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      How Biden’s Promises to Reverse Trump’s Immigration Policies Crumbled

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      President Biden has tried to contain a surge of migration by embracing, or at least tolerating, some of his predecessor’s approaches.Immigration was dead simple when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was campaigning for president: It was an easy way to attack Donald J. Trump as a racist, and it helped to rally Democrats with the promise of a more humane border policy.Nothing worked better than Mr. Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” that he was building along the southern border. Its existence was as much a metaphor for the polarization inside America as it was a largely ineffective barrier against foreigners fleeing to the United States from Central America.“There will not be,” Mr. Biden proclaimed as he campaigned against Mr. Trump in the summer of 2020, “another foot of wall constructed.”But a massive surge of migration in the Western Hemisphere has scrambled the dynamics of an issue that has vexed presidents for decades, and radically reshaped the political pressures on Mr. Biden and his administration. Instead of becoming the president who quickly reversed his predecessor’s policies, Mr. Biden has repeatedly tried to curtail the migration of a record number of people — and the political fallout that has created — by embracing, or at least tolerating, some of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant approaches.Even, it turns out, the wall.On Thursday, Biden administration officials formally sought to waive environmental regulations to allow construction of up to 20 additional miles of border wall in a part of Texas that is inundated by illegal migration. The move was a stunning reversal on a political and moral issue that had once galvanized Mr. Biden and Democrats like no other.The funds for the wall had been approved by Congress during Mr. Trump’s tenure, and on Friday, the president said he had no power to block their use.Hundreds of those seeking asylum in the United States wait to be processed near the border wall in El Paso, Texas.Justin Hamel for The New York Times“The wall thing?” Mr. Biden asked reporters on Friday. “Yeah. Well, I was told that I had no choice — that I, you know, Congress passes legislation to build something, whether it’s an aircraft carrier wall or provide for a tax cut. I can’t say, ‘I don’t like it. I’m not going to do it.’”White House officials said that they tried for years, without success, to get Congress to redirect the wall money to other border priorities. And they said Mr. Biden’s lawyers had advised that the only way to get around the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to spend money as Congress directs, was to file a lawsuit. The administration chose not to do so. The money had to be spent by the end of December, the officials said.Asked on Thursday whether he thought a border wall works, Mr. Biden — who has long said a wall would not be effective — said simply: “No.”Still, human rights groups are furious, accusing the president of abandoning the principles on which he campaigned. They praise him for opening new, legal opportunities for some migrants, including thousands from Venezuela, but question his recent reversals on enforcement policy.“It doesn’t help this administration politically, to continue policies that they were very clear they were against,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant rights organization. “That muddles the message and undermines the contrast that they’re trying to make when it comes to Republicans.”“This president came into office with a lot of moral clarity about where the lines were,” she added, noting that he and his aides “need to sort of decide who they are on this issue.”Mr. Biden had previously adopted some of his predecessor’s policies, including the pandemic-era Title 42 restrictions that blocked most migrants at the border until they were lifted earlier this year. Those have still failed to slow illegal immigration, and the issue has become incendiary inside his own party, driving wedges between Mr. Biden and some of the country’s most prominent Democratic governors and mayors, whose communities are being taxed by the cost of providing for the new arrivals.Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York, has blamed the administration for a situation that he says could destroy his city. J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois and an ally of Mr. Biden, wrote this week in a letter to the president that a “lack of intervention and coordination” by Mr. Biden’s government at the border “has created an untenable situation for Illinois.”Bedding for asylum seekers temporarily housed at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIn comments to reporters at an event opposing book banning, Mr. Pritzker said that he had recently “spoken with the White House” on the matter “to make sure that they heard us.”The moment underscores the new reality for the president as he prepares to campaign for a second term. His handling of immigration has become one of his biggest potential liabilities, with polls showing deep dissatisfaction among voters about how he deals with the new arrivals. With record numbers of migrants streaming across the border, he can no longer portray it in the simple terms he did a few years ago.Since taking office, Mr. Biden has tried to balance his stated desire for a more humane approach with strict enforcement that aides believe is critical to ensure that migrants do not believe the border is open to anyone.This spring, the president announced new legal options for some migrants from several countries — Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti. He also has expanded protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants already in the United States, allowing more of them to work while they are in the country temporarily.But the more welcoming policies have been balanced by tougher ones.Earlier this year, Mr. Biden approved a new policy that had the effect of denying most immigrants the ability to seek asylum in the United States, a move that human rights groups noted was very similar to an approach that Mr. Trump hailed as a way to “close the border” to immigrants he wanted to keep out.The president and his aides have responded to the increased number of migrants by calling for more border patrol agents. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, bragged on Wednesday about the surge in border enforcement that Mr. Biden has pushed for.“Let’s not forget,” she said. “The president got 25,000 Border Patrol, additional Border Patrol law enforcement, at the border.”In a budget request to Congress, the Biden administration has asked for an additional $4 billion for border enforcement, including 4,000 more troops, 1,500 more border patrol agents, overtime pay for federal border personnel and new technology to detect drug trafficking.And on Thursday, the administration announced that it would resume deporting Venezuelans who arrive illegally, essentially conceding that the policy of creating legal immigration options from that country had failed to stem the tide of new arrivals like they had expected.Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, said Mr. Biden proposed an immigration overhaul on his first day in office that he noted has been blocked by Republican lawmakers.“He has used every available lever — enforcement, deterrence and diplomacy — to address historic migration across the Western Hemisphere,” Mr. LaBolt said, adding that the administration is “legally compelled” to spend the wall money. “President Biden has consistently made clear that this is not the most effective approach to securing our border.”Despite early reports that the number of migrants had dropped this summer, crossings have soared again this fall. Border Patrol agents arrested about 200,000 migrants in September, the highest number this year, according to an administration official who spoke anonymously to confirm the preliminary data.Still, the administration’s announcement about new construction of a wall was a surprise to many of the president’s allies, who had repeatedly heard Mr. Biden join them in condemning Mr. Trump for trying to seal the country off from immigrants.On Friday, the president, who has long insisted a wall would be ineffective, said he has no power to block the use of funds already approved during Mr. Trump’s tenure.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesIn a notice published in the Federal Register on Thursday, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said that easing environmental and other laws was necessary to expedite construction of sections of a border wall in South Texas, where thousands of migrants have been crossing the Rio Grande daily to reach U.S. soil.