The border and immigration are issues weighing heavily on the minds of voters. At Tuesday’s presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris ought to approach this issue more shrewdly, playing to her party’s strengths and framing it in a way that paints former President Donald Trump’s views on immigrants as the deterioration of truly American ideals.
Trump said in December, “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation.” With such openly bigoted language, Trump has brought nakedly authoritarian impulses into the heart of the country, poisoning the Enlightenment values that make America the beacon of democracy. It was during the Trump administration that everyday people witnessed migrant children being locked up in abhorrent detention facilities.
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Harris and Democrats are often playing defense to Republican attacks on immigration and border security. But they can and should make the case to voters that supporting America’s legacy of welcoming immigrants is the patriotic thing to do. At the debate, Harris should take the opportunity to lay out the legislative pathway toward resolving the issue, then pivot to a more fundamental framing that speaks to more latent, abstract and instinctual feelings — and Americans’ higher and more enduring values.
Harris and Democrats can and should make the case to voters that supporting America’s legacy of welcoming immigrants is the patriotic thing to do.
In pledging to sign the recent bipartisan border bill that Trump undermined for his own political benefit, Harris can claim to be acting in the public interest in the literal, practical sense of stemming the tide of border crossings. She can simultaneously frame the issue as a stemming of the tide of dissipating, un-American ideological extremism and culturally permissible autocratic impulses.
Many observers felt that the recent Democratic National Convention was an attempt to wrest patriotism from the right, with an emphasis on the immigrant story as intrinsic to the American dream. Standing up against Trump’s poisoning of enduring values is a further claim to not only patriotism, but also tradition, which, if argued adeptly in a debate, could frame MAGA as an aberration.
Presenting this as a twofold solution would appeal to and bind skeptics of the Democrats, who see them as ineffectual or lax on the border but have severe misgivings about Trump’s demagogic excesses and the extreme policies he and his allies are pushing for in a potential second administration.
Brad Evans and Henry Giroux, co-authors of “American Fascism: Fourteen Deadly Principles of Contemporary Politics,” argue: “Fascism operates at the level of desire: The desire for power, the desire to control, the desire to humiliate, the desire to violate. … Fascist desire both seduces and colonizes, embodies a ruthless appropriation of power and the loss of power over one’s sense of self-determination.” The word “colonizes” is prescient here, as it speaks to an ideological colonization that’s at least as threatening to the welfare of society as the literal influx of migrants at the border. Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically — they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are at that point now. That is the true poisoning of the blood of the country. And Harris can make the case to the American people that Trump, his party and their policies are the real “invasion” of American society.
Nicholas Sheppard
Nicholas Sheppard is a freelance journalist and author of the novels "Broken Play" and "How to Disappear Completely." 
