It is with that baseline, then, that we must point out that Trump’s comments about the border Thursday are unusually alarmist (if not unusually exaggerated) — even by his standards.
Trump was speaking with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt brought up a segment that had aired on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program Wednesday evening, centered on immigrants from China.
Ingraham and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Hewitt said, “went over the numbers, and it’s really startling. In the last year that you were president, 342 Chinese nationals crossed our southern border. Last year, 24,000 did, and this year thus far, 22,200 — 46,000 Chinese nationals in 18 months. What do you think they’re up to?”
Trump riffed about border security and immigrants from Congo for a while before Hewitt refocused him. What did the former president think the “Chinese nationals” were doing?
“They’re probably building an army,” Trump replied. “They’re probably building an army from within. I mean, you look at what’s happening, because they’re very healthy young men for the most part. And it’s up to over 30,000 now. That’s a lot of people. It’s up to over 30,000.”
It is true that the number of immigrants from China that have arrived at the southern border is up since Trump’s last year in office — a year in which immigration was exceptionally low thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. But there is no reason to think that they are coming to the United States to “build an army.”
Before we explore that point, though, let’s go back to the Ingraham-Pompeo conversation itself, one that Trump probably saw, given his loyalty to Fox News.
Ingraham began by showing a clip of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby speaking to reporters this week about a conversation between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“The two leaders held a candid and constructive discussion on a range of bilateral, regional and global issues, including … continuing efforts on climate change and people-to-people exchanges,” Kirby was shown saying.
“Climate change!” Ingraham remarked, then introducing Pompeo.
“You know,” Pompeo began, “it’s very interesting — if you read the Chinese readout, what they say took place? Very different than what Admiral Kirby described.”
Particularly in the video snippet Ingraham aired. It clipped out most of what Kirby said about the call, that the two presidents discussed “areas of cooperation and areas of differences. They encouraged continued progress on issues discussed at the Woodside Summit, including counternarcotics cooperation, ongoing military-to-military communications, talks to address artificial-intelligence-related risks” — and climate change.
Pompeo quickly transitioned into this question about immigrants from China.
“It doesn’t sound like [Biden] made a single statement about them coming across our southern border,” he said to Ingraham. “There’s no chance that this is accidental, that these folks are actually seeking asylum. The Chinese Communist Party has enormous control over who gets to leave their country. And so, there’s something afoot here when we now having more come across the border in the last two years than the previous decade combined.”
He went on for a bit, with Ingraham marveling at his observations. Then he offered that we did know some things about those arriving.
“We know for sure that we don’t have any idea who they are,” Pompeo said. “Not only are they mostly got-aways, but even the vetting that we’re doing with them is just a handful of simple questions and then we release them.”
This is perhaps the most important point: The numbers being cited are numbers of immigrants being stopped at the border. These are not “got-aways,” people who enter the United States without being detained. Pompeo knows this, since he immediately follows up that claim by saying that we ask them questions. (Try asking a question of someone who is not in your presence and see how successful that is.) It means, too, that we do know who they are. Because most are, in fact, single adults, they are also less likely to be released from custody.
None of this is a mystery, despite the collective presentation of Ingraham, Pompeo, Hewitt and Trump. In March, Meredith Oyen, an associate professor of history and Asian studies at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, wrote an essay for the Conversation exploring the increase in southern-border arrivals.
“The dramatic uptick is the result of a confluence of factors,” Oyen wrote, “that range from a slowing Chinese economy and tightening political control by President Xi Jinping to the easy access to online information on Chinese social media about how to make the trip.”
Those arriving are largely members of China’s middle class, she noted, “not rich enough to use education or work opportunities as a means of entry, but they can afford to fly across the world.”
A large percentage of those arriving in the United States over the southern border do so to claim asylum. For immigrants from China, Oyen notes, those claims are more likely to be successful, given the oppression and religious intolerance in their home country.
In other words, there’s every indication that the increase in immigrants from China is a function of their seeking to live in the United States and enjoy its freedoms and economy — not that they are here to “build an army.” (The logistics of arming and aggregating a fighting force of thousands of people within a foreign country would seem to make that idea incorrect from the outset, but again, this is Trump theorizing.)
The point is obvious, just as it is obvious when Trump and others describe immigrants as “military-aged males”: People coming to the United States seeking work or safety are inherent threats to public safety or elections or, apparently, national security. It isn’t that anyone could realistically assume that 3,500 people from China coming into the United States in February — 680 of whom were members of families with kids, mind you — were preparing for a fourth-column assault on the country. It’s that it is politically beneficial for Trump and his allies (including Pompeo, Ingraham and Hewitt) to pretend that Biden’s border policies are indisputably dangerous to American voters.
It’s just caravans all over again.