“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States,” Mr. Mayorkas said.In a statement later, Mr. Mayorkas made clear the administration would prefer to spend the money on other areas, “including state-of the-art border surveillance technology and modernized ports of entry.”There have always been barriers at the border, and Democrats have voted for funding to construct them. But before Mr. Trump arrived on the scene, they were placed in high-traffic locations and were often short fences or barriers designed to prevent cars from crossing.Mr. Trump changed that. He pushed for construction of a wall across the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico, eventually building or reinforcing barriers along roughly 450 miles. And he insisted on a 30-foot tall wall made of steel bollards, painted black to be more intimidating. At various points, Mr. Trump said he wanted to install sharp, pointed spikes at the top of the wall to skewer migrants who tried to climb over it.The walls being constructed by Mr. Biden’s administration will be different, border officials said. They will be 18 feet tall, not 30. And they will be movable, not permanent, to allow more flexibility and less environmental damage.But the image of an ominous and even dangerous barrier — designed to send a message of “keep out” to anyone who approached — underscored the yearslong opposition from Democrats, including Mr. Biden, to its construction. At the end of 2018, the federal government shut down for 35 days — the longest in its history — over Democratic refusal to meet Mr. Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion to build the wall.For Mr. Biden, the politics of immigration have changed significantly since then.Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York put it bluntly in a letter to the president at the end of August, as New York City struggled to deal with tens of thousands of new migrants.“The challenges we face demand a much more vigorous federal response,” she wrote. “It is the federal government’s direct responsibility to manage and control the nation’s borders. Without any capacity or responsibility to address the cause of the migrant influx, New Yorkers cannot then shoulder these costs.” More

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      House Speaker, Ukraine War, Border Wall: Trump’s Influence Reaches a Post-Presidency Peak

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      A Republican leadership vacuum has allowed the former president to exert power over his party — and in the country — in a way that lacks much historical precedent.From a House leadership contest to the southwestern border and a foreign war, Donald J. Trump’s influence this week seemed to pervade the nation’s politics more than it has since the first weeks after his exit from the White House.Not since Jan. 27, 2021, when Representative Kevin McCarthy flew to Mar-a-Lago to mend the rift with Mr. Trump, has the former president’s sway been as widespread or as palpable.Mr. Trump’s successor, President Biden, resumed construction of a border wall that will always be stamped with Mr. Trump’s name and restarted deporting Venezuelan migrants, following a hiatus when the Biden administration extended protective status for those fleeing that devastated nation.The House Republican Conference launched its search for a new speaker following the historic vanquishing of the last one, Mr. McCarthy, and again, Mr. Trump was calling the shots. Some House Republicans even suggested handing the gavel to their unofficial leader, Mr. Trump, before he stepped in to try to anoint Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, with an effusive endorsement that dwelt heavily on the congressman’s high school and college wrestling records.Lurking next is mid-November, when funding for the federal government expires and Mr. Trump’s policy demands will overtake the debate in Congress: halting U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, stiffening border controls and neutering the Justice Department as it pursues felony prosecutions that threaten Mr. Trump’s grip on the reins of his party — and also his freedom.U.S. Border Patrol agents patrolling for migrants in La Grulla, Texas, in 2017. Starr County, where La Grulla is located, is where 20 miles of wall are to be built.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThat a twice-impeached, quadruply indicted former president is exercising this much influence is baffling to historians far more used to defeated or disgraced politicians fading into obscurity. David Blight, a professor at Yale University who specializes in the dissolution of American unity before the Civil War, struggled for a precedent.“Let’s think of Nixon: What influence did he really have in Washington? He got on TV, did the Frost interviews, but real influence on the Republican Party? No. They tried to become something other than the Nixon Party,” Mr. Blight said.“I don’t know of another analogy except in authoritarian regimes elsewhere,” he concluded, pointing to on-again, off-again dictatorships in Africa and South America and to the attempted returns of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte.But an extraordinary vacuum of leadership has given the former president an in, and he has taken it with zeal. The Republican speaker’s chair is vacant, swept clean by internecine conflict. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is diminished by age, health issues and a Senate Republican Conference increasingly willing to challenge his authority.And the Democrats, led by an aging and soft-spoken president who is temperamentally Mr. Trump’s opposite, are facing issues they cannot solve on their own but without partners across the aisle to help address, including a broken immigration system, the stalled war in Ukraine, crime, labor unrest and economic uncertainty.The White House has struggled to control the narrative on recent events — Mr. Biden insisted, for instance, that his administration’s decision to waive more than 20 federal laws and regulations and resume construction of a border wall was merely the fulfillment of a legally binding appropriation signed into law in 2019 — even as his secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, attested in writing to “an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States.”President Joe Biden resumed construction of a border wall that will always be stamped with Mr. Trump’s name and restarted deporting Venezuelan migrants, leading to a struggle to control the narrative on recent events.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump’s presence looms undeniably large. A chorus on the right embraced the border decision, claiming “Trump was right” as it still sank in among Democrats. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading voice on the Democratic left, dismissed the excuse that the administration was somehow “required to expand construction of the border wall.”“The president needs to take responsibility for this decision and reverse course,” she wrote Thursday evening.Immigrant rights groups are beginning to speak out, using the same accusations of cruelty and callousness toward Mr. Biden that they routinely used against Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Jordan may have given the combative Ohio Republican an edge over the House majority leader, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, in his quest for the speakership, but Mr. Jordan still found himself on Fox News praising Mr. Trump as the best president of his lifetime and the likely next president, to head off suggestions from colleagues that the former president would be a better leader for the House.All of this was extraordinary for a man who is, at this very moment, on civil trial in New York for business fraud, whose co-defendants go on trial in Fulton County, Ga., within weeks on charges that they conspired with him to overturn a presidential election, and whose lawyers are maneuvering to delay or dismiss three felony trials, any of which could put him behind bars.His own former lawyer, Ty Cobb, told a panel at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics this week that Mr. Trump has no legal defense in the federal cases he faces. And, Mr. Cobb added, given federal sentencing guidelines, “a judge is going to have to depart pretty aggressively, under difficult circumstances, if Trump’s convicted, to keep him out of jail.”Yet turmoil has always been an asset to Mr. Trump, a cauldron into which he has always been more than willing to plunge.He did nothing to save Mr. McCarthy, showing no appreciation for the man he once called “my Kevin,” and who rescued him at perhaps his darkest political moment, when even Mr. McConnell was suggesting Mr. Trump face criminal charges for a Capitol riot he was “practically and morally responsible for provoking.” The former president basked briefly in the accolades of his House Republican acolytes who floated his name for speaker before ending such talk with his endorsement of Mr. Jordan.Kevin McCarthy addressed reporters after being ousted as speaker on Tuesday.