The Republican Party owns the South Texas border.
Joe Biden let them have it. His ultimate concession was his weekend visit to El Paso.
Throughout his first two years in office, the president had ignored growing calls to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, which the GOP has made its cause célèbre since June 2015, when Donald Trump began his first presidential campaign with a lengthy excoriation of immigration, particularly from the south. After a sudden announcement last week, Biden made his first trip to the border, a quick tour of immigration facilities in El Paso.
Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez and others who had begged Biden to visit the Rio Grande Valley didn’t criticize his trip elsewhere. They said they’re just glad he decided to visit the border; the exact site didn’t matter.
To be honest, we see little practical benefit to such trips. They basically are photo opportunities, with choreographed tours and public announcements against carefully chosen backdrops. While officials might spend some time with friendly border officials and political allies, they rarely spend time with service workers who actually work with the immigrants and can best describe the challenges they, and the immigrants, face as a result of our immigration policy — or lack of it.
It’s pretty much all for show, about making a political statement.
But that’s the point. Trump’s preferred place to make those statements was the Valley. He made frequent visits here to bemoan the numbers of foreign nationals seeking to cross our borders and to voice his support for those who want to keep them out. Likewise, Gov. Greg Abbott, who has picked up the cause since Trump’s ouster in 2020, also has come to the Valley several times. He even spent Election Night here and scheduled a post-election victory party in Edinburg, although he ultimately didn’t attend after an unexpected poor showing at South Texas polls.
That lack of support for Abbott could have emboldened Biden to come to this same area and stand up to Abbott and Trump in the very place they have claimed as their own.
They and other Republicans have adopted an aggressive, confrontational style of politics in recent years. Biden could have shown confidence in his policies, and in his purpose, by responding to their border rhetoric in a similar style.
Certainly, those policies affect the entire 2,000-mile southern border, and El Paso, Del Rio and other areas are just as important as the Valley. However, Biden’s decision to avoid an area that the Republican leaders have claimed as their own, especially after seeing on Nov. 8 that Democratic Party support remains strong here, could be seen as an unwillingness, or an inability, to confront his critics directly. Whether true or not, his opponents could argue that Biden’s avoidance suggests he doesn’t have an answer to their politics, or to their positions.
In visiting the border, the president at least let people know he hears us. The location and cursory nature of his visit, however, does little to raise hopes that his visit will be followed by any substantive action toward addressing our immigration problems.
