to migrants trying to journey from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Little is known about the precise role that Biden played in getting Mexico to institute this crackdown. But Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, says most analysts agree that Biden’s private diplomacy with Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador played a crucial part.
“Increased Mexican enforcement efforts have clearly played a big role in bringing the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border down in the past few months,” Selee told me.
What all this really shows is that fixing the challenge posed by migration to the southern border depends on solutions that are regional in nature. The basic thrust of Trump’s attacks, at bottom, is that presidential “toughness” is the only real way to “solve” the problem. But border security, while obviously playing a crucial role in managing migration, is far from the sole answer.
“Trump views the issue as starting and ending at the border,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told me. “But this is a diplomatic issue that requires a regional approach. What we’re seeing at the border now is proof of that.”
In other words, the declining numbers don’t merely illustrate that Biden’s asylum restrictions are having an impact. They also show that viewing the problem as one to be solved in no small part through diplomacy in the Americas—as Harris deeply believes to be true—is also the smarter approach. (The entire Trump attack is also nonsense for other reasons: There’s no link between migration and crime, and crime is sharply down under Biden in any case.)
Now, a few caveats. First, Trump does understand that the issue is a regional one, but only to a very limited degree. As president, he threatened Mexico with tariffs to get it to crack down on migrants journeying northward. But Biden has secured more cooperation from Mexico via diplomacy than Trump did, Reichlin-Melnick notes. “So far, the deployment of Mexican enforcement officials throughout that country is having a larger impact on crossings than a similar deployment in June 2019,” he said.
What’s more, the very fact that Trump and his allies sneeringly describe Harris’s role as “border czar”—when in fact her role has been a diplomatic one—illustrates Trump’s dumbness on this issue. As Jonathan Blitzer details in The New Yorker, Harris had some success in securing financial aid and investments to the Northern Triangle countries—which is designed to create opportunities in those places that mitigate the need to migrate—despite it being an extremely challenging task.
Obviously that hasn’t alone solved the issue, as Blitzer reports, because it’s not nearly enough to fix the region’s deep problems. But the point is, Trump simply does not think addressing the root causes of migration should be a meaningful part of the solution to immigration at all. As president, Trump canceled aid programs to the region. If reelected, he would cancel Harris’s efforts, too.
One other caveat: Many progressives do not see lower border numbers achieved through asylum restrictions and stricter Mexican enforcement as a success, because it likely denies many truly endangered people a chance to seek refuge here. That is a fair criticism. However, it should be placed in the context of Biden’s broader agenda: He has also created new parole programs that allow tens of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti to apply from abroad for entry.
Biden and Harris simply have not closed the door on migrants. As the Cato Institute’s David Bier has usefully detailed, these parole programs are a genuine humanitarian success story, impacting hundreds of thousands of people or more. Trump would also cancel them if reelected—even though they have provided an alternative pathway to showing up at the border, reducing pressure on it. Which shows that Trump’s real goal isn’t a secure border—it’s fewer migrants in our country, because he believes that they are “poisoning” us.
The Harris campaign is drawing up plans to attack Trump on immigration. To that end, the new border numbers will surely help. But rather than simply recite them as evidence that the border is under control, the campaign could also use them to make a broader argument: Trump is offering mainly empty bluster and cartoon toughness, while Harris sees immigration in regional—that is, three-dimensional—terms. In short, she might argue, the only “dumb” one here is Donald Trump himself.
