Dear Kamala Harris, It’s Time Democrats Grow Some Balls on the Immigration Issue

Sara Towle originally published the following article on Tales of Humanity from the Borderlands on August 2, 2024.

Even Conservative Voters Say, “The Cruelty is Not Okay.”

I’ve been crisscrossing the US. Not as a candidate but as an author determined to touch hearts and change minds before the November election. My book Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands takes a deep dive into the most pressing issue of the 2024 election: immigration. My aim with the book was to harness the transformative power of storytelling to bring clarity to this woefully misunderstood issue.

I’ve found hope on the road. After eighteen events in eight cities reaching approximately 500 people, I can state that even conservative voters seem to know, on some level, they’re being lied to: that the “invasion” rhetoric and open-borders/closed-borders binary spoon-fed to them every day by the media is neither nuanced nor honest. From coast to coast, I’ve perceived a genuine hunger for truth and a willingness to eschew fear-mongering and seek a greater appreciation of this critical and highly complex issue.

Here are some anecdotes from the swing state of Michigan: the home state of the Reagan Democrat, where folks have long defied political groupings and pollsters’ predictions…

There was the construction contractor, whose company had been compromised, he stated, from Inauguration Day 2017. He struggled to maintain a full crew of skilled craftsmen until Venezuelan builders found their way to Michigan in the last few years. He credits the Biden administration with this change. Though he voted for Trump in 2016, he did not in 2020, and will not again.

There was the healthcare administrator, who drove an hour to attend one of my talks. It makes no sense to US society to deny basic healthcare to newcomers, he expressed during our Q&A. People forced to seek medical attention in emergency room settings when health conditions have reached critical status costs the US taxpayer more, he explained.

He pointed to the number of newly arriving doctors, nurses, pharmacists, laboratory technicians, home-care providers, etc., whose skills and talents could strengthen the US healthcare system — a tale I tell in the profiles of medical professionals, who might have been first responders during the COVID crisis had they not been exiled to cartel-controlled northern Mexico by Trump’s Remain in Mexico and Title 42 abominations.

There was the US Army veteran, who served on the heavily militarized 38th parallel of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Informed by this first-hand experience of border violence, he bemoaned the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico borderlands. He was shocked to learn — and he was not alone — that the US Border Industrial Complex is not limited to the southwest: Customs and Border Protection claims a 100-mile policing jurisdiction emanating from coastal and land boundaries that subsumes the whole of his home state. (An eye-opening 2021 American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan report suggests that US-Canada border militarization is not far behind its southern counterpart.)

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Finally, there was the older gentleman, who came armed with all the slogans you might expect.  “A nation without a border is not a nation,” he stated, invoking just one.

“I don’t disagree,” I responded. “But do they need to be so cruel?”

I asked him if he felt it was right for the world’s wealthiest nation and “leader of the free world” to slam the doors shut on the very people our economic policies and forever wars displace?

He challenged me to explain the phrase “forever wars,” which took me aback. I assumed everyone understood that aspect of US adventurism abroad. But another octogenarian in the audience spurred me on. “Yes,” he said, “What do you mean by that?”

I began my trip through time with the bloody war of aggression that forced Mexico to hand over more than half of its territorial holdings to the US, defining our southern border in 1848. I wove through the series of US occupations, police actions, and interventions, sparked by the 1898 Spanish–American War, from the Philippines to the Caribbean and Central America. I evoked the undermining of Haiti for France; the CIA-orchestrated Guatemalan coup for United Fruit; the economic warfare against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela; Nixon’s Operation Condor; Reagan’s Dirty Wars; and the so-called Wars on Drugs and Terror we are waging today.

By the time I finished, these gentlemen recognized that there is no “invasion” at the US southern border — there are no tanks or uniforms or guns. There are just people on the run from harm, horror, and hunger caused by decades of US resource and labor exploitation.

They saw the “Biden’s-open-borders” trope for what it is: malarkey. Our borders are only open to goods and money. People must have the right papers to pass.

The two were not the only white, suburban, red-tinged Michigan voters to be persuaded by the facts. Like me, when I first discovered the brokenness of our immigration system and how it compromises our legal, faith-based, and national values, they became outraged, too. They bought my book, posed for a selfie, and left promising to recommend it to others.

So the common ground I’ve found while crisscrossing the US is this: once the deliberate dehumanization foundational to our immigration system is exposed, everyone can agree — the cruelty is not okay.

Unless you’re a demagogue or profiteer who benefits from it.

It’s time members of the Democratic Party grow some balls on the immigration issue, including such thought leaders as Crooked Media hosts. (I love you Dan Pfeiffer, Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett. But you gotta read my book.)