Biden team pushes back on Trump’s migration analysis: ‘He’s not interested in securing our border’

Joe Biden may be isolated in Delaware while he recovers from the coronavirus, but his campaign has been quick to respond to the half-truths that Donald Trump uttered on Thursday night during his speech on the stage of the Republican convention. “He is not interested in making our border secure,” the Democrats say. “Donald Trump and the Trumpist Republicans killed one of the toughest and most necessary initiatives to make the border more secure,” the team of the current president of the United States said in a statement. The initiative referred to in the text is the bipartisan bill to strengthen border security that Republicans blocked in the Senate in May. The statement then recalls that Biden has implemented drastic measures, especially a controversial executive order to restrict the right to asylum, which have managed to reduce the irregular entries of migrants in an election year.

Once the initial conciliatory tone with which Trump began his 92-minute speech had faded, the former president returned to the issues that most mobilize his electoral base. One of them is illegal immigration. He said that undocumented immigrants have “killed hundreds of thousands of people a year” and that people who have arrived in the United States from other countries have taken jobs away from blacks and Latinos. The reality reflected in the official figures is the opposite: a decrease in violent crimes, which are at their lowest point in the last 50 years. Academic studies such as the one led by Stanford University economics professor Ran Abramitzky also reflect that immigrant men are 60% less likely to end up in jail than those born in the United States.

At another point, Trump claimed that the governments of Venezuela and El Salvador were sending assassins north, a claim for which the Republican’s own campaign team has been unable to provide any evidence.

During the Republican convention, some of the speakers also painted an idyllic picture of the Trump era, which some Democrats have been quick to deny. “Homicides are up 30%, one of the largest increases in history,” said Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, a rising politician in Biden’s party. Newsom said on his social networks that during each of the four years of the last Republican administration, cuts to the security forces budget were proposed. The California governor criticized Trump’s speech, which he defined with three adjectives: “Boring, lazy, false.”

The speeches at the convention that preceded the speech by the party’s standard-bearer focused heavily on the economy. Even former wrestler Hulk Hogan, who was one of the stars of the night, dedicated a few words to the increase in prices and the hyperinflation that the United States has experienced and that has mainly affected ordinary Americans, said the former wrestling champion. Biden’s campaign has also counterattacked against this type of statement by claiming that the only ones to benefit from Trumpism’s economic policies were the highest-income citizens. “As president, Donald Trump gave billions to the rich in tax benefits,” they say.

Democratic Governor Newsom, for example, has recalled that GDP during his presidency had its worst drop since 1947, there was a trade deficit and 2.9 million jobs were lost, including 154,000 in the manufacturing sector. The White House added, for its part: “[Trump] He left office with the worst record of job creation since Herbert Hoover (the US president from 1929-1933).”

Steven Rattner, a financial analyst who led an auto industry restructuring during the Obama administration, also provided context. “Trump claims he will reduce debt, but his administration has borrowed for the next ten years at a rate that far outpaces Biden’s,” he said. According to the expert, the former’s administration added a net $8.4 trillion [7,7 billones de euros] to the public accounts, while the debt contracted during the administration of the current president is 4.3 billion dollars [3,9 billones de euros].

One of the harshest reactions to Trump’s speech was offered by the United Auto Workers, the union for workers in the automotive industry. “Donald Trump is a scab and a billionaire. It is them he represents. We know very well which side we are on. And it is not his,” wrote the organization, which has 400,000 members, on X. The message was published after Trump called for the resignation of the union leadership for “allowing” factories in the sector to be announced in countries such as China or Mexico. “We will bring them back,” said the candidate.

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