Far from border, immigration dominates races for the House
In a recent congressional debate i in Idaho, the first 11 questions for a pair o of congressional candidates were abouu about immigration. At another in Arkansass Arkansas, the fate of undocumented immigrann immigrant kids dominated the discussion even eve though few of them reside in the state. And in Minnesota, a Democrat challenging an incumbent GOP House lawmaker went back and forth on the merits of building a wall on the U.S. southern border more than 1,600 miles away.
With the midterm elections next, the topic of immigration is churning in House congressional races in places where the unemployment rate is low, the economy is robust and undocumented immigrants are few. Historically, these indicators, when pointing in the opposite direction, trigger an antiimmigrant backlash.
President Donald Trump has been the driving force behind that focus on immigration, with his tweets and comments about the migrant caravan marching north and his plan to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, along with his attempts to follow through on his pledge to build a border wall. But there’s also a level of “cultural anxiety” at play, political experts say, as some Americans living far from the border continue to perceive a threat from immigrants, legal and undocumented alike.
Americans list health care, the economy and gun policy as the three most important issues they’ll consider when casting their vote, with immigration coming in fourth, according to a nationwide poll conducted by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. But selfidentified Republicans cited immigration as their top concern.
Daron Shaw, a professor who studies campaigns and public opinion at the University of Texas at Austin, says those numbers can be explained by two factors.
The first is a connection ingrained in the minds of many Americans that immigrants are harmful to the economy and drive down the wages of native-born workers, a connection that is refuted by multiple studies. So even if a nativeborn American is gainfully employed, Shaw says, they can still blame immigrants for their rising property taxes or a neighbor who’s underemployed.
The second reason Shaw cited is that border control becomes a measure by which voters judge a government’s ability to operate. Shaw said the perception of an out-of-control border becomes a key point of contrast between candi- dates, with many Republicans pushing for a border wall while accusing Democrats of sabotaging their efforts to preserve “open borders.”
That analysis helps explain why Republican Rep. Mike Simpson and his Democratic challenger Aaron Swisher ended up fielding 11 consecutive questions about immigration to start their debate in Idaho’s second congressional district.
“There is today, I heard,
1,000 people from Honduras making their way up here that are going to try to cross illegally,” Simpson said in the debate Oct. 14. “That’s going to cause a problem.”
The caravan en route to the U.S.-Mexico border has since swelled to between
3,500 to 7,000, but the majority are not expected to present themselves at ports of entry and request asylum. Nearly 1,700 members of the current caravan have applied for asylum in Mexico, according to Mexican government.
A similar debate played out last week in Minnesota’s second congressional district, when Republican Rep. Jason Lewis and Democratic challenger Angie Craig didn’t discuss the border their state shares with Canada but did debate the logistical challenges of the nation’s southern border.
Lewis recounted a trip he took to Southern California, explaining what he learned about a valley there known as “Smuggler’s Gulch” and the 14 miles of double-layered border fencing erected around San Diego. “Of course we need a wall,” he said.
Craig countered by saying that drones flying overhead and sonar technology scanning for tunnels were more effective options. “If you build a 30-foot wall, someone’s going to build a 32-foot ladder,” she said.
U.S. Border Patrol apprehension numbers along the southern border rose in 2018, but remain at historic lows because of stronger enforcement efforts, a stronger Mexican economy and past decade’s lengthy U.S. recession. In fiscal year 2000, federal agents caught nearly 1.7 million migrants compared with less than 400,000 in fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30.
In Arkansas, which is home to less than 1 percent of undocumented immigrants protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Republican Rep. French Hill and his Democratic challenger, state Rep. Clarke Tucker, spent a long portion of a recent debate debating DACA.
DACA was created by President Barack Obama in 2012. The goal was to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents.