Washington, DC – A must-read MSNBC opinion column by Julio Ricardo Varela, political commentator and founder of the popular Latino Rebels website, “Ron DeSantis Threatens Worse Border Policies Than Donald Trump,” captures the scope and dangerous implications of DeSantis on immigration.
The column, which we excerpt below and includes detailed quotes from America’s Voice Political Director Zachary Mueller, also includes the important observation that Republicans’ recent anti-immigrant extremism hasn’t worked as an electoral strategy outside the MAGA base. As Varela writes:
“Fortunately, the kind of political game he [DeSantis] and Republicans are playing hasn’t led to many recent wins. Cries of an immigrant invasion and the so-called great replacement theory didn’t lead to the results Republicans hoped for in 2018, 2020 or 2022. Even so, as DeSantis’ new plan illustrates, the immigration red meat appears too tempting for Republicans to pass up.”
America’s Voice has detailed a similar point: in 2022 and every cycle since the start of the Trump administration, Republicans’ anti-immigrant extremism – despite a massive investment – failed to deliver and may have backfired and alienated the general electorate (see our detailed 2022 post-election report for the evidence).
Find key excerpts of the new Julio Ricardo Varela column below:
“Ron DeSantis on Monday released his “No Excuses” immigration enforcement platform, which officially classifies stopping migration as a military operation and endorses the use of “deadly force” against migrants suspected of running drugs.
…DeSantis’ 2024 strategy appears to be to take the Trump rhetoric that equated Mexicans to rapists and make it even more extreme. He calls his plan “No Excuses” to argue that Trump didn’t follow through on his anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“It is hard to overstate the dangerous implications of Ron DeSantis’ approach to immigration,” Zachary Mueller, political director of the immigrant rights group America’s Voice, said Tuesday. “From ‘invasion’ to ‘deadly force’ to ‘stone cold dead’ to ‘act of war’ to ‘a duty to protect the country,’ he is relying on and mainstreaming a collection of phrases and ideas that are flat-out incitements to violence and have been linked to domestic terror attacks by white nationalists.” Mueller also said DeSantis’ “dangerous language and ideas should be viewed through the lens of public safety more than political positioning and horse race maneuvering. We cannot become numb to this stuff.”
He’s right. Words have power. They have even more power when they’re wielded by presidential candidates or presidents themselves. Even deadly power.
Around the same time in 2018 that people on the right were trying to whip up fear over a caravan of migrants moving toward the U.S., a gunman in Pittsburgh attacked the Tree of Life synagogue because it was one of the synagogues participating in an event sponsored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which was open about assisting asylum-seekers from Central America. The gunman, who was found guilty of 63 federal counts this month, claimed in social media posts that HIAS was bringing in migrants to do violence in the U.S.
In remarks to reporters on Nov. 1, 2018, days before the midterm elections, then-President Trump said: “At this very moment, large, well-organized caravans of migrants are marching towards our southern border. Some people call it an ‘invasion.’ It’s like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border.”
In August 2019, a 21-year-old white man killed 23 people inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border with Mexico. Shortly before that, he posted an online screed claiming that the attack would be “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
… there’s no reason we shouldn’t call out the danger of Republicans’ whipping up anti-Latino sentiment …. the politics matters, too. Fortunately, the kind of political game he and Republicans are playing hasn’t led to many recent wins. Cries of an immigrant invasion and the so-called great replacement theory didn’t lead to the results Republicans hoped for in 2018, 2020 or 2022. Even so, as DeSantis’ new plan illustrates, the immigration red meat appears too tempting for Republicans to pass up.
… The Republican Party’s old, white electorate is getting even older, while Democrats tend to have a younger and more multiracial and multiethnic electorate … to win Latinos outside Florida, DeSantis would need to tap into voters of Mexican descent … Essentially advocating for a war against the country where their families are from is most likely not a position most U.S. voters of Mexican descent would support. Democrats would be wise to exploit that. They should also call more attention to DeSantis’ punitive anti-immigrant state law that has immigrants leaving the state because they don’t feel welcome there.
All the signs from the midterms show that Republicans will fail again unless they change the way they talk about immigration. The fear, however, is that they will continue this rhetoric and put the lives of more people at risk. There are no excuses for that.”
The entire column is here.
