Republicans continue to warn of 'invasion' at southern border that doesn't exist
Republicans have recently increased their xenophobic rhetoric in response to the announcement that the Biden administration will finally end the unjustified use of Title 42. The eighty-year-old public health law was contorted by Stephen Miller in 2020 to deny people the opportunity to apply for refugee status under established law. By all objective measures, it has been a failure. It turbocharged recidivism, inflated the number of “border encounters,” and prevented the use of consequence delivery mechanisms under existing law.
Ending the program simply returns our asylum system to a pre-pandemic state, which, as we know, was already very restrictive and decades out of date. Those who request asylum and are rejected will still be expelled. Those who are caught multiple times trying to enter the country illegally will face federal felony charges that they do not face under Title 42. For those who were kept out by closing ports of entry and blocked from making asylum claims via Title 42, there very well may be pent-up demand to request asylum when Title 42 no longer blocks them from doing so. But America has managed asylum claims for decades. Doing so again won’t bring on the “apocalypse” Miller predicts.
Republicans, however, are seeing the ending of Title 42 as an opportunity for a disingenuous political attack in the run-up to the midterms. They want to boost turnout by scaring voters with white nationalist conspiracy theories. Republicans increasingly claim that the arrival of people at the border to exercise their legal right to apply for refugee status constitutes an “invasion.” In fact, the border has never been more secure, the border security apparatus has never been better funded, and the effectiveness of agents in apprehending those who cross our border has never been higher. Many in the GOP go further, arguing that Democrats are intentionally letting in immigrants and refugees to “replace” white Americans.
The embrace of these racist fictions has become as predictable and ubiquitous as it is disturbing. This is not just a problem of the far edges of the party, but something that has been embraced by leading Republican voices. Warnings of an “invasion” or assertions about a Democrat ploy to “change the demographics” of the country have become commonplace. This is despite the fact that both notions are connected to the racist “replacement theory” popularized through the chants of “Jews will not replace us” on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017. Ideas that have since been echoed by mass murderers who attacked Christchurch, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the Walmart in El Paso.
Read more: https://riograndeguardian.com/mueller-republicans-continue-to-warn-of-an-invasion-at-southern-border-that-doesnt-exist/
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