A Tale of Two Foreign Policy Approaches Towards Immigration

Patient diplomacy versus violent insanity.

Photo by K E on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has written a fair amount about immigration and how it has been essential to the U.S. post-pandemic recovery. That said, it would obviously be preferrable for migration to be legal rather than illegal. The surge of illegal crossings from Mexico into the United States in recent years is a function of multiple pressures. State breakdown in Latin America has been a push factor, while a robust U.S. economy that needs more workers has been a pull factor.

With the economy humming along, migration has been top of mind for voters. Two recent stories highlight the very different means by which Trump and Biden approach the problem. One president’s preferred approach requires a lot of patient diplomacy and behind-the-scenes negotiation and is starting to pay off. The other is violent and insane.

Let’s start with the patient approach. Here is an actual fact somewhat at odds with the stylized fact of the political press: in 2024 illegal border crossings along the Southern border have fallen by 40 percent. How is that happening during a time when the temperate weather ordinarily would a surge?

The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell offers an unusual but plausible answer: patient diplomacy.

Most migrants crossing illegally from Mexico into the United States are not Mexican nationals. They’re citizens of other countries, such as Guatemala and Ecuador, who transit through our southern neighbor. In early December, Mexico’s immigration agency ran out of funds to continue its migrant deportations and transfers. Not coincidentally, that is when unlawful crossings from Mexico into the United States peaked.

But by the end of the month, after negotiations with Biden and his top aides, the Mexican president committed to providing more funding and military resources to address irregular migration. This included military patrols, highway checkpoints and busing migrants en masse from northern Mexico (i.e., closer to the United States) to southern Mexico. As my colleague Nick Miroff recently reported, Mexican authorities have been intercepting about 8,000 U.S.-bound migrants daily.

“It’s mostly about Mexico’s interdiction efforts, especially the ongoing efforts to stop migrants from getting to the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “That came after negotiations with the Biden administration.”

Rampell goes on to note that it’s not just diplomacy with Mexico that has helped: “Canada, Greece and Spain… have also opened up more legal pathways for migrants to work in their countries…. Here, too, U.S. leadership and Biden’s relationship with key allies have encouraged other countries to share more of the global burden of mass migration.” Illegal border crossings are still high by historical standards but they are trending downwards thanks to these Biden initiatives.

Now let’s segue towards the violent and the insane: what does Trump want to do? We already know he wanted to set up internment camps and deport close to ten percent of the U.S. population.

If Trump follows through on migration internment camps, there is one very predictable result: a mass casualty event in which agents of the U.S. government killed numerous resisting migrants or U.S. citizens protesting the change in policy. The scale of what the Trump campaign wants to do in this arena is so massive – Stephen Miller has talked openly about using red state National Guard units to go into blue states to round up migrants – that resistance would be inevitable.

Furthermore, the second Trump administration would welcome such a clash.  Their theory of immigration restrictionism is that if the U.S. establishes a reputation for ruthless enforcement, it will deter those contemplating migration to the United States.  Trump and Miller would spin any such attack as an example of how migrants threatened the breakdown of law and order.  More importantly, they would play up the violence in a conscious attempt to deter further immigration.  Trump’s theory of immigration enforcement has always been to amp up the cruelty in an effort to deter future migrants.

But that is just within the United States. In the area of foreign policy, it would seem that Trump’s thinking about Latin America seems to be a cheap knock-off of Operation Reciprocity from the the 1994 film Clear and Present Danger:

If you think this is a cartoonish exaggeration, let’s just check out what Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng is reporting:

If he wins a second term in November, Donald Trump wants to covertly deploy American assassination squads into Mexico soon after he’s sworn into office again, according to three people who’ve discussed the matter with the former U.S. president.

Both during and after his presidency, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee has floated different ideas for bombing or invading Mexico in response to the American fentanyl crisis and to “wage WAR” on notorious drug cartels. As president, Trump even thought it was possible to bomb the cartels’ drug labs, and then potentially pin the strikes on another country, according to his former defense secretary, Mark Esper.

What was once a fringe notion that senior Trump administration officials quickly moved to shut down has now become a mainstream GOP policy proposal, including among influential Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and conservative think tanks….

Three sources tell Rolling Stone, in conversations with close MAGA allies, including at least one Republican lawmaker, Trump has privately endorsed the idea of covertly deploying — with or without the Mexican government’s consent — special-ops units that would be tasked with, among other missions, assassinating the leaders and top enforcers of Mexico’s powerful and most notorious drug cartels. 

In some of these discussions, Trump has insisted that the U.S. military has “tougher killers than they do” and pondered why these assassination missions haven’t been done before, arguing that eliminating the heads of cartels would go a long way toward hobbling their operations and striking fear into the hearts of “the kingpins.” (In fact, versions of this strategy have indeed been tried before in the long-running international war on drugs, including in Mexico, where the nation’s government, with U.S. support, devoted substantial resources to wiping out as many cartel bosses as possible. It has not worked.)….

None of these Trump plans are directly about immigration, but think about the second-order effects. Suebsaeng reported Mexico’s leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador denounce GOP plans akin to Trump’s as “an offense to the people of Mexico.” Is there any scenario where Mexico cooperates with the United States on migration if the Trump administration is unilaterally sending kill teams across the border? Not a chance.

I suppose the MAGA folks will tell themselves that Mexico’s cooperation is not important, that Trump needed to get tough on the drug cartels, and that a wall along the border will solve the migrant problem. As Rampell noted in her essay, however, “Trump supporters have conveniently forgotten that border crossings spiked in 2019 to their highest levels in over a decade and were reversed only when the coronavirus pandemic temporarily disrupted international migration patterns.”

My colleagues Jim Goldgeier and Elizabeth Saunders have previously noted that good foreign policy is usually boring and invisible. That is definitely Biden’s approach. If, on the other hand, you think internment camps, mass casualty events, and unauthorized kill teams will solve the migration problem, then I guess a vote for Trump would make sense.

It would not be boring. But it would be insane, illegal, and massively counterproductive.