Harris flip-flops on border wall, betrays Latino supporters

For most of her 20 years in public service, Kamala Harris has pretty much ignored Latinos. And yet, as the Democratic presidential nominee drifts to the right on issues like immigration, Latinos may soon wish they could go back to simply being ignored.

After all, it’s better to be overlooked than to be targeted.

It’s not easy to see the world in black-and-white terms when you’re serving as a district attorney, state attorney general and U.S. senator in a state where Latinos make up more than 40 percent of the population.

Now that Harris is running for president and eager to inoculate herself against the accusation from Republicans that she is soft on illegal immigration, she is overcompensating.

For one thing, as Axios recently noted, Harris now supports building a border wall and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get it done. In her speech to the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris said that — if she were elected president — she would sign the recent bipartisan border security bill that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is widely believed to have scuttled so he could preserve the border crisis as a campaign issue.

That bill requires that as much as $650 million be used to continue building on the border what Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., the lead negotiator, calls “the Trump border wall.”

But according to Axios, Harris was against the border wall before she was in favor of it. In 2017, shortly after getting elected to the Senate, she said the wall was a “stupid use of money” and pledged to “block any funding for it.” In 2019, Harris called it Trump’s “medieval vanity project.” In 2020, she wrote on Facebook that the border wall was a “complete waste of taxpayer money” and insisted that it “won’t make us any safer.”

Harris advisers are trying to spin the flip-flop as being nothing out of the ordinary. They say that the border bill doesn’t authorize the spending of any new money to build the wall and that it only extends the timeline to spend funds that were appropriated during the Trump administration.

What a weak argument. So Harris only wants to spend as much money as Trump did? What happened to all that stuff about how the wall was a waste of money and a vanity project?

In her convention speech, Harris tried to draw a contrast with Trump on immigration — albeit in the most vague language possible. She gave the policy item only three sentences.

“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” she said. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border. America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and our values abroad.”

Instead of that hash, Harris could have summarized her approach to immigration in a three-word slogan: “Be like Trump.”

In August, a New York Times-Siena College poll of four battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina — found that Harris got 51 percent of the Latino vote among registered voters, compared with 41 percent for Trump.

That’s not good for a Democrat. In 1996, Bill Clinton got 72 percent of the Latino vote. In 2012, Barack Obama got 71 percent. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got 66 percent. In 2020, Biden got 61 percent.

Meanwhile, history shows us that if a Republican can earn the support of at least 4 of 10 Latino voters (i.e., Ronald Reagan who got about 40 percent of the Latino vote in 1984, or George W. Bush who got around 44 percent in 2004), their Democratic opponent is in big trouble.

As a Mexican American journalist who has covered politics for more than 30 years, I had a feeling that Harris would sell out Latinos.

We’re a cheap date for Democrats. You can promise us little and deliver even less. And still, we’ll vote for you. And if you break your promises, we’ll vote for you again.

Harris needs the support of union members, suburban whites and Black voters, and all those groups tell pollsters the United States should take in fewer immigrants.

I just didn’t expect this would happen so soon. I imagined Harris would wait until after the election to turn her back on Latinos — and disregard their concerns about border walls. But the election is so close that the Democrat couldn’t take the chance. She needs to get her share of the anti-immigrant vote before early voting begins in late September. And that means sounding like Trump, building walls and burning bridges with Latinos.

All of a sudden, simply being ignored is looking pretty good.

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, “Ruben in the Center,” is available through every podcast app.