Duel at the border: Both rivals in this year’s presidential election (5. 11.) appear at the Mexico border in Texas on Thursday.
US President Joe Biden was expected to inspect the situation in the border town of Brownsville. Republican opponent Donald Trump visits Eagle Pass, a focal point of the migrant crisis. Texan authorities, who laid rolls of barbed wire on the banks of the Rio Grande, are at loggerheads with the federal Border Patrol. Chaotic scenes amid the mass influx of asylum seekers were shocking.
The border drama became Biden’s biggest challenge (apart from his age) in the expected ‘rematch’ against Trump. The numbers of illegal border crossings have risen dramatically during his time in office: 2.5 million people were apprehended last year, almost seven million since Biden took office. There were 300,000 in the most recent record-breaking surge in December alone (although the numbers have fallen since then).
Biden let the crisis slide for too long. Now his re-election is under threat. According to a Monmouth poll, 61% of US voters consider illegal immigration to be a ‘serious problem’. And: for the first time, the majority of Americans support the construction of a border wall, as Trump has been calling for since his first election campaign in 2016. However, this project only made slow progress during his time in office. Nevertheless, migration figures were only a good third of what they were during the Biden era.
Border states such as Texas and Arizona sent hundreds of thousands of immigrants on buses to US cities governed by Democrats such as Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and New York. These cities praised themselves as ‘cities of refuge’, where local authorities refuse to cooperate with the ‘deportation authority’ ICE.
Now they are crumbling under the weight of daily migrant arrivals. New York, for example, is required by law to guarantee everyone a roof over their heads. Hotels have been rented, school buildings transformed, and tent camps set up. According to Mayor Eric Adams, who currently has to deal with 200,000 migrants, the billions spent could ‘destroy the city’.
However, Trump and the Republicans currently have little appetite for constructive solutions. A bipartisan deal recently negotiated in the Senate to stem the flow of immigrants failed in the Republican-dominated lower chamber of Congress. This is because Trump torpedoed the compromise, as he wants to use it as a stalking horse for Biden during the election campaign.