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesFor now, much of this is only theater. But when a stopgap spending bill expires in mid-November, fealty to Mr. Trump will have real consequences. The next speaker will still be facing a Democratic Senate and president, but will also face the impossible demands dictated by Mr. Trump to his loyal troops in the House.As the migrant crisis worsens in Democratic cities, Mr. Biden could well be pushed further in Mr. Trump’s direction on new border controls. New York Mayor Eric Adams traveled to Mexico this week with a message to deter migrants from coming to the United States. Chicago’s young and liberal mayor, Brandon Johnson, said Wednesday he would also travel to see the porous frontier with Mexico “firsthand,” as migrant buses reach his city by the dozen each day.Mr. Trump’s influence could also imperil Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia.The 45-day measure to keep the government open dropped additional military aid to Ukraine, and supporters of such aid will be hard-pressed to resume the flow through the next spending measures. Mr. Trump’s “America First” mantra was long dismissed by critics as an isolationism that leaned the country toward Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.Ending American assistance to a Ukraine battling an invading army from Moscow would be the apotheosis of Trumpist foreign policy — and could be brought about even without Mr. Trump in the White House.But for all those possible Republican victories, Mr. Trump’s most pressing personal demand — defunding the prosecutions of him — almost certainly cannot be met, raising once again the prospect of a pointless government shutdown.At some point, Republicans in Washington may have to choose between Mr. Trump and governance. More

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      ‘Republicans Own These Issues, and They Can Hurt Democrats’

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      To advance his relentless political ambition, Donald Trump has ridden a promise, a commitment and a pledge.A promise to end the illegal flow of migrants, drugs, cash and guns “across our border.”A commitment to stop other countries seeking “to suck more blood out of the United States.”A pledge to impose law-and-order solutions on cities “where there is a true breakdown in the rule of law,” describing a majority-Black city like Baltimore as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and warning gangs of shoplifters just last week that if he is elected again, “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”How relevant are those themes going to be heading into the 2024 election? Will they work to attract enough voters for him to win? Do they address the sources of voter anxiety?Here are some sources of voter angst that have Trump relishing his rematch with President Biden. Crime — urban and rural — has become more unsettling and threatening. Carjacking, for example, is on the rise of (growing in Washington, D.C., from 152 in 2019 to 485 in 2022). Murder in major cities is up 33.7 percent from 2019 to 2022; gun assaults are up 43.2 percent. Shoplifting in Trump’s telling creates an image of urban lawlessness reinforced by liberal prosecutors’ adoption of policies like no cash bail and the non-prosecution of misdemeanors. The southern border has become increasingly porous, with the number of migrants crossing into the United States in August breaking all records as the U.S. Border Patrol arrested over 91,000 migrants. Southern Republicans, in turn, have shipped migrants by bus to New York, Washington, Chicago and other municipalities.The incumbent president, Joe Biden — fairly or unfairly — does not convey the image of a leader in control of events.The damage inflicted on students in public schools by the Covid lockdown, by school shootings and by conflicts over race, gender and sexual identity — particularly over what can and cannot be discussed or taught — is broadly undermining confidence in American education.And then there is the problem of inflation, which for many Americans is eating away at their sense of security and their standard of living.The reality is that Trump has plenty to capitalize on, but the question remains: With his venomous and often incoherent rants, with 91 felony charges against him, with his White House record of chaos and mismanagement, has Trump worn out his welcome with all but his hard-core MAGA loyalists?I posed these questions to a cross-section of scholars and political operatives. Their responses suggest that Trump might well be a competitive nominee in 2024, with the potential to win a second term in the White House.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, captured in an email the conflicting forces at work as the next election approaches: “Americans see the collapse of safety in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco and blame the entire Democratic Party for the policies of a fringe extreme.”Westwood cited data in a Pew Research study showing that “a majority of Republicans and Independents and a near majority of Democrats (49 percent) reported that violent crime was important to their 2022 vote (including 81 percent of Blacks).”While “Trump is successfully branding Democrats as weak on crime and immigration,” Westwood continued, it remains uncertain whether he can persuade voters that he is the better choice: “It is hard for Trump to convince Americans that he is the tough-on-crime candidate while simultaneously demanding the destruction of the Department of Justice and railing against the integrity of the judicial system.”In the case of immigration, Westwood argued, “Democrats don’t seem to have a coherent policy they can sell to Americans.”“As with crime and immigration, the state of the economy should be wind behind a Republican’s sails,” he added.Trump, however, in Westwood’s view, remains an albatross strangling Republican ambitions:By sticking with Trump the party is potentially sacrificing huge advantages to support an elderly man who could spend the rest of his life in prison. This is a Republican election to lose, but Trump might just help the Democrats survive their own policy failures.In an April Brookings essay, “The Geography of Crime in Four U.S. Cities: Perceptions and Reality,” Hanna Love and Tracy Hadden Loh argue:While stoking fears of crime is an age-old election tactic, something feels different about its salience in the pandemic-era landscape. Faced with slow-recovering urban cores and predictions of an “urban doom loop,” many pundits and urban observers are returning to a playbook not fully deployed since the 1990s — pointing to public safety as the primary cause of a host of complex and interconnected issues, from office closures to public transit budget shortfalls to the broader decline of cities.Love and Loh interviewed nearly 100 business leaders, public officials and residents of New York, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago. Their primary finding:Respondents overwhelmingly pointed to crime — not the desire for flexible work arrangements — as the top barrier to preventing workers’ return to office. Across all four cities, the vast majority of resident, major employers, property owners, small business owners and other stakeholders reporting rising rates of violent crime and property crime downtown and indicators of “disorder” (such as public drug use) as the top barriers to stopping workers from coming back to the office — and thus impeding downtown recovery.Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Duke, wrote by email that both immigration and crime pose difficult political choices for Democrats, especially those with progressive ideals: “First for the migrant question, any large uptick in marginalized populations that is visible to native populations have the potential both to create unease among those populations and to be blamed for any increases in the risk of victimization that folks feel.”How much does this hurt the Democrats?“I would say a whole heck of a lot potentially unless they are willing to adopt the sort of stance to crime and punishment that President Bill Clinton took in his 1992 campaign and presidency.”The result?This rise in visible criminal activity and social unrest leaves Democrats where they essentially either give up their values in terms of crime and punishment and keep voters in the middle or hold the line in terms of crime and punishment (continuing to argue for more progressive policies) and risk losing some votes. It’s not a great spot.Wildeman is not alone in his belief that these issues are quite likely to work to the detriment of Biden and the Democratic Party generally.