Heading into November, Donald Trump’s rhetorical strategy on the economy is simple: Insist it is doomed, blame it on Vice President Kamala Harris, and tie everything back to immigration.
The Trump campaign’s thematic simplicity — fact-free, lowest-common-denominator forward — appeals to uneducated voters. Insulated from the truth by complicit right-wing echo chambers, his base enjoys the koolaid as Trump insists the sky is falling.
Trump and JD Vance harp about a doomed economy because they need the economy to be doomed, but economic indicators aren’t cooperating with their spin. Personal income is up, post-COVID inflation is down, the GDP is stellar, and U.S. stocks keep reaching all-time highs — The S&P 500 has surpassed its own record a staggering 31 times since January 2024.
Immigration grandstanding is blocking real progress
If Trump’s perfidy on the economy is galling, his lies about immigration are criminal.
In February, voters outside the Fox News bubble watched as Trump wrecked a bipartisan border bill, just to preserve immigration for his presidential campaign. After falsely claiming that immigrants were raping, murdering, and killing Americans with fentanyl, he threatened any member of his own party who tried to fix the problem. Overnight, Trump became chief enabler to the chief “criminals” he claimed were killing Americans, and his base didn’t even hear about it as Fox News called President Biden an “accessory to murder.”
After Trump destroyed the border bill, over the following seven months, he failed to craft a thoughtful alternative. Trump now says he will round up millions of immigrants, assign each of them an individual serial number, put them in detention camps, and simply deport them.
Setting aside the holocaust-adjacent visuals, the worst byproduct of Trump’s ignorant and sloppy “solution” is that it makes intelligent, targeted immigration proposals ever more elusive.
Americans have wanted immigration reform for decades
Surveys show that an overwhelming majority of Americans want Congress to fix immigration, and yet, immigration reform has failed for decades.
Significant immigration and border proposals introduced in 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2013, 2021, and 2022 all failed, largely due to Republican opposition. Who can forget the “Gang of Eight” U.S. Senators (4 Republicans, 4 Democrats) who crafted a comprehensive proposal to fix immigration 10 years ago, only to watch it die under the Republican leadership of then-House Speaker John Boehner?
The proposal would have provided the kind of industry-specific, thoughtful approach we needed then, and still need now. It would have given tech and science employers greater access to urgently-needed engineers and foreign graduates with advanced degrees. It included a merit-based review system to award more green cards based on the nation’s needed skills and education. It created a legalization plan for undocumented immigrants already living and working in the country.
The immigration bill Trump killed this year would have done even more. As GOP Sen Mitt Romney of Utah put it to CNN, “(T)he fact that (Trump) would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling.”
Effective immigration policy is key to growth
Last year, Republican governors correctly cited the country’s economic dependence on immigrant labor, describing job vacancies that were hurting the U.S. economy. “In meaningful ways, every U.S. state shares a border with the rest of the world, and all of them need investment, markets and workers from abroad.”
Trump’s one-size-fits-all immigration policy ignores this economic reality. Many employers, in many regions, are desperate for workers. Labor-intensive industries in construction, landscaping, healthcare, and farming rely on immigrant labor to stay in business. Farmers in particular rely on migrant laborers to work with livestock and harvest field and orchard produce in sweltering heat. Two years ago, the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association begged Congress to expand their accessible labor pool with immigration, complaining that the American dairy industry needs immigrants to address “an acute national labor crisis,” that “would soon worsen.”
It was no different this year in Springfield, Ohio, where CEOs were desperate to attract migrant workers. After a successful effort by the city’s leadership and Chamber of Commerce to attract new industries and businesses to Springfield, there was an acute labor shortage. Haitian immigrants, whom employers have described as having an outstanding work ethic, began arriving to take jobs in Springfield’s warehouses, manufacturing and the service sector. Springfield’s CEOs, pleased with their hardworking habits, urged their Haitian employees to encourage other Haitians to join them.
Trading economic reality for political gain, Trump and Vance falsely accused those excellent workers of eating America’s pets. The migrant workers, their employers, and the entire Springfield community are now in danger.
On Wednesday, in front of supporters in Traverse City, Michigan, Vance stuck to the ‘Harris caused it, immigrants did it, and Trump will fix it’ rhetorical formula anyway: “(I)f we want to allow American citizens to afford a home again, we’ve got to start by deporting the millions of illegal aliens that Kamala Harris let come into this country.”
Here’s a counter-formula for the Harris camp: Trump lies, Vance amplifies, and their thirst for power is dangerous.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free..
