Invasion from Mexico
M
any conservatives, eager to attack the Biden administration, have spent the past month drumming up fear about an impending “invasion” across our southern border which could commence as early as May 23, 2022 when President Biden plans to end the Title 42 Expulsion Program. The invasion rhetoric has found a deep well of support among conservative Republicans as they prepare for the 2020 midterm elections in their usual fashion: ginning up as much fear about “Invasion” conspiracy theories as humanly possible.
Threats of an “Immigrant Invasion” are resilient. Like “The Great Replacement Theory,” the word “invasion” has a long and violent history in American politics. In the 1830s, anti-irish agitators like Samuel Morse called the arrival of immigrants a “Papist invasion” and an attack on “the American way of life.” The invasion oratory flared up again among right-wing border extremists in the 1990s, when ideologues like Glenn Spencer, fabricated the “Reconquista” conspiracy theory claiming that Latino ideologues were secretly conspiring to return the American Southwest to Mexican rule, thus creating a new Hispanic nation called “Aztlan.” As outlandish as this idea seems it gained conservative traction throughout the 90s.
The “Reconquista” conspiracy theory was revived by Patrick Buchanan in his 2006 book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. The book had as its core thesis a revival of the “Reconquista” theory, claiming that Mexico was slowly but steadily taking back the American Southwest. “You've got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country,” Buchanan said on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes in November 2007.
What we fear, we rail against. Politician, worth their salt, know if they can get us to fear something they can get us to vote against it. This speaks to the power of fear to unleash some of our strongest and darkest emotions. Like COVID, fear is notoriously contagious. Skillful politicians, from both sides of the aisle, have learned to use fear mongering with amazing success.
“Invasion” is a “wedge word” conservatives have used for centuries to scare us. They are hyping it again for the midterm election hoping to turn the legitimate fear many Americans have about where the world is headed to their advantage. They believe their timing couldn't be better.
Right now, thanks to the Soviet invasion of Ukraine, Americans are seeing, in real time, heartbreaking images of Ukrainian cities being reduced to rubble, pastures turned into mass graves, women and children murdered while trying in vain to escape the Soviet invasion. As unbelievable as it appears, the subliminal message Conservatives want us to take away from these images of needless death, destruction and human carnage is, “The impending immigration invasion is going to destroy America just as assuredly as the Soviet invasion will destroy Ukraine if we don't keep the Title 42 Expulsion Program in place!” Be afraid, be very afraid.
When asked about a Title 42 invasion Texas Congressman, Michael Mccaul didn't limit his comparison to traffickers or criminals trying to cross the border. No, every single person trying to cross—including the tens of thousands seeking asylum and the hundreds of thousands of families and unaccompanied children who are just seeking a better life—are in Mccaul's mind no different from soldiers invading a sovereign nation.
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, the House's third-ranking Republican, also called it an invasion. “Ending Title 42 will worsen the already catastrophic invasion at our Southern Border,” she tweeted. “Joe Biden and his Far Left policies are destroying our country.”
Steven Miller, Trump's former senior immigration adviser and the architect of Title 42, went even further: “This will mean Armageddon on the border. This is how nations end.”
Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, who has become Republicans' go-to white nationalist in the House, joined in the hysteria on Twitter: “This is a full scale invasion. This is 540,000 in one month. Putin sent 150,000 troops into Ukraine and we are ready to set fire to the world. Eliminating Title 42 will only add fuel to the fire. Madness!”
Donald Trump, ever the puppeteer, has been leading the way. “We are being invaded by millions and millions of people, many of them criminals,” he told the crowd at a rally in Washington Township, Michigan, in April, claiming that between 10 and 12 million spontaneous migrants were waiting to cross the border. “We will be inundated by illegal migration.”
Throughout our nation's history talk about immigration has aroused passionate emotions and spirited debate. But today, the debates and our emotions have exploded into a form of neoimmigrant hatred which has Americans divided, agitated, and confused about what to do about immigration.
In the context of the Ukraine war—where Americans can see on a daily basis what an actual invasion looks like—some conservatives at least recognize how wildly out of proportion this type of rhetoric seems. And in light of the very real and very lethal consequences this kind of rhetoric has had on some of our citizens in the recent past, its pervasiveness is a real cause for concern. It's not just “hot talk.”
David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute called invoking an invasion an “overheated political analogy. An ‘invasion' isn't just an overstatement,” Bier wrote. “It's a completely unserious attempt to demand extraordinary, military-style measures to stop lawful and completely mundane actions like unarmed men, women and children from entering between the ports of entry to file asylum paperwork or violating international labor market regulations in order to fill one of the 10 million job openings in this country.”
No wonder much of the country's mood is a mix of anger, fear, frustration, crushed hopes and diminished dreams. During the Pandemic, people lost loved ones, jobs, houses, health care, net worth and even more of their optimism and belief that a combination of hard work and living by the law would mean a better future for them and their families. It didn't work out that way for many of them. And what do most of those running to succeed Joe Biden offer: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Whether conservatives admit it or not, they know the easiest way to protect their standing in Trump's Republican Party is to embrace his loathing and stoke the same bigoted fury that led a teenager to open fire in a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo. Perhaps one day, the conservative's fever will break. Until it does, our country's future remains very dark.