Two Candidates, one War Against Migrants

Following the first debate between the presidential nominees from each major party, working people across the United States have been recovering from the dismay of watching two senile politicians with dismal approval ratings spar on national television. 

Top Democrats seem equally concerned, with David Axelrod, former White House official turned CNN commentator remarking, “He seemed a little disoriented. He did get stronger as the debate went on. But by that time, I think the panic had set in.” Other top Democrats have echoed this sentiment. Even Biden’s vice president Kamala Harris had to concede Biden’s “slow start” in an interview with CNN. “It was a slow start, that’s obvious to everyone,” said Harris. “I’m not going to debate that,” adding that Biden “got into a groove where it counted.”

The base of the Democratic Party has long been less than thrilled with Biden’s candidacy. According to a CNN poll from September of 2023, 67% of Democratic Party-leaning voters said they wanted a different candidate to run on the party’s presidential ticket. This was a month before Israel began to carry out genocide in Gaza with Biden’s unconditional arming, funding, and political support, further tanking his polling numbers among young people and Arab-American voters. 

Who is tougher on migrants?

Much was written about the childish sparring around their respective golfing capabilities, but a topic that both candidates, especially Trump, returned to over and over again, was immigration. 

Trump and the Republican Party have consistently maintained that Biden’s “soft” approach to immigration is the cause of the large influx of migrants at the border. But many are pointing to how both candidates, during their respective presidencies, have maintained a strict regime of sanctions and economic destabilization of Global South countries that have directly led to the current migrant crisis. Both candidates have also enacted draconian policies to turn away migrants at the border, including this month when Biden borrowed directly from Trump’s policy to effectively shut down the border.

“How can Biden ‘debate’ Trump about immigration when he’s adopted Trump’s policies??” wrote the campaign of Claudia De La Cruz and Karina Garcia, two socialists running against Biden and Trump in the presidential election. “We reject any attempt to divide working people based on where they were born. End the war on migrants and the brutal violence at the border—the real enemy is on Wall Street!”

During the debate itself, both Biden and Trump spent significant airtime posturing themselves as the toughest on migrants. Jake Tapper, CNN anchor and one of the debate moderators, wasted no time in positioning the question on immigration in the most alarmist and dehumanizing terms possible. In posing the question to Biden, Tapper asked, “A record number of migrants have illegally crossed the southern border on your watch, overwhelming border states and overburdening cities such as New York and Chicago, and in some cases causing real safety and security concerns. Given that, why should voters trust you to solve this crisis?”

Biden immediately threw migrants under the bus, despite campaigning on a platform of shifting away from Trump’s blatantly racist and draconian immigration policies. Biden claimed that he had the endorsement of “Border Patrol men,” alleging that his border policy has created “a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally.” 

“And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the, the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers,” Biden added, confusingly. 

To Biden’s answer, Trump responded, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” 

Trump claimed that under his presidency, “we had the safest border in the history of our country,” and that Biden “decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum, terrorists.”

“We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now. All terrorists all over the world, not just in South America, all over the world. They come from the Middle East, everywhere, all over the world. They’re pouring in. And this guy just left it open,” Trump continued.

Imperialist policies fuel the migrant crisis

Despite the heated exchanges, both Biden and Trump have upheld brutal sanctions regimes against Venezuela and Cuba that have resulted in an influx of migrants fleeing desperate economic conditions. Members of Biden’s own party have urged the President to lift sanctions on these countries in order to address migration. 

Peoples Dispatch spoke to Alexander Gil, a Caracas-based organizer with the Union Comunera, and part of the ALBA Movimientos Secretariat. Gil articulated that, “In relation to the difference between Biden and Trump in the framework of their migratory policies and their policy of sanctions, I would tell you from the outset that we do not see any difference.”

“Many people have even said that Biden has handled, let’s say, in a softer way the migratory issue and has tried to soften the coercive, unilateral measures, some even speak of a possible lifting of unilateral coercive measures, but that has not been the case,” Gil said. “Because even this, even this very fact of softening the measures, some, not all, unilateral coercive measures, also serves as a pressure mechanism.”

In terms of the differences between the Republican and Democratic parties, “maybe one can see that they negotiate more than the other, but we know that they have an ultimate goal and that is to put an end to the Bolivarian revolution,” Gil continued. “So, as long as this policy of permanent aggression against Venezuela is maintained, as long as right-wing groups continue to be financed to destabilize our processes, we will continue to characterize all those who come to the White House as people with the same interests and we will continue to resist [them].”

Peoples Dispatch also spoke to Araceli Herrera, a Mexican immigrant and a grassroots organizer based in San Antonio, Texas, who organizes domestic workers and immigrants. According to Herrera, “the problem of migration has always existed because they steal the wealth and raw material of our countries to get rich.”

She named many imperialist policies enacted by the West as the chief culprit of mass migration. “[Corporations] move to our countries for cheap labor and without international laws that protect workers. That is why they put their factories there. That is why they own the coltan, lithium, copper, gold, and pay starvation wages.” 

“The solutions are that they pay good wages and nobody wants to leave their countries, their environment, their families,” she articulated.