Don’t feel dismayed if you have no idea what’s going on at our Southern border.
Since I began covering it two decades ago, the notion of “illegal immigration” has always been confusing, and it’s gotten even more muddled in recent years.
Lawmakers playing partisan politics want to confuse you. Democrats and Republicans regularly warned of a “border crisis” during the Donald Trump administration, though for different reasons. Trump’s core campaign call to “build the wall!” withered in the hot desert sun once he became president. Democrats, for their part, accused Trump of putting “kids in cages,” even though Joe Biden is now using the same holding facilities.
At a Feb. 7 hearing by the House Oversight Committee, emboldened Republicans, flexing their new majority muscle, mixed apocryphal hyperbole and statistical stew to hype the “border crisis” to hysterical levels.
Using every buzzword he could conjure, committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky mused: “It sounds like the cartels are taking advantage of historically high flow of illegal immigration to overwhelm Border Patrol agents’ resources, place migrants in peril, and undermine border security by introducing deadly narcotics, criminals and terrorists into our country.”