The Economist (UK) Gives Vinegar-Laced Kudos to President’s Border Successes

The UK “newspaper” The Economist is no friend of Donald Trump, deriding his efforts on universities, tariffs, and just about every possible other issue. But the outlet had to give its devil his due, offering (vinegar-laced) kudos to his efforts at the U.S.-Mexico line in an October 5 article headlined “Donald Trump is victorious at the southern border”. Though you should read to the end to see where the journal thinks this will all end up if the next president isn’t as serious about border security.

The Economist

For those who are unfamiliar with The Economist, Encyclopedia Britannica describes it as a “weekly magazine of news and opinion published in London”, that’s “generally regarded as one of the world’s preeminent journals of its kind”, providing “wide-ranging coverage of general news and particularly of international and political developments and prospects bearing on the world’s economy”.

Founded in 1843 as Britain was gaining preeminence around the globe, it provides useful analyses on forgotten countries in overlooked regions, many once British-controlled, including the United States.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal “is known for its social-libertarian slant and maintains that free markets provide the best method of running economies and governments”.

That said, the New Yorker (which tries to emulate its UK counterpart in tone and analysis) has criticized The Economist’s brand of “liberalism”, while AllSides, a website that grades biases in media outlets, says the journal “leans left”.

“Friendship Park”

Which brings me to its October 5 article on Trump’s border-security successes.

It begins with a snapshot of “Friendship Park”, the spot of land at the westernmost point of the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego and immediately adjacent to the Tijuana beaches.

As the National Park Service describes the place:

Friendship Park is the only public park along the Mexico-US border envisioned as a binational friendship encounter area. It serves as a meeting spot where people who are unable to see each other due to immigration status can interact on a limited basis. The physical form of the park throughout the years has changed, reflecting the state of immigration policies between the two nations.

That last part is rhetorical meiosis. Two walls on the U.S. side with an access road between now separate the park, and The Economist complains: “The Mexican side is buzzing. Vibrant murals adorn the wall and vendors sell churros to beachgoers. The American side is empty; it is a militarised zone.”

Having been there in early March, this description of the two sides of the park leaves out two very salient points.

The first is that a major reason why the Mexican side is “buzzing” is because Tijuana has expanded all the way to the international boundary, whereas the rugged and largely undeveloped International Park sits on the U.S. side.

The closest town in California to the park is either Imperial Beach or San Ysidro, and each is a few miles away. The sewage-filled Tijuana River, which flows north from Mexico and drains into the Pacific between the park and Imperial Beach, only attracts cholera.

The second point is that the western sections of Tijuana adjacent to the wall are among the safest (and best-heeled) parts of town, largely because the wall is there and patrolled on the U.S. side, sending smugglers and the crime they bring further east.

You don’t have to believe me. As Politico (another Trump-unfriendly outlet) conceded in the summer of 2018:

Tijuana has in many ways been a success story since the 1990s — and at least some of that success owes to the border walls. Over the years, the walls, along with bulked-up security, have imposed order on a chaotic border, where extortion, rape and robbery had been common.

“Migrant Shelters, Once Overflowing, Are Mostly Empty”

Few Economist readers will venture to either side of Friendship Park to experience the affluence (or the effluence) for themselves, but that “buzzing”-versus-“militarised” dichotomy is the first tell this isn’t an unvarnished encomium to Trump II border security.

Thereafter, however, the journal does acknowledge the decline in illegal migration from the south:

In Tijuana aid workers say migrant shelters, once overflowing, are mostly empty aside from Mexicans fleeing violence in their hometowns. This does not seem like a short lull. Almost no one is travelling north through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle on the Colombia-Panama border that became a thoroughfare for migrants from all over the world intending to claim asylum in America. … A small reverse migration has even begun. At least 15,000 people, mostly Venezuelans, have returned to South America since January.

Having ventured in March to the Tijuana side of the border, I can confirm that the “Deportee Welcome Center” (its sign in English, no less) there was so empty that it wasn’t even staffed.

No migrants were on the street awaiting their smugglers, and no coyotes were offering their services. The town was bustling with pedestrians, but most were headed elsewhere in the area, or to cross lawfully through the port of entry.

And it’s common knowledge, given reports from outlets like Axios, AP, the New York Post, and DHS itself, that northbound traffic through the Darién Gap has slowed to less than a trickle since Trump returned.

That’s a good thing, given that the New York Times in April 2024 quoted “aid groups working in” the gap who claimed “in the past six months they ha[d] documented an extraordinary spike in” migrant assaults, robberies, and rapes, “with patterns and frequencies rarely seen outside of war zones”.

That wasn’t 2022, as migrant encounters at the Southwest border were setting new records; that’s last year, during a period when, The Economist article claims, border apprehensions under Biden “began to fall”.

“The Entire Might of the Federal Government”

The Economist offers some reasons why illegal migration has plummeted under Trump II:

The Trump administration has thrown the entire might of the federal government behind stopping illegal immigration. Their approach “is layered, like an onion”, says Adam Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think-tank. Displays of military force, harsher penalties for border-crossers, the performative cruelty of deportations without trial to prison in El Salvador and a ban on asylum reinforce each other.

The current administration has utilized military assets at the border, but as I explained last December, that’s nothing new.

Military assistance in immigration enforcement dates back to at least the Carter administration, and the National Guard has monitored the Southwest border since 2006, when President George W. Bush launched “Operation Jump Start”.

It’s true, as The Economist asserts, that unlike his predecessors Trump has annexed “border land and attach[ed] those parcels to nearby (and sometimes not so nearby) military bases”, allowing troops to arrest aliens for illegally entering border-adjacent property.

