With Republicans appearing on track to lose control of the House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump has trotted out a greatest hits of Trumpian tactics to try to rally his base. In a speech and subsequent news conference Thursday at the White House, the president depicted a nation under siege from criminal immigrants — millions already here, thousands more on their way. On top of sending 5,200 troops to the border and possibly up to 15,000 total to thwart the caravan “invasion,” Trump declared he would drastically change asylum policies to detain asylum seekers in “massive cities of tents” while their applications were being considered. He has also said he would use an executive order to amend an unambiguous part of the U.S. Constitution that says people who are born here are citizens.

To be clear, Trump has identified some genuine issues. With opioids killing thousands of Americans a month, it’s troubling that so much heroin and fentanyl comes across our southern border. It’s true that many asylum seekers are motivated by economic and lifestyle reasons, not fears for their personal safety, which partly explains why in 2017, 1 in 3 applications were rejected. And on the question of giving automatic citizenship to children born in America to non-U.S. citizen parents, “birth tourism” — which draws hundreds of wealthy Russian and Chinese families a year — is at least eyebrow-raising.

Marvin Sanabria, a Central American migrant traveling with a caravan to the United States, kneels in prayer after waking up in Huixtla, Mexico, on Tuesday. The caravan, estimated to include more than 7,000 people, had advanced but still faced more than 1,000 miles, and likely much farther, to the end of the journey. Associated Press/Moises Castillo

But on just about everything he says on immigration, Trump isn’t trying to start an informed debate. He’s trying to create a boogeyman. Fact-checkers show that asylum seekers skipping hearings is relatively uncommon — about 3,200 out of 54,000 applicants in fiscal 2017 were ordered removed from the U.S. for doing so. The government’s own data show that in a recent six-year span, only 159 youths detained at the border were suspected gang members. And there are many studies that show unauthorized immigrants are less likely to engage in crime than U.S. citizens. So much for the central premise of the president’s fearmongering. As for the 14th Amendment’s provision of citizenship to anyone born here, does anyone think Trump is as worried about Russian and Chinese families taking advantage of this as is he is about Mexican families?

When thousands of U.S. troops begin arriving at the border in coming days — pointlessly — in anticipation of a caravan that is many weeks away, perhaps his true believers will begin to doubt Trump’s “invasion” hysteria, then begin to wonder how much else of what the president says about immigration is malarkey. That insight can’t come soon enough.

Editorial by The San Diego Union-Tribune

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