What this tells us is that the country’s apparatus for handling asylum cases isn’t even remotely adequate to the challenge even in normal times. With 7,000 asylum seekers on their way to the border, and with more caravans likely if they succeed, the U.S. system will break down completely. Trump calls the country’s immigration laws “a disgrace,” and Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger considers that an “indisputably non-false thing” for the president to say.
So what can the president do to stem the tide and forestall future caravans? How can he meet the challenge without increasing tensions on this emotional issue? He has little maneuver room, given the powerful pro-immigration sentiments of elite institutions and the country’s upper crust, which has largely managed to insulate itself from the disruptions that occur in the wake of significant immigration waves (while availing itself of inexpensive household help). Consider just two headlines in two elite newspapers. The New York Times: “Trump Escalates Use of Migration as Election Ploy,” with the sub-headline “Stoking Voters’ Anxiety with Baseless Tale of Ominous Caravan.” And The Washington Post: “For Trump and GOP, a bet on fear, falsehoods.”
These headlines—and many more like them, as well as most of the coverage from the elite media—reflect the reality that many elites simply don’t see a problem here. And anybody who does is violating the norms of political discourse, as established and enforced by the elites. Or at least, the elites sought assiduously to enforce those norms of discourse and largely did—until Trump came along and exposed the profound fault line embedded in the country on this issue.
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