Two presidents will visit the southern US border Thursday, highlighting the centrality of migrant surges to November’s election in a spectacle that will explain why America’s polarized politics has for decades failed to fix a broken immigration system.
Joe Biden and his predecessor and possible successor, Donald Trump, will tour different sectors of the border in Texas as they spell out dueling arguments on what everyone now agrees is a crisis.
They’re already feuding over their first-term records on immigration, and their visits will mark the most visible and intense manifestation yet of their likely rematch.
The ex-president will be in Eagle Pass, scene of a border showdown between the Biden administration and Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. His visit will showcase his dark portrayal of a nation under siege from a torrent of what he claims are migrant criminals and invaders. It’s a narrative that he hopes will vault him to the presidency, just as it did in 2016. Trump is promising mass deportations and detention camps if he wins back the White House and is unleashing some of the most extreme anti-migrant rhetoric in modern American history. The apparent inhumanity is the point as he promises a strongman presidency of retribution and channels the anger of his base voters.
Biden, who’s been on the defensive over the border for much of his term, will visit Brownsville following his embrace of tougher rhetoric and policies. The president hopes to turn the tables on Republicans, including Trump, who crashed a bipartisan Senate bill brimming with many conservative goals, apparently to deprive him of an election-year victory. Biden’s first visit to the border in 13 months follows tense discussions in his inner circle as the immigration crisis morphed into a political liability after months of the White House…
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