I am really interested in how people think of and understand the border crisis. I think Preston’s piece does a really good job of framing how people misunderstand Trump and Harris’ respective records on the border as well as their plans. Trump only built 85 miles of wall during his presidency despite campaigning on building a wall! I also didn’t realise how many of the issues right now at the border are actually because of Trump: because he torpedoed the bipartisan border security bill and because his regulations shut down asylum courts during his first presidency (this was just mentioned in passing but seems quite significant to the current 5-year delays in asylum hearings). By contrast, Harris and Biden seem to have been more effective in reducing the number of crossings and gesturing towards a perhaps more functional asylum and border system. Yet, somehow, they are still seen as weak on the border. Preston’s piece does a good job of tallying the respective policy records, I think most Americans simply don’t understand the economic necessity of migration. It’s equally possible that many do, and they just don’t care. Obviously the article was written before the election, but I wonder if mainstream media coverage will point to white nationalism as a cause for Trump’s election. That seems like a course of action that may well be true to a large extent but also alienating to readers. I remember at the start of the class we discussed how much of people’s resistance to immigration was rooted in racism. I think I remember our answer being inconclusive. Has our answer to that question changed since the election? Does an explicit white nationalist winning the popular vote change our answer? My thinking is that it lends more weight to the idea that some or even many people were motivated by racism. I think a large part of Trump’s winning comes from people seeing immigration as a zero-sum game. It’s hard to think of a country as anything other than a place with finite resources, even if economic growth and innovation mean the truth is actually more complicated. In that context, thousands of people continuously arriving at the southern border, Preston’s article said 250k arrived in one month when Mexico temporarily stopped patrolling, feels unsustainable and the root of all social and economic issues in a very grounded and common sense way, even if economists are telling you that’s not how it works. I also think about Trump winning in the context of the migrants we met in Brooklyn telling us that settled Latinos had been very unsupportive of them when they arrived. In spite of Trump’s white nationalism, I wonder if settled immigrants also see new arrivals as a threat to their resources. I also wonder if settled immigrants don’t like the fact that new arrivals draw attention to their own foreignness, so that they worry that they, too, will be perceived as non-immigrants in the same way. I think this would have been very hard to do, but I do think a consideration of immigration policy needs to consider what voters are associating with migration. For example, how much of the inflationary crisis was blamed on immigrants in voters’ minds?

The next big question is what is going to happen when Trump comes into power. I agree that the appointments of Tom Homan and Stephen Miller to the head of ICE and white house deputy chief of staff, respectively, indicate Trump intends to follow through on his campaign pledges. So, I suppose the question is how bad will the impact really be and will those impacts change people’s minds about immigration? Almost 50% of farm workers in the US are undocumented migrants, so there could very reasonably be food shortages or at least inflation. Will Trump be able to conjure a new enemy then?