The phrase “Construct the Wall” has as soon as once more discovered its manner into the U.S. presidential election marketing campaign. Again when he was working for president in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump used it as a method of tapping right into a xenophobic and quasi-isolationist streak within the U.S. public. However this time round, the phrase and the difficulty of migration general has taken on added salience: Many Republicans have begun to seek advice from Trump’s Democratic opponent on this yr’s contest, Vice President Kamala Harris, as President Joe Biden’s “border czar,” as a manner of associating her in voters’ minds with what they characterize as Biden’s failure to rein in migration.
It’s true that Harris was charged with guiding the Biden administration’s coverage for stemming the move of undocumented immigrants on the U.S. southern border. However her precise function was to deal with diplomatic relations with the international locations of origin of the migrants arriving on the border, not truly to set border-management coverage. Nonetheless, the label has caught, at the very least amongst Republicans.
The broader cost by the Trump marketing campaign is that his administration had made progress on lowering the variety of people making an attempt to enter the U.S. on the border, just for that progress to be undone by the purported incompetence of the Biden administration, and particularly Harris. Trump isn’t alone amongst Republicans calling for harder measures on the U.S. border, however he particularly has lengthy made addressing the border his signature difficulty, as mirrored in his “Construct the Wall” catchphrase.
