While bashing some Republicans for not getting on board with the Senate immigration bill unveiled over the weekend, MSNBC host Al Sharpton used the word "invasion" Monday to describe the border crisis, which some liberals found to be highly controversial.
President Biden and politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties have touted the deal as a bipartisan compromise to secure the border. However, many Republicans argue that not only is this deal insufficient, but Biden already has the necessary ability to take action to secure the border. One of their main critiques is that it would include Title 42-type authority that would only be mandated if numbers at the southern border exceeded 5,000 migrant encounters a day. Democratic California Sen. Alex Padilla is so far the only Democratic senator to have publicly criticized the bill. He called the deal a "new version of a failed Trump-era immigration policy that will cause more chaos at the border, not less."
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., went on "Morning Joe" to tout the bill he helped negotiate and Sharpton asked him what could be done to get voters to pressure their senators to support the bill.
Sharpton expressed urgency and channeled people "outraged" across the country at the "influx of migrants," pointing the finger at senators who aren't on board as the ones "allowing this to continue."
"What is being done to get the public to really rise up in various states to say to their senators that they want to see the border issue resolved?" he asked. "I mean, you’re getting migrants beating up policemen in the streets of New York. You’re seeing an influx of migrants all over the country that, frankly, have people outraged. Couldn’t there be some kind of public pressure put in the next couple of days in some of these senators’ states saying, ‘Why are you allowing this to continue?’ Because at the end of the day, senators have to deal with their voters."
After mentioning funding to Israel and Gaza, Sharpton went back to the border, referring to the migrant crisis as an "invasion," a term that sparks outrage among immigration advocates and the left.
"But the border, I mean, we’re looking every day at the invasion of migrants, and they’re playing a time game with politics on this?" Sharpton asked. "Couldn’t the pressure be put to bear in their home states?"
HuffPost senior reporter Paul Blumenthal objected to the use of the term "invasion" to describe the massive influx of people who are coming across America’s southern border, in a Monday piece warning, "Texas Makes Absurd Argument That Immigration Is 'Invasion.'"
"Once confined to the nativist far-right, this rhetoric of immigrant invasion has surged into the Republican Party mainstream since former President Donald Trump’s rise in 2016," Blumenthal wrote. He went on to say, "This rhetoric has been deployed throughout American history to fuel support for anti-immigration measures and most notably in the Supreme Court’s opinion upholding the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882."
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He went on to cite a quote from University of Baltimore School of Law professor Matthew Lindsay who argued that such rhetoric has "portrayed immigrants as faceless masses, who were racially incapable of assimilating into American conceptions of liberty, and would undermine the country’s system of free labor by taking work at exploitative wages."
