Last month, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a one-hour address on the danger of illegal immigration to the United States. His stage was the US-Mexico border in Arizona and the set piece of his performance was the border wall.
The message was simple: with their border policy, Democrats have “unleashed a deadly plague of migrant crime”. Trump has ratcheted up the tensions on immigration further since then, repeating wild conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants eating pets and, more recently, claiming migrants are “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest”.
What the US needs, Trump has repeatedly stressed, is a closed border, a walled border.
