What Harris and Trump Get Wrong About the Border

Mexico, remarkably, is a word that is barely being mentioned in the lead up to the U.S. presidential election. It is not being discussed much on the campaign trail, even though the southern border and immigration are central protagonists in the contest. It takes two sides to have a border, but U.S. political discourse these days treats the 2,000-mile-border with Mexico as if it were the wardrobe leading to Narnia, or the edge of the known world represented by dragons on maps from antiquity. Pet-eating dragons, in Donald Trump’s narrative. Who knows, really, what we’re bordering.

Our southern neighbor and top trading partner was mentioned once in passing in the Sept. 10 presidential debate, and only in the context of auto manufacturing and trade policy. There was no mention of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador; the years of wrangling with his administration over various aspects of immigration policy; Mexico’s current democratic backsliding or the imminent arrival of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum; the looming joint review of the USMCA trade agreement that must occur by 2026, the high-profile frictions around combating cartel drug lords. Nada specific.

It’s not surprising that talk about the border and immigration no longer borders anything resembling the real world. From the very day Donald Trump announced his first presidential run in June 2015, he has ruthlessly demonized immigrants as mystical, treacherous scapegoats for all our ills. And regardless of how much Trump’s insidious talk of Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets gets mocked, or how he fares at the ballot box in November, the sad truth is that he has succeeded in shifting the center of gravity on immigration in our politics.

All sides seem to accept the dangerous Trumpian worldview. Vice President Kamala Harris rightly condemns Trump’s more racist pronouncements and exaggerations, but neither she nor Democratic candidates in tight congressional races appear eager (judging by the commercials I am being bombarded with in my battleground state of Arizona) to push back on his movement’s premise that we are being invaded. Instead, they engage in arguments about who’s to blame for too many people coming, and who’s tough enough to handle the supposed crisis. I don’t see much of an appetite to point out that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, that we need more legal pathways to attract the workforce we rely on, or that countless economists point out that immigration remains a huge competitive advantage for the U.S. at a time of low unemployment and an aging population.

And I certainly don’t see political leaders refuting Trump’s doomsday proclamations by reminding voters that, whatever today’s frictions in the relationship, in the grand scheme of things the U.S. is very fortunate to border Canada and Mexico.

Indeed, sharing North America with these two friendly neighbors that don’t harbor ill will has provided the U.S. a luxury that no other continental power has enjoyed in modern history. Much like the island-based British Empire in its heyday, the U.S. has been free to project force around the world without having to worry about its own borders. It’s no wonder generations of national security and foreign policy elites in Washington are often more conversant in Russian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern affairs and geography than anything having to do with Canada or Mexico.

Harris has rightly accused Trump of preferring to exploit the idea of a border crisis to addressing it. But Trump hardly started this country’s venerable tradition of treating our most important trading partner with complacent, benign neglect. Because Mexico hasn’t posed a pressing threat to the U.S. for over a century, it could languish off the priority list of policymaking and most Americans. 

My home of Phoenix is one of the most vibrant metropolises of what I like to call MexUs, the glorious swath of the U.S. that was once part of Mexico, which spans from northern California to the Texas Gulf shores. If MexUs were its own country, it would be home to more than 85 million people and the third largest economy in the world.

I often point this out in speaking about the relationship (even to groups of military officials), not to make a huge deal of the fact that so much land changed hands as the result of a war that both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant decried as immoral, but to suggest we should be more appreciative of the fact that it isn’t a huge deal in the relationship. Elsewhere in the world, you can find flashpoints of ongoing tension and hostility between neighbors in many places where far less impressive slivers of land than California or Texas changed hands. 

The U.S. has a long track record of dealing decisively and effectively with existential threats. If the border did pose the national security crisis Trump and his MAGA allies suggest it does, we wouldn’t be relying on a federal law enforcement agency with fewer deployed officers than the NYPD to address it. Nor would we continue to muddle through with our lackadaisical and incoherent set of immigration policies that can be summed up as conflicting signs posted along the border, one reading “Do Not Trespass;” the other “Help Wanted: Inquire Within.”

Yet this approach isn’t a cost-free indulgence. With all the nonsensical talk of invading migrants and the border crisis, legitimate challenges and frictions aren’t being addressed. It is an affront to the rule of law to rely on a workforce of millions of undocumented migrant workers forced to live in the shadows because we haven’t provided adequate legal pathways for immigration. And you don’t have to be an anti-immigrant zealot to agree that in the absence of such realistic legal channels for immigration, the asylum-seeking process has been abused and that border infrastructure and public services in some communities when the number of arrivals spike are overwhelmed. But these are solvable problems if we were in a problem-solving mood.

As for our relationship with Mexico, in a more rational policymaking universe we would engage with its government to develop a regional, North American migration policy that reflected our interdependence. After all, in 2023 more than half the migrants seeking to cross our southern border came from countries beyond Mexico, and the occasional overwhelming spikes in arrivals tend to be driven by events in Venezuela or Central America. North America would do well to have a coordinated approach to immigration for the entire region, in the same way the European Union does. We would also try to align our energy policies and work toward shoring up the rule of law and democracy. The U.S.-Mexico relationship should be a considerable asset for both countries, but politics undermines its potential.

This is also true of America’s own relationship with its immigrant population, not to mention our heritage as a nation of immigrants. Immigration is a blessing the U.S. needs to nurture and manage, but our shared politicized narratives on the subject are veering so dangerously off course that a serious contender for the presidency can pass off talk of deporting millions of hardworking immigrants as a sensible proposal. If we continue down this road, we may end up with a truly existential crisis, not just one made up to fire up a political campaign.