Last week, Rep. Paul Gosar (R\u2013Ariz.), who’s running unopposed<\/a> for reelection in Arizona’s 9th congressional district, was caught in a covertly recorded <\/span>video<\/span><\/a> seemingly expressing sympathy to people who claimed they’d been shooting at undocumented immigrants.<\/span><\/p>\n

“We’ve shot at them,” the man, an undercover activist, told Gosar. “I’m worried that the Democrats are gonna send me to jail.” Gosar replied, “They have more rights than we do.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“I might’ve hit someone,” the man said before thanking Gosar for his work. “Say a prayer because this country needs you,” the congressman replied. “There’s a bunch of people that are ready to go into action.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Gosar, who’s previously <\/span>proposed<\/span><\/a> a 10-year moratorium on <\/span>all <\/span><\/i>immigration, is part of an Arizona GOP that’s taken an increasingly militant turn on migrants and the border.<\/span><\/p>\n

With Election Day less than one week away, the results of Arizona’s midterm races could shake up both national politics and recent statewide trends. Immigration has emerged as a central plank for high-profile Republican candidates, including Senate candidate Blake Masters and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who routinely lean into their party’s worst <\/span>impulses<\/span><\/a>. Their platforms include policies that are legally fraught and unlikely to solve persistent problems at the border.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both Masters and Lake say they will finish the construction of former President Donald Trump’s border wall, which currently <\/span>covers<\/span><\/a> about 245 miles of Arizona’s 373-mile border with Mexico. Trump’s project cost roughly <\/span>$20 million<\/span><\/a> per mile to construct, <\/span>dwarfing<\/span><\/a> the cost of reinforcements installed under the Bush and Obama administrations. Despite that expense, the wall hasn’t thwarted illegal migration. Immigrants have <\/span>been able<\/span><\/a> to climb over it with ladders, cut through it with cheap tools, and tunnel under it. With fewer legal migration pathways and a far more fortified border, the number of migrants injured or killed as they fell from the wall <\/span>spiked<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Renewed border wall construction could end up hurting Arizona communities, including private landowners robbed of their land by eminent domain and Native Americans who’ve had their sovereignty violated<\/a> despite<\/a> explicit <\/span>opposition<\/span><\/a>. Lake <\/span>says<\/span><\/a> she’ll veto “any budget that fails to fully fund the border wall’s completion,” despite the economic and political costs she might incur.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lake and Masters see illegal immigration as an “invasion” to be combated. “It’s time to militarize this border,” Masters <\/span>said<\/span><\/a> in a campaign ad. Lake’s first “<\/span>solution<\/span><\/a>” to secure the border involves invoking Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution “to fend off the invasion at our southern border in the absence of federal protection.” She <\/span>claims<\/span><\/a> this will allow Arizona\u2014and “a compact of like-minded states”\u2014to “arrest illegal immigrants” and “return them back across the border.”<\/span><\/p>\n

As David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, explained<\/a> for <\/span>Reason<\/span><\/i> last year, the Constitution does indeed require “the federal government to protect against an ‘invasion’\u2014what every court that has reviewed the question <\/span>has interpreted<\/span><\/a> to mean an ‘armed hostility from another political entity.'” Further, “the Constitutional Convention debates <\/span>connected<\/span><\/a> the power to repel invasions with the power to raise armies.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Incoming migrants seeking safety and economic opportunity do not match the Founding Fathers’ concept\u2014nor any modern one\u2014of an invasion. As Bier wrote<\/a>, migrants “want to be us, not conquer us.” Lake’s misinterpretation of the Constitution could be truly damaging: It severely distorts the nature of the people crossing the border, reinforces anti-immigrant animus, and could help open the door to an extraordinary allocation of state funds toward misguided enforcement <\/span>schemes<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Washington could be doing plenty more to restore<\/a> asylum and expand work visa access, which would help<\/a> make migration flows more predictable and help reduce illegal migration. That’s something Masters could work on if elected, though his legal immigration plans <\/span>include<\/span><\/a> “we want good immigrants, not bad ones” with no actual call for the U.S. to accept more legal immigrants than it currently does.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Masters, who in a now-deleted sentence on his campaign website <\/span>argued<\/span><\/a> that “the Democrats dream of mass amnesty, because they want to import a new electorate,” it’s a particularly disappointing turn. The erstwhile libertarian-leaner, <\/span>according<\/span><\/a> to <\/span>Jewish Insider<\/span><\/i>, once blogged under a pseudonym that “illegal immigration is an ethical contradiction in terms,” arguing that “‘unrestricted’ immigration is the only choice.” Certain migration patterns aren’t <\/span>illegal<\/span> “because this makes rational or ethical sense, but because a State or some form of Government so declared them,” he wrote<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

GOP candidates’ militant fixation on the border also doesn’t reflect voter preferences. In a September Marist poll of registered voters in Arizona, just <\/span>13 percent<\/span><\/a> of voters ranked immigration as their top issue when thinking about the midterms, putting it in fourth place behind inflation (36 percent), preserving democracy (26 percent), and abortion (15 percent). Though <\/span>24 percent<\/span><\/a> of Republicans listed immigration as their number one issue, twice as many said inflation was their top priority.<\/span><\/p>\n

With <\/span>one-third<\/span><\/a> of Arizona’s electorate composed of independent and third-party voters, Republicans will need to look beyond their party’s base to win seats. Unfortunately for moderate and liberty-minded voters, the anti-immigrant tenor of the Arizona GOP pushes reasonable conversations about border security out of reach.<\/span><\/p>\n

The post In Arizona, Blake Masters and Kari Lake Embrace Bad Border Policies<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The anti-immigrant tenor of the state’s GOP candidates is keeping reasonable conversations about border security out of reach. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77871"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}