Republican presidential candidates are using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to push for tighter security on the US-Mexico border, in what political operatives call a novel attempt to link a foreign conflict to the domestic debate over immigration.
The reason for the link is twofold, say operatives and political strategists involved in the 2024 primary campaign.
Illegal immigration is at the top of Republican voters’ list of concerns, so candidates are eager to raise the issue as much as possible on the campaign trail, they said.
At the same time, Republican voters are more wary of foreign conflicts and less interested in foreign policy than in previous competitive primaries, said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist.
While Republicans have long portrayed themselves as staunch defenders of Israel, it is unlikely to be an election-defining issue, he said. That makes it more likely that candidates will reframe the conflict in domestic terms.
Republicans have often said that militants who support or carry out attacks on Israel will try to slip across the US-Mexico border, although there is little evidence of this. There are no known cases of Americans being injured in militant attacks by immigrants who entered America illegally, according to a study published by the libertarian Cato Institute, which looked at the period between 1975 and 2022.
It’s a pretty creative campaign to tie a foreign conflict to border security, which (the candidates) know Republicans really care about,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster with more than 30 years of campaign experience. “We’ll see if it’s effective or not, but it’s certainly innovative.”
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is running third in most polls behind former US President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is one of several Republican candidates who have used the conflict to push for tighter border controls.
Speaking on Meet the Press on 8 October, she said the surprise attack on Israel by militants from the Palestinian group Hamas on 7 October should serve as a wake-up call for the United States to seal off its southern border from potential terrorists.
“(Immigrants) are not being screened. We don’t have to wait for another 9/11,” she said.
Trump said at a rally in Iowa on Monday that he would order law enforcement to deport immigrants who publicly support Hamas. He also said, without evidence, that Hamas fighters were flooding across the US-Mexico border.
In a social media post this month that included images of an explosion in Gaza, the Palestinian territory at the centre of the conflict, DeSantis wrote that America was “vulnerable with so many military-age men coming into our country” across the U.S.-Mexico border.
A poll conducted 6-8 October, which included responses both before and after the first attack on Israel on 7 October, found that 4% of Republicans chose war and conflict as the most important issue facing the nation, while about one in four said immigration was their top issue, second only to the nation’s economic health.
Border Patrol agents encounter people on the Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS), a system that tracks known or suspected terrorists, as well as family members and associates.
A September report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found that in the fiscal year through July, border agents encountered about 160 non-citizens on the TSDS list, up from about 100 in fiscal year 2022.
That still represents less than 0.0001% of immigrants encountered at the southern border, according to US Customs and Border Protection data, and there is no record of Hamas members being apprehended in recent years.
Even these figures may exaggerate the problem, as they include members of the FARC, a guerrilla group in Colombia, according to the DHS. The US revoked the FARC’s terrorist designation in 2021, five years after it made peace with the Colombian government, and the vast majority of its members have laid down their arms.
Republicans have made the connection between national security and border security before, albeit in a broader sense.
When he was running for president in 2015, Trump promised a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States after a deadly attack by ISIS sympathisers in California. As president, Trump eventually banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.
But proposals to beef up border security in response to a foreign conflict with no obvious connection to the US-Mexico border appear novel, strategists said.
“It’s given Republican candidates an opening to play to base voters on illegal immigration,” said Rob Godfrey, a political consultant and former senior adviser to Haley.
Still, the immigration crackdown proposed by Republican candidates is not without risk, said Ayres, the Republican pollster.
He said some of the proposals put forward by Republicans risked alienating middle-of-the-road voters who a Republican nominee will need to win over in the November 2024 election.
During his speech in Iowa on Monday, Trump vowed to tighten travel bans from “terror-prone” countries without explaining how he would enforce his proposals.
“You’ve got to be credible (on immigration) and you’ve got to be persuasive,” Ayres said. “It’s possible to do all of that, but blanket bans on people are a total non-starter.”
