How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration

https://newrepublic.com/article/205915/democrats-can-play-offense-immigration

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https://archive.li/ySJI2

If all politics is spectacle in the era of Donald Trump, few episodes illustrate this more vividly than that created by Republican governors who bused asylum-seeking immigrants from their states into Northern cities during Joe Biden’s presidency. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida ensured that in the run-up to Trump’s 2024 reelection effort, the news media—and millions of social media feeds—were flooded with imagery of immigrants camped out in urban areas: desperate mobs swamping blue states and cities and straining their social service systems to the breaking point.

It was a reprehensible but crafty tactic: By manufacturing a wildly distorted and undeniably powerful and shareable display that became a stand-in for Biden’s Border Crisis, as Trump and Republicans branded it, these governors probably helped Trump get reelected in 2024. To this day, some reporters still describe it as akin to a political masterstroke.

Yet now something just as powerful is happening, albeit in the other direction, and, mystifyingly, the savvy media almost never describe it in such terms. A handful of Democratic governors have found an innovative way to leverage the power of spectacle against Trump by relentlessly highlighting his ICE raids, kidnappings, and paramilitary abuses, in part by encouraging countless ordinary people to join in the project of using their phones to, as the old left phrase has it, document the atrocities. And it’s working: It’s done real political damage to Trump, just as those GOP governors damaged Biden. It’s creating a cultural moment around immigration that’s perhaps more powerful than the one created by those GOP governors. And it’s forging a new way for Democrats to go on offense on this issue—if they’ll seize upon it.

The Democratic governors in question are JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California. This role was thrust upon them as stewards of the biggest, most densely populated, immigrant-heavy urban areas in the country—Chicago and Los Angeles—which are in the crosshairs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. This has created an opening to experiment with new kinds of opposition politics well suited to the information wars of the Trump years—the wars of spectacle. It’s no accident that both Pritzker and Newsom are plainly considering presidential runs in 2028. That’s incentivizing them to break through to national liberals and Democrats with novel forms of confrontation with Trump.

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