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, emailed his view thatthe themes that are to the Democrats’ disadvantage are more relevant than they were in 2016. The burden posed by migrants is a greater issue, and the increase in the crime rate and murder rate, along with the inability of law enforcement to control rampant shoplifting in some cities, can even make the Democrats’ base among minority voters and college educated voters uneasy, and also women — varying geographically.“Republicans own these issues,” Shapiro pointed out, “and they can hurt Democrats. These issues along with education, race and gender identity will help Republicans running for Congress and state offices, even if they benefit Trump less due to his other serious baggage.”Roland Neil, a social scientist at the RAND Corporation, also pointed to the dangers facing Biden and his fellow Democrats:Two things we can be certain of: first, violent crime increased dramatically in many cities, especially when the pandemic hit; and second, this coincided with various progressive criminal justice reform efforts, such as bail reform, more lenient prosecution in some jurisdictions and calls to defund the police.While the incidence of violent crime has subsided in recent months, Neil noted:Focusing on that misses the point, since the issues drawing attention are all real problems facing cities and the public has taken notice. They should not be dismissed as trivial, as they genuinely impact safety and quality of life.There is no consistent and reliable data, Neil wrote, “for crimes and disorder that have been drawing much attention, like carjacking, retail theft by flash mobs, open air drug markets and the changing nature of encounters with homeless people.”That said, he added, “there is evidence that carjackings are up in several cities since the pandemic. Also, drug overdose deaths are at historical highs, and motor vehicle theft is up sharply in many cities.”Philadelphia, according to Neil, “presents an interesting case: shootings and murder are down by about a quarter this year (from a very high level), but flash mob retail thefts likely create the sense of a city that is losing control.”Phillip Atiba Solomon, a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale, stressed the racial implications of Trump’s strategy in his emailed reply to my inquiry, arguing that these have the strong potential to sway white voters:Broadly, I think the themes you outline can be simplified to, “We’re the victims, and the victimizers are getting away with murder.” And, yes, I think they’ll apply this year as well as in any year when the “we” includes a coalition of elites and paycheck-to-paycheck working folks, each of whom reasonably see themselves as losing ground they once felt confident belonged to them (however ill-gotten that ground was in the first place).According to Solomon:This is a country that generally makes life hard for working people and is busily shifting symbols around that are meaningful to people who identify as white. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to manipulate feelings that life is not fair into feelings that “we” are being persecuted by “those people” who are stealing what “rightfully belongs to us” — literally, figuratively and with all appropriate scare quotes.The current political environment entails both conflict between the parties and disputes within each of the parties. Neil Malhotra, a political scientist at Stanford, described this ambiguity in an email:The conventional wisdom is that any Republican candidate for president, not just Trump, should focus on three issues: inflation, immigration and crime. Trump may be uniquely positioned to take advantage of these three issues, particularly since he has a more moderate image than his competitors on issues where Republicans are disadvantaged: abortion and entitlements — Social Security and Medicare.The flip side, Malhotra wrote, “is that the Democratic candidate for president should be focusing the campaign around abortion rights, climate change, health care and economic inequality.”Malhotra cited a Pew Research survey from June, “Inflation, Health Costs, Partisan Cooperation Among the Nation’s Top Problems,” that broke down the issues on which voters agree more with Republicans than Democrats and vice versa.Republicans had the edge on economic policy (42-30), immigration (41-31) and crime (40-30). Democrats led on climate change policy (41-27), abortion (43-31) and health care (39-27). The smallest gaps were on foreign policy, favoring Republicans (37-33), gun policy (statistically even) and education, favoring Democrats (37-33).Crime, in Malhotra’s view,is a particularly interesting topic because it’s always been more about perception than reality. Violent crime statistics have been declining during the Biden administration from the Covid peak, but there is a general image of lawlessness mainly around property crime, which I believe is a real and persistent problem in many areas.In the case of crime, Malhotra wrote, “You don’t actually need to be a victim or even in danger for it to affect your political worldview. I suspect a lot of Americans’ reaction to property crime is a sense of helplessness and a world they are not used to.”Malhotra made the case that Trump loyalists are a more complicated constituency than they are often described as being:There is a lot of talk of MAGA voters as wanting to go back to a 1950s America characterized by racism and sexism. I’m sure people like that exist, but there is another type of MAGA voter that I’ll call “end-of-history MAGA.”Many of these people are members of Gen X (born between 1961 and 1981), which is a generation that slightly leans Republican. “End-of-history-MAGA” people look back to the 1990s as a peak period of American greatness characterized by economic strength, declining crime, etc. I don’t think these people can be easily dismissed as racist or sexist. But they may believe that America has been in decline on many dimensions.The entry of growing numbers of younger voters into the electorate, Malhotra noted, will work to Biden’s advantage, as they “generally see immigration and crime as less important issues than older voters.”But, Malhotra cautioned, “a potential threat for Biden is that younger voters are being crushed by high rent, high interest rates and low housing supply, and they see little optimism for experiencing the American dream of homeownership.”Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, makes the point that in 2024 Trump will have been the nominee, if all goes as expected, three times in a row, and Biden twice. When combined with the increasing immovability of polarized Democrats and Republicans determined to support their own parties, “2024 will likely look much like 2020 and 2016.”“There simply won’t be much movement in the aggregate,” he added. “This means that even small things on the margin could end up mattering a lot.”Levendusky, in contrast to some others I have quoted here, suggests that despite a difficult set of issues, Biden may be stronger than expected:In a normal year, Biden would be in real trouble. But Trump brings his own unique issues as well, especially this year. He’s a uniquely mobilizing factor for Democrats — they view him as an existential threat, and his indictments may well drag down support among key groups he needs to win back in order to secure the White House.In the case of Trump’s indictments, Levendusky argues that “the core of Trump’s base is unlikely to be moved, but more marginal voters are a different story.” If these “wavering Republicans or independent voters are in key states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, etc., that will be extremely damaging to Trump.”Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who has written extensively about crime, argued in an email that Biden can make the case that he has a better record on fighting gun violence and crime than is widely recognized:Candidate Trump will undoubtedly paint a portrait of urban America as lawless, dangerous, and disorderly, just as he did in 2016. That said, President Biden has a strong case to make that he has done more than any recent president to address gun violence.Gun violence, Sharkey wrote,began to skyrocket in the summer of 2020, when former President Trump was in office. Since that point, the level of violence has plateaued, and so far in 2023 the vast majority of U.S. cities have seen sharp declines in homicides and shootings.While the Republican Party, Sharkey continued,has railed against the Department of Justice and largely ignored the Jan. 6 assault on U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department officers, the Biden administration has invested additional federal funding in law enforcement while also using federal funds to support Community Violence Intervention programs, which, even if the funding was nowhere near sufficient, represents a historic expansion of the federal government’s approach to addressing violent crime. The passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is the first major federal legislation to address guns in decades.A potential problem with Sharkey’s analysis is that in contemporary campaigns, especially those involving Donald Trump, it’s not at all clear that substance matters.Few, if any, have put it better than retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who on Oct. 2 expressed to CNN his frustration over seeing his ex-boss far ahead in the competition for the nomination:What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.’”A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.Kelly continued:A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. … A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      GOP Voters Show Appetite for Calls to Use Military Force Against Mexican Cartels

