Chaos and cruelty at the southern border is part of Republicans' agenda

To judge by Sen. Katie Britt’s opposition response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last week, Republicans are aghast and dismayed by what Britt repeatedly called “the crisis at our southern border.”

Though it’s been debunked again and again, right-wing political operatives and pundits are obsessed with a mythical crime wave fueled by undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers.

In fact, the so-called crisis is a racist political strategy initiated by the presumptive Republican nominee and his enablers, and they have every reason to be delighted by the fear, resentment and anger they have aroused.

Meanwhile, desperate asylum seekers fleeing violence and persecution in their homelands are treated as political footballs flung to and from overwhelmed communities struggling to shelter them safely.

Britt’s deceptions were particularly egregious: When searching for an example of a crime on U.S. soil to link to Biden’s current border policies, her speechwriters were forced to reach both across the border, to Mexico, and back in time, to President George W. Bush’s administration. Confronted with the facts, Britt’s office countered with another myth linking asylum seekers to fentanyl, nearly all of which is smuggled through official ports of entry by people legally authorized to cross.

Make no mistake: the nation needs comprehensive immigration reform. The Max documentary “Gumbo Coalition,” about the work of the National Urban League and Unidos US, illustrates the heartbreaking human toll of our harsh immigration policies. But Britt and other allies of the GOP presidential nominee have no plan and no intention to fix a broken system. Human suffering — particularly when the face of that suffering is Brown or Black — is the fuel on which their electoral engines run.

Republicans use migrants as pawns

Partisan Republicans in Congress didn’t kill a bipartisan deal on border security to solve a migrant problem. They killed it to create one. Their flagrant disregard for public safety and the well-being of immigrants appalled even some of their most staunchly conservative colleagues. Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, who spent months negotiating the compromise, said a “popular commentator” told him that if he tries to move a bill to solve the border crisis, “I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott hasn’t transported more than 100,000 migrants to northern cities, Chicago among them, because he thought they’d find shelter and support there. He did it because he thought they would not — intentionally putting the migrants in harm’s way.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, jealous of the attention but experiencing no mass migration to his own state, lured migrants from San Antonio so he could stage his own racially motivated display of cruelty.

A nation of wealth and compassion is fully capable of absorbing an influx of migrants in an orderly and humane way, if it has the will. As Mayor Brandon Johnson recently observed, “We have at least 30,000 Ukrainian refugees in the city of Chicago, and no one has even noticed.” Unlike the Central American asylum seekers, who must wait a minimum of six months for a work permit, the Ukrainian refugees were permitted to work immediately. Thus, opponents of immigration reform can incite racism by misrepresenting Central American migrants as lazy and unwilling to work.

Unlike Central American asylum seekers, who have been subjected to the cruel whims of publicity-hungry southern governors, the Ukrainian refugees were settled according to a plan coordinated among federal officials, local governments, individual sponsors and community groups. Thus, opponents of immigration reform can incite racism by misrepresenting Central American migrants as chaotic, disruptive and overburdening.

The bipartisan border agreement that Congressional extremists tanked would have more than quadrupled the number of asylum officers and allowed for 100 more immigration judges to process the five- to seven-year backlog of claims and adjudicate more than 2 million pending cases. It would have provided $1.4 billion to overstretched cities and states struggling to provide critical services and expedited work permits to alleviate migrants’ reliance on those services.

Unfortunately, Congressional extremists and their chosen presidential nominee have chosen cruelty, chaos and racial resentment over common sense and human decency.

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League. He was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002.

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