First parades, now borders
President Donald Trump’s repeated references to “my generals” is telling. He remains oblivious to the principle that the generals work for America and take an oath to uphold the Constitution. He delights in the presence of men in uniform and tries to mimic what he imagines their language must sound like. But in substantive ways, he shows them little respect. The military, as far as Trump is concerned, is simply another venue from which to throw red meat to his low-information base.
The president wanted to bring back torture until Defense Secretary Jim Mattis talked him out of it. He is willing to waste military funds and time on a parade because he liked the one he watched in France. He is willing to disrupt morale and operations by barring transgender people from serving. He still has not visited the military at a combat zone. And now he proposes to deploy it (or the National Guard, it seems) to the border.
Why is the president doing this? It’s part and parcel of Trump’s temper tantrum, figuratively and literally at the military’s expense, for getting fleeced on the spending deal. He did not get his wall—which Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) had offered him—so instead he’ll move troops to the border. Huh?
Since there is no surge in illegal immigration—despite Trump’s continued claims to the contrary—neither the wall nor the military is needed.
Former auto industry czar Steven Rattner explained: “As a result of a number of factors—better enforcement, a stronger economy in Mexico and the like—illegal border crossings have been dropping steadily for nearly two decades, from a peak of nearly 1.65 million to just over 300,000 last year.”
At the same time the Mexican economy has been improving, providing more and better jobs south of the border than was historically the case. In 2015, Pew Research found that “from 2009 to 2014, 1 million Mexicans and their families (including U.S.-born children) left the U.S. for Mexico, according to data from the 2014 Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics.”
The National Immigration Forum reiterated this point in a written statement. “The purported sense of urgency, however, is misplaced—net immigration from Mexico is negative, and prior to this week’s statements the administration frequently touted the decrease in border crossings that puts Border Patrol arrests at a 46-year low. And of the unauthorized immigrants arriving in the U.S. in the past decade, the majority have arrived via ports of entry rather than via illegal border crossings that a border wall could prevent.”
Why do we need a wall or the military to stand by it? We don’t. Like his misunderstanding of the trade deficit, Trump doesn’t know or care to know what the real border situation is. He built his political base primarily on anti-immigrant white grievance and he’ll keep going back to the well of xenophobia no matter the facts.
Mattis, however, doesn’t have to put up with this. He can tell the president—and Congress— that using troops in this fashion puts unnecessary strain on forces elsewhere. (Even if it is National Guard forces deployed, they are then not available for other duties, including relieving regular military personnel.)
Trump’s misuse of the military hurts those putting their lives on the line, and adds to the burden felt by military families. If he really cared for the troops, Trump would stop treating them as pawns in his noxious brand of populism.