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      G.O.P. candidates on the trail have used the idea as both an effective applause line and a solution for what many Republicans see as an unchecked border.Iowa is more than 1,000 miles from the U.S. border with Mexico. But Republican primary voters in the Midwestern state have embraced what has become almost orthodoxy among the G.O.P. candidates vying for their votes: deploying military forces to fight drug cartels and secure the border.Just years after former President Donald Trump mused about it in the Oval Office, the idea of using the country’s military might at the border — without the consent of the Mexican government — has made its way into barns, diners and other haunts along the campaign trail. The Times reported Tuesday on Mr. Trump’s plans to make the idea a reality in 2025 should he ultimately win the White House.At a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Orange City, Iowa, last month, Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that the United States should “use our own military to secure our own southern border.” He drew cheers before he finished the line: “and if necessary, our northern border, too.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina received claps for his border policy pronouncements at the Iowa State Fair in August, during which he said, “We have to crush the cartels.” He added that the United States had “the available military-grade technology to stop the fentanyl flow across our borders.”And one of the most reliable applause lines for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who frequently promises military strikes against Mexican drug cartels and deadly force against people crossing the border — has involved a declaration that his administration would leave drug traffickers “stone-cold dead.”A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that around two-thirds of Republicans support the idea of military intervention to take on cartels, though that percentage dropped when respondents were asked whether the United States should do so without Mexico’s permission.Unilaterally sending U.S. troops into Mexico is a nonstarter for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said the move would constitute “an offense to the people of Mexico.” Policy experts and even senior aides in the Trump administration also decried the prospect as an extreme escalation.But that hasn’t stopped G.O.P. presidential candidates from using the threat of taking out cartel members abroad through military force as both an effective rallying cry and a solution for what many Republicans see as an unchecked border and an opioid epidemic, even if promises of military intervention may prove difficult to keep.The line has received a warm welcome in other early voting states, too. Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, often pledges to send special military operations “to take out the cartels in Mexico.”At an event in Hampton, New Hampshire, last month, it really landed. “If Mexico is not going to do it, we will do it,” she told a crowd outside a cozy bed-and-breakfast, who began clapping before she finished her delivery. The small state has been ravaged by fentanyl. Few candidates have offered alternate thoughts. Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who once led the Drug Enforcement Administration, has rebutted the idea of military intervention — a response that might partly explain why Mr. Hutchinson did not even make the G.O.P. debate stage last week.“It doesn’t make sense, as some candidates say, that we ought to start dropping bombs or invade Mexico,” Mr. Hutchinson said at a Republican tailgate for an Iowa-Iowa State football game in September. “Mexico is still a friendly country to the United States and economic partner, and you don’t invade another country.”The crowd didn’t seem convinced: Many resumed chatting or searched for refreshments during his remarks.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Trump and DeSantis Push for Mass Deportations, Escalating Hard-Right Immigration Proposals

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      In dueling speeches in California, the two Republican candidates pushed for mass deportations, a position that is as extreme as it may be unfeasible.As a presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has said he would authorize the use of deadly force against people crossing the border, seek to end the practice of birthright citizenship and send the military to strike against drug cartels inside Mexico, a key ally of the United States, even without the permission of its government.Those positions put him on the hard right among the Republicans running for president, many of whom are tapping into deep anger among G.O.P. primary voters over immigration.Now, Mr. DeSantis, who often tries to stoke outrage with his border policies, has unveiled another extreme position: deporting all undocumented immigrants who crossed the border during the Biden administration.“Everyone that has come illegally under Biden” should be sent back, Mr. DeSantis said on Friday in response to a reporter’s question at a campaign event in Long Beach, Calif. “That’s probably six or seven million people right there. It’s going to require a lot of effort. It’s going to require us to lean in.”Though Mr. DeSantis greatly overestimated the number of people who have entered the country illegally since Mr. Biden took office, such mass deportations would require enormous investments in the nation’s immigration enforcement system and could do severe economic harm to key American industries.Conducting so many deportations would require Mr. DeSantis to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, authorize widespread raids into immigrant communities, significantly expand immigration detention space to meet national standards and substantially grow the fleet of airplanes used for deportations. Billions more dollars would need to be spent on bolstering immigration courts to adjudicate cases within months instead of years. Currently, some migrants who have recently arrived in the United States have been given court dates a decade from now because the immigration court backlog is so large.Still, Mr. DeSantis is not alone in his promises to upend the nation’s immigration system.Speaking to a crowd in Anaheim, Calif., former President Donald J. Trump pledged to enact the largest deportation in the country’s history.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesOn Friday, former President Donald J. Trump, who is leading the Florida governor by roughly 40 points in national polls, pledged to enact “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” if re-elected. Mr. Trump was speaking at the same time as Mr. DeSantis, roughly 20 miles away at a convention of Republican activists in Anaheim, Calif.The dueling speeches highlighted how crucial an issue border security has become in the Republican presidential primary. At his campaign event, Mr. DeSantis took the opportunity to criticize Mr. Trump, saying that his rival had failed to “get the job done” on the border during his first term. Though the two men are largely aligned on immigration policy, Mr. DeSantis is making the argument that he would be more effective in carrying out a hard-line vision.