The land that Trump transferred to the Department of War (DoW), however, was already federally owned, much of it along a narrow 60-foot border set aside known as the “Roosevelt reservation”.

The “Roosevelt” in question is President Theodore Roosevelt, and as Colorado State University (CSU) explains, he claimed that land 1907 “for federal use to combat opium smuggling and to enforce immigration policies” in the interests of “national sovereignty”.

CSU continues, noting that, “Shortly after, in response to incursions during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the federal government increased its presence along the border to shore up national security”, meaning Trump’s actions are simply an extension of more than 118 years of federal policy.

The Economist also grumbles about Trump’s use of other DoW assets, most notably “Stryker armoured vehicles and anti-submarine surveillance planes”, which the newspaper asserts “are now features of the borderland”.

CBP’s use of surplus Lockheed P-3 Orions, which “started their lives as submarine hunters for the U.S. Navy”, well predates Trump II, though to be fair, the current administration’s deployment of M1126 Strykers along the border is new.

Reuters reports, however, that the border Strykers “are unarmed” (though “soldiers have personal weapons”) so their primary contribution to border security is their unique “joystick-controlled camera systems that can see for two miles … and have night vision”.

That’s no different than using other cameras along the border, which has long been common and never been exceptional (except when the Biden administration “paused” new camera placements along with other border infrastructure for years), though I’ve spent two extended periods at the Southwest border in the past six months and never saw either a P-3 or a Stryker, so they’re hardly ubiquitous.

Special bonus: Troops are using the Stryker’s night-vision capacity at the border in the sorts of desert environments most of our recent wars have been fought in, so they’re getting real training even if, as Reuters puts it, the work they’re doing is “monotonous”.

“Getting Tougher on Those Who Still Dare to Cross”

To support its claim that Trump II is imposing “harsher penalties for border-crossers”, The Economist asserts that “[e]ncounters at the border have dwindled, but federal prosecutors are charging ever more migrants with illegal entry” while also arguing the administration is imposing an “asylum ban”.

The former is the sort of “Fox Butterfield fallacy”, i.e., “misidentifying as a paradox what is in fact a simple cause-and-effect relationship”, that those opposed to criminal enforcement often employ.

It’s named after a New York Times reporter who questioned why incarceration rates were rising even as the crime rate was falling, apparently failing to appreciate the connection between the two metrics. Here, The Economist can’t quite figure out why an administration that has driven down illegal entries wants to keep them low by prosecuting criminal entrants, though the rationale should be obvious.

As for the “asylum ban”, it’s true (as I have reported in the past) that the president issued a proclamation that limits the protections available to aliens who cross illegally.

But he did so in direct response to Biden policies that treated all illegal entrants as “asylum seekers”, regardless of whether they had claims, which triggered the largest illicit migrant influx in U.S. history.

Every country in the Western Hemisphere, save Grenada and Cuba (both islands) and Guyana (a coastal enclave), grants some sort of protection to those fleeing persecution, and they should be expected to seek it in the first safe place they come to.

Under the last administration, however, migrants travelled from around the globe through multiple safe havens to make their way to the more economically advantageous United States, an abuse of our humanitarian protections and a big reason why there’s a Trump II administration.

“The Third Tenet of Mr Trump’s Layered Border Strategy”

Which brings me to what The Economist describes as “the third tenet of” the Trump II “layered border strategy”, which in the outlet’s description are “demonstrations of cruelty”. It continues:

In this administration the routine process of deporting someone — a normal part of immigration enforcement — has changed. Masked agents grab people from street corners, detain them (often in squalid conditions), and sometimes remove them to a country they have never set foot in.

While I have never written for a hoary and pretentious journal, I’ve spent more than three decades in and around immigration enforcement and can assure you ICE arrests today are no different than INS arrests were back in 1994; if anything, they’re more professional now thanks to the prevalence of camera phones and social media.

The face coverings are, admittedly, novel, but then so is widespread doxxing of agents, public figures who compare immigration officers to “Nazis” and “fascists”, governors who call ICE “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo”, and gang members charged with placing bounties on Border Patrol chiefs — all of which counsel in favor of masking.

In that vein, and regrettably, The Economist has lowered itself to peddling such dangerous tropes using language more familiar to those who read talking points distributed by the Portland Antifa chapter than a soi-disant “globally trusted source for fact-checked reporting and analysis”.

As for the “squalid conditions”, ICE’s “National Detention Standards” (NDS) are among the highest in the world, and I should know, having served for eight years as an immigration judge at an ICE detained facility and toured countless others in my eight-plus years of doing immigration oversight on Capitol Hill.

If The Economist wants to talk about “truly squalid” confinement, perhaps it should start a little closer to home.

“Migrants May Not Be Able to Beat Mr Trump Right Now”

Noting that the Trump border proclamation is currently under review in federal court (as I have reported), the Economist article explains that continued security at the U.S.-Mexico line largely depends on the outcome of that case (ditto), before ending on an ominous note:

[T]he allure of America is strong. Many Haitians who put down roots in Mexicali, on the border, left for America when Mr Biden opened a pathway for them in 2023. Migrants may not be able to beat Mr Trump right now, but they can try to wait him out.

I’ll skip over the question of why Haitians who “put down roots in Mexicali” needed to thereafter leave “for America” when the last administration “opened a pathway for them” except to note that it proves my earlier point about country-shopping by so-called “asylum seekers” under Biden.

The last line in an article that gives Donald Trump credit for border security through gritted teeth is dispositively true: Policies implemented by the last administration threw the border open, and policies implemented by the current one have shut them. Congress can make all the immigration laws it wants, but without White House will, they’re meaningless — and Congress can’t legislate presidential will.