Donald Trump Created the Crisis at the Border

Mani Albrecht/U.S. Customs and Border Protection via ZUMA

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I haven’t seen anyone make an argument about immigration that seems kind of obvious to me—and, I suspect, to President Trump himself. Here it is.

Up until 2017, illegal immigration across the southern border was fine. It had been decreasing for years; it was at historically low levels; and there were no regular caravans of asylum seekers coming up from Guatemala. The first of the recent caravans began in 2018, and at first they seemed like the ones we had seen before from time to time: they started with a few thousand people and then shrunk as they got farther north. By the time they reached the US border, they were modest in size and created only modest problems.

But then, later in 2018, as Election Day approached, Trump suddenly went bananas. There were armies of migrants marching toward our border! Mexico has to stop it! Build the wall!

But this backfired. Not only did Republicans get walloped at the polls, but Trump’s constant howling acted as a great marketing campaign for the caravans. Instead of scaring migrants away, he made them more aware of asylum as a way of escaping from their country. The result was more caravans than ever before, and eventually, enough people at the border that we really did have something of a crisis on our hands. But it’s a crisis mostly of Trump’s own making. He decided that yelling about the brown hordes was more useful than making a deal of some kind with Democrats, and the result was more families seeking asylum than ever before.

I suspect that Trump understands this at a gut level. The migrant crisis happened on Trump’s watch. Presidents get blamed for stuff that happens on their watch. So Trump is taking the blame for the migrant crisis. He can squawk forever about Democrats not being willing to build his wall, but in the end he owns the migrant crisis and the public will hold him to account for it. I think that’s fair, since I suspect that putting immigration front and center for the past two years has largely caused the crisis. But even if you disagree, it doesn’t matter. Trump is president. Fair or not, he takes the blame. He knows this, and it panics him.

Trump himself, of course, is too dimwitted to think of any solution other than getting even louder and tougher. That’s not likely to work, but it’s his only play.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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