“I would note that the former president is campaigning on the same promise he made in ’16 that he didn’t deliver on,” Mr. DeSantis said.With his “six or seven” million figure, Mr. DeSantis was probably referring to the roughly six million people who have been caught crossing the border since 2021. That is about double the number of unauthorized immigrants who actually entered the country under Mr. Biden and are still here.Of those six million, at least 1.6 million have been allowed to stay in the country temporarily and face charges in immigration court. Officials estimate about 1.5 million others have entered the country illegally without being detained.The government estimates about 11 million undocumented people live in the country overall.Mass deportations are not as simple as the Republican contenders make them sound.Many of the people they call illegal immigrants are eligible for legal status in the United States or are already here on a legal status. An example of a legal status is Temporary Protected Status, the humanitarian benefit Mr. Biden just extended to nearly 500,000 Venezuelans who have come to the country since the spring of 2021. People who are in the country and eligible for legal status are entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, said Greg Chen, the senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.The time it would take to remove millions of people is substantial. In the past, the greatest number of deportations has been around 400,000 a year. The year with the highest number in recent history is 2013, during the Obama administration, when there were more than 432,000. During the Trump administration, the year that saw the most deportations was 2019, with more than 359,000.Deporting such a large amount of people poses “logistical, practical and legal challenges,” said Ron Vitiello, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration.Justin Hamel for The New York Times“DeSantis’s statement demonstrates his utter lack of any understanding of immigration enforcement operations,” Mr. Chen said. “At a practical level, deporting that many people would be impossible in even a single term.”Mr. Chen also pointed out the serious economic costs of deporting many of the workers who take on the United States’ most dangerous and low-paying jobs, particularly in agriculture.Immigration laws signed by Mr. DeSantis in Florida this year have already led to worker shortages in the agricultural sector, as well as in construction and hospitality, some employers have said. In addition, undocumented workers play a key role in hurricane cleanup in the state, but many have said they would no longer risk traveling to Florida because of the threat of deportation.There is also a significant diplomatic component to deportations — countries must be willing to take back their citizens, and the United States must have relations with those countries to coordinate those return trips. This stipulation would pose a huge challenge in returning the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have fled to the United States in the past few years. A DeSantis or Trump administration would most likely need to reestablish diplomatic relations with Venezuela and recognize the government of Nicolás Maduro — something Mr. Trump did not do as president — to carry out their plans.“Mass deportations are really, really, really hard to do,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant organization. “The political backlash would be enormous.”Ron Vitiello, a former acting director of ICE during the Trump administration, acknowledged that there were “logistical, practical and legal challenges” to deporting so many people. But he said that immigrants would continue to cross the border illegally if they believed that they would be able to stay long-term.“If the rest of the world believes they’ll never be deported, that is an incentive for lots of people,” Mr. Vitiello said. “You have to end the incentives to change the traffic patterns at the border.”When Republicans tried to enact comprehensive immigration reform under President George W. Bush, the idea of deporting large numbers of undocumented people was not considered realistic or desirable, reflecting how deeply the political mood in the G.O.P. has shifted in the years since.“Mass deportation is not a workable solution,” the Bush administration argued in a 2007 fact sheet, at a time when the population of unauthorized immigrants was even higher than it is today. “Deporting the millions of illegal immigrants who are already in the country would be impractical, harmful to our economy, and potentially devastating to families with deep roots in their communities.”Jonathan Swan More

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      Latino Republicans Call Debate a Missed Opportunity to Reach Voters

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      Republicans have sought to make inroads with the fast-growing slice of the electorate. But voters saw a swing and a miss on debate night.The Republican Party has been on a quest to make inroads with Hispanic voters, and the second presidential debate was tailored to delivering that message: The setting was California, where Latinos now make up the largest racial or ethnic demographic. The Spanish-language network Univision broadcast the event in Spanish, and Ilia Calderón, the first Afro-Latina to anchor a weekday prime-time newscast on a major network in the United States, was a moderator.But questions directly on Latino and immigrant communities tended to be overtaken by bickering and candidates taking swipes at one another on unrelated subjects. Only three candidates — former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — referred directly to Latinos or Hispanics at all. And only Mr. Pence pitched his economic message specifically toward Hispanic voters.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose state has the third-largest Latino population, appeared to suggest there was no need for specific overtures to Hispanics or independents when he had won by such large margins in his home state, including in Miami-Dade County, a former Democratic stronghold.“I’m the only one up here who’s gotten in the big fights and has delivered big victories for the people of Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”In interviews, Latino voters and strategists called the debate a missed opportunity for Republicans: Few of the candidates spoke directly to or about Latinos or claimed any cultural affiliation or familiarity with them. The Republican field offered little in the way of economic plans to help workers or solutions to improve legal channels to immigration. The candidates doubled down on depictions of the nation’s southern border as chaotic and lawless.Mike Madrid, a longtime Latino Republican consultant in California, said the tough talk could draw in the support of blue-collar Latino Republicans who did not hold a college degree and in recent years have tended to vote more in line with white voters. But the debate was only further evidence that the party had abandoned attempts to broaden its reach beyond Latino Republicans already in its fold. Republicans are “getting more Latino voters not because of their best efforts, but in spite of them,” he said.Latinos are now projected to number about 34.5 million eligible voters, or an estimated 14.3 percent of the American electorate, according to a 2022 analysis by the Pew Research Center.Although Latino voters still overall lean Democratic, former President Donald J. Trump improved his performance with the demographic in 2020 nationwide, and in some areas like South Florida and South Texas even made sizable gains. Debate over what exactly drove his appeal continues.Some post-mortem analyses have found his opposition to city-led Covid pandemic restrictions that shut down workplaces and his administration’s promotion of low Latino unemployment rates and support for Latino businesses helped persuade Latino voters to his side, even when they disagreed with his violent and divisive approach to immigration.Historically, about a third of Latino voters have tended to vote for Republican presidential candidates. But Latino Republicans differ from non-Hispanic Republicans on guns and immigration: Fewer Hispanic Republicans believe protecting the right to own guns is more important than regulating who can own guns, and Hispanic Republicans are less likely to clamor for more border security measures, according to the Pew Research Center.At the debate on Wednesday, Ms. Calderón, who is Colombian and has gained prominence in Latin America for her incisive reporting on race and immigration, and the other moderators often turned to issues central to Latinos in the United States, including income inequality, gun violence and Black and Latino students’ low scores in math and reading.But on the stage, the candidates’ attention quickly turned elsewhere. Mr. DeSantis — the only candidate to provide a Spanish translation of his website — accused Washington of “shutting down the American dream,” an idea popular with Latino workers, but mostly pitched himself as a culture warrior.Ilia Calderón, the first Afro-Latina to anchor a major national news desk in the United States, was a moderator.Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockIn response to a question on whether he would support a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people in the United States, Mr. Christie talked of the need for immigrant workers to fill vacant jobs. But in his central point, he pledged to increase the presence of troops and agents at the border with Mexico, calling for the issue to be treated as “the law enforcement problem it is.”Mr. Pence dodged Ms. Calderón when she pressed him on whether he would work with Congress to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The initiative, which remains in limbo in the courts, is temporarily protecting from deportation roughly 580,000 undocumented immigrants who have been able to show they were brought into the country as children, have no serious criminal history and work or go to school, among other criteria. About 91 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 54 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners favor a law that would provide DACA recipients permanent legal status. Although Mr. Pence described himself as the only candidate onstage who had tackled congressional reform before, he did not directly answer the question on DACA. Mostly, he used his responses to attack Vivek Ramaswamy and Mr. DeSantis before launching into a lengthy accounting of his track record on hard-line Trump policies.“The truth is, we need to fix a broken immigration system, and I will do that as well,” Mr. Pence said. “But first and foremost, a nation without borders is not a nation.”When asked how he would reach out to Latino voters, Mr. Scott highlighted his chief of staff, who he said was the only Hispanic female chief of staff in the Senate and someone he had hired “because she was the best, highest-qualified person we have.” But he, too, quickly turned to attacking his home-state rival, former Gov. Nikki Haley.The exchanges were a marked difference from the 2016 presidential debate when Senator Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, defended speaking Spanish and personalized their experiences with immigration and the Latino community.Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who helped run Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign last election cycle, said they also were different — and less effective — from those of Mr. Trump. Missing were the pledges “to bring jobs back to America, buy American and drain the swamp,” he added, messages that he said tended to resonate with Latinos and Latino men in particular.“Their campaigns have become such grievance politics that there is not a positive message that is radiating from anyone,” Mr. Rocha said. The shift could also hurt Republicans with a Latino community that skews young and tends to be aspirational, he argued.In South Texas, Sergio Sanchez, the former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, said he listened to the debate with dismay. He wanted to hear the candidates talk about pocketbook issues and energy policies. And he wanted them to stay on message and connect the dots for voters on why their economic policies were better than those under the Biden administration. Instead, he said, they spent more time swinging at one another.That was not good for Latinos or anyone else, he said. “They swung and missed,” he added. More

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      The Permanent Migration Crisis

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      On Wednesday the Biden administration announced that it will offer work permits and deportation protections to over 400,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States since 2021. On paper this is a humanitarian gesture, a recognition of the miseries of life under the Maduro dictatorship. In political practice it’s a flailing attempt to respond to a sudden rise in anti-immigration sentiment in blue cities, particularly New York, as the surge of migrants overwhelms social services and shelters.I say flailing because the fundamental problem facing the Biden administration is on the southern border, where every attempt to get ahead of the extraordinary numbers trying to cross or claim asylum has been overwhelmed.In Eagle Pass, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reports that in a week, an estimated 10,000 migrants have entered the city, whose entire population is less than 30,000. The subsequent movement of migrants to places like New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., has been encouraged by red-state governors, but under any circumstances such crowds in Eagle Pass would eventually mean rising numbers in big cities. And policies that make it easier to work in those cities, like the Biden move, are likely to encourage more migration until the border is more stable and secure.The liberal confusion over this situation, the spectacle of Democratic politicians like Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul sounding like Fox News hosts, is a foretaste of the difficult future facing liberals across the Western world.For decades, liberal jurisdictions have advertised their openness to migrants, while relying on the sheer difficulty of international migration and restrictions supported by conservatives to keep the rate of arrivals manageable, and confine any chaos to the border rather than the metropole.What’s changed, and what will keep changing for decades, are the numbers involved. Civil wars and climate change will play their part, but the most important shifts are, first, the way the internet and smartphones have made it easier to make your way around the world, and second, the population imbalance between a rich, rapidly-aging West and a poorer, younger Global South, a deeply unstable equilibrium drawing economic migrants north.All of this is a bigger problem for Europe than the United States — European aging is more advanced, Africa’s population will boom for decades (in 50 years there may be five Africans for every European) while Latin America’s birthrates have declined. The European equivalent of Eagle Pass is the island of Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost possession, where the number of recent migrants exceeds the native population. This surge is just the beginning, Christopher Caldwell argues in an essay for The Spectator on the continent’s dilemmas, which quotes a former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy: “The migration crisis has not even started.”America’s challenge is less dramatic but not completely different. The world has shrunk, and there is no clear limit on how many people can reach the Rio Grande. So what’s happening this year will happen even more: The challenges of mass arrivals will spread beyond the border, there will be an increased demand for restrictions even from people generally sympathetic to migrants, but the sheer numbers will make any restrictions less effectual.This combination can yield a pattern like what we’ve seen in Britain after Brexit and Italy under Giorgia Meloni: Politicians are elected promising to take back control of borders, but their policies are ineffective and even right-wing governments preside over high migration rates. The choice then is to go further into punitive and callous territory, as the Trump administration did with its family-separation policy and its deal with Mexico — or else to recoil as many voters did from Trump’s policies, which encouraged the Democrats to move leftward, which left them unprepared to deal with the crisis when they came to power, which now threatens to help elect Trump once again.In a sense you might distill the challenge facing liberals to a choice: Take more responsibility for restricting immigration, or get used to right-wing populists doing it for you.But in fact the problems for both left and right will be messier than this. The populists themselves will not always know how to fulfill their promises. The interests of liberals in immigrant destinations like New York City may diverge from liberals in college towns or suburbs. The scale and diversity of migration will create unexpected alliances (a lot of Venezuelan migrants might vote for Trump if given the chance, after their experience with socialism) and new lines of internal fracture.Most likely there will be neither a punitive end to the crisis nor a successful humanitarian means of managing it. There will be a general rightward evolution, a growing tolerance for punitive measures (“Build the wall” could be a liberal slogan eventually), that has some effect on the flow of migration — but doesn’t prevent it from being dramatic, chaotic and transformative, on the way to whatever new world order may await.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Which Crisis Should We Talk About First?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Democratic mayors and governors are warning the Biden administration that the migrants crossing our southern border are straining their cities and states to the breaking point. New York City alone is sheltering and feeding an average of 59,000 migrants a day. What’s your advice to the White House?Gail Collins: Easy stuff first, Bret. There are job openings many newcomers could fill in areas like food service, if they’re given the ability to work. And the federal government needs to give stressed-out regions — particularly New York City — a whole lot more help when it comes to housing.Bret: I’m definitely in favor of handing out work permits, if that’s what you mean. Please go on.Gail: Making more housing available has to include building new accommodations and transforming existing city buildings, both residential and those with unneeded office space. Over the long run, we absolutely have to open up options for multifamily housing in suburban areas that have long resisted it.As to the border itself, Biden is trying to tighten up the whole immigration process, but a lot of his initiatives have been challenged in court. The administration has expanded federal border resources in an effort to make processing families faster. Although of course there’s still more that should be done.OK, your turn.Bret: Assuming the president wants to get re-elected, while preserving the possibility of immigration reform sometime in the next, oh, 100 years, he has to get control of the border. Right now. Jobs can take months to fill and housing takes years to build — not to mention that there are plenty of U.S. citizens who ought to be the administration’s first priority when it comes to affordable housing.In the meantime, we’ve had a 30-month crisis that too many Democrats downplayed until it became a blue-state problem. Millions of people have entered the country illegally and tens of thousands in New York are now living off government assistance. Working-class people are afraid they are going to be priced out of low-paying jobs by desperate migrants.My advice to the president: Ask for the resignation of Alejandro Mayorkas, his failed homeland security secretary. Put a highly respected former military officer, like retired Adm. William McRaven, in the job. Call up 10,000 active duty troops to help police the border. Work with Mexico to further strengthen its border with Guatemala. And invest infrastructure funds to build that damned wall. Because if Biden doesn’t get control of the border, it will become Donald Trump’s signature — and possibly winning — issue in next year’s campaign.Gail: Ah, Bret, once again you lose me at the wall. Which isn’t very useful at stopping migrants but is great as a symbol of our worst impulses — the evolution from our image as welcoming land of liberty to cranky neighbor warning the kids to stay out of his backyard.Bret: It’s one thing when several kids come into the cranky neighbor’s backyard. It’s quite another when several million do, then raid his fridge and medicine cabinet and never want to go home.Gail: Speaking of kids — I know this is not a terrific segue — I guess we should discuss the Hunter Biden situation.Bret: I think of it as two situations: the first about Hunter, the second about Joe.Regarding the first, I don’t see why the son of any president — but particularly a Democratic president who favors gun control and believes the rich should pay their taxes — should not face stiff penalties for blowing off paying his taxes and also for buying a gun while addicted to drugs.As for the second, at a minimum I’d like to know how the president’s story went from “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” to the White House’s tacit admission that Hunter would put his dad on the line when speaking to business associates, ostensibly just to make small talk but very likely as a way of selling the Biden “brand.” I’d also like to know why Biden used email aliases during his vice presidency to communicate with Hunter. The answers might well turn out to be innocent. But that’s all the more reason to respond to the questions rather than evade them.Gail: We definitely have two different Hunter Biden issues: what punishment he deserves and how much of an impact his messy saga should have on our opinion of his father.Bret: The father who, I should underscore, I will probably find myself voting for next year barring the miracle of a Nikki Haley or Chris Christie candidacy on the Republican line. Go on.Gail: As to the first, we have a guy who lied, when filling out the paperwork to buy a gun, about whether he was a drug addict. And who failed to pay all his 2017 and 2018 taxes. Hunter was going to get 24 months probation, until his plea deal collapsed.This is a combo for which low-income folks with no friends in high places would probably get a stiffer punishment. But I am also sure that any Republican senator’s son who got in similar trouble would not in a billion years go to jail.Do you disagree?Bret: I’m sure you’re right — and that’s wrong in itself. But Hunter definitely deserved stiffer punishment than the wrist-slap he seemed on his way to getting before his plea bargain fell apart this summer.Gail: On the second count, it is pretty clear that Joe Biden helped Hunter get some business cred by reminding potential clients that Dad was vice president.Bret: Meaning that Joe could have been turning himself into a willing participant in some pretty shady business dealings in places like Ukraine, where he was supposed to be the Obama administration’s point man for fighting corruption.Gail: Even if that’s the version of the saga voters buy, I find it extremely hard to imagine this is going to have any impact on the president’s re-election prospects. You have here a guy who lost his first wife and a daughter in a terrible car crash and his beloved older son after a long cancer battle. Don’t think most Americans will hold his attempts to aid the surviving son against him. While he’s running against a man whose family profited shamelessly from foreign business ties during the presidency.Bret: I truly feel for the president when it comes to the tragedies in his life. And I have zero sympathy for Trump or his sleazy family. But that doesn’t change the fact that Hunter is also sleazy and that, at a minimum, Joe shouldn’t make a habit of having Hunter constantly by his side.Gail: I know the Republicans can’t let a day go by without howling about Hunter, but I truly don’t think the country cares.Bret: Not sure you’re right about that. Democrats are really underestimating the impact this could have on the election. A CNN poll published last week found that 61 percent of Americans think Joe was involved in Hunter’s business dealings and that 55 percent think he acted inappropriately regarding the investigation into Hunter. What that does is to diminish Biden’s claim to represent honesty and decency in the White House. A similar thing happened in 2016 when Democrats went after Trump on his sexual ethics, and Trump struck back by bringing Juanita Broaddrick to his second debate with Hillary Clinton, to remind the country about Bill’s sexual ethics. The risk is that undecided voters conclude that both sides are morally tainted so they may as well vote their pocketbook interests.Gail: I just feel the only people who are going to vote against Biden because of Hunter are people who were going to vote against Biden for something anyway.Bret: Different subject, Gail. Nancy Pelosi just announced she intends to run for re-election, when she’ll be 84. I realize she’s no longer in a leadership position, but given Mitch McConnell’s and Dianne Feinstein’s and, well, Joe Biden’s diminished capacities, wouldn’t it be better for her to retire in good health and make way for someone a little younger?Gail: The super-important fact about Nancy Pelosi’s career decision is that she opted to give up one of the nation’s most powerful posts because she felt a younger leader could do it better.Bret: True, and she deserves credit for that. I’d still suggest she take a look at some of her generational peers in politics, including McConnell and Feinstein, and ask herself if that’s the best way to walk off the political stage.Gail: The nation is growing older and people need to believe that they can step aside for the next generation of leaders without totally retiring from public life. So, hey, I’m a Pelosi rooter on this front.Bret: I’ll defer to you on this subject. And speaking of immortality, I need to put in a word for Rebecca Chace’s wonderful obituary of Edith Grossman, the great translator of Gabriel García Márquez and Miguel de Cervantes. I started reading García Márquez in Spanish as a kid — he lived just a few blocks from us on the south side of Mexico City — and then I read some of the same books in her English translations when I was a bit older. Grossman’s translations somehow managed to make him a more vivid, lucid, enchanting writer.She wasn’t just a translator. She was an artist.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More