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Every year the United States spends many billions of dollars securing the 2,000-mile border it shares with Mexico. This perpetually growing investment hasmade Customs and Border Protectionwhich is staffed by more than 60,000 federal employeesone of the largest law enforcement organizations in the world.

But you wouldnt know that by tuning in to Fox News, which depicts the US-Mexico border as an unmonitored wasteland where all are free to come and go at will. Since just before the 2020 election, the term open borders has been featured in right-wing media with startling frequency: From November 1, 2020, through March 16, 2023, Fox News pundits used the phrase a whopping 3,282 times, according to data compiled by Americas Voice and Media Matters, while Newsmax clocked 2,727 mentions over the same period. This coverage, according to Americas Voice, aired during time slots collectively valued at nearly $27 million for advertisers.

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While right-wing medias open borders messaging has proven salient for stateside viewers, theres also reason to believe that its impacting perceptions of the border abroad. I met with migrants in Costa Rica that were turned back, and their sense was that they will be able to enter freely, RepresentativeAdriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat, told me, arguing that the confusion stems squarely from right-wing disinformation. The perception from them was that the border is open and they could just walk through.John Modlin, a chief Border Patrol agent,shared a similar insight last month. Testifying before the House Oversight Committee, he relayed how detained migrants often said they were led to believe the border was open.

Just how this misinformation is reaching migrants is not entirely clear. But its well known that human smugglers, who ferry migrants across the border for a fee, have widely promoted the open borders lie as a way of driving business, according toDylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a nonprofit that works with migrants. Smugglers are constantly peddling that type of misinformation because theyre looking to feed their bottom line, he said, noting that traffickers falsely advertise open crossings to migrants desperate for a way into the US. The open borders myth is alsospread on Facebook and WhatsApp, where it reaches unwitting migrants. We had a group of Venezuelans who approached a bridge because they had seen something online and were under the notion that the border was open, Corbett added.

Still, Corbett noted that while migrants might latch on to any glimmer of hope that can sustain them on their journey, including bogus conservative talking points that end up on social media, policy debates in Washington and on Fox News is hardly whats fueling the crisis. We know whats going on in their countries: hunger, poverty, and social insecurity, he said. Those are the things that drive migration. Not the political situation in the US.

Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of Americas Voice, said that she, too, has heard accounts of migrants receiving misinformation about the porousness of the border from social media and smugglers. The best open border propaganda machine is, in fact, the GOP, she said in an interview. We know the impact this disinformation has on migrants, who largely get information through online platforms. And we know that smugglers take this information and use it for their own purposesto recruit and encourage irregular migration.

The open borders narrative, while especially prominent now, has been circulating in the US for years. In the mid-2000s, whenLou Dobbs hosted a nightly show on CNN, he aired a recurring segment called Broken Borders, in which he baselesslyportrayed migrants as disease-ridden criminals. That style ofcoverage, viewedat the time as both disturbing and novel, is now par for the course on Fox, the network Dobbs joined when he left CNN.Tucker Carlson regularly smears South and Central American migrants as invaders freely rampaging across the border, evenclaiming they make the US dirtier and arebeing used by Democrats to replace the current electorate.

For Republicans in Congress, Carlsons prime-time show is considered gospel. During the long series of votes for Speaker, a lot of folks on the floor were saying, Well, well see where the votes land after Tucker is on tonight, RepresentativeGreg Casar, a Democrat whose Texas district stretches from San Antonio to Austin, told me. And this interdependence, said Casar, has crippled any hope of immigration reform. So as Republicans feed anti-immigrant fear, its accelerated by right-wing media, he continued, and then you see the Republican Party becoming more and more extreme on issues like immigration."

For a while, fearmongering around migrants proved useful for riling up the Republican base. During the lead-up to the 2018 midterms,Donald Trump, along with his congressional and media allies, aggressively spun narratives about a migrant caravan homing in on the US. A similar spike in open border warnings occurred ahead of the 2020 election. Open borders is one of their favorite things to resort to when they think its politically advantageous, or when they need to pass a certain Trump litmus test, RepresentativeChuy Garca, an Illinois Democrat, told me, noting how many times hes seen his Republican colleagues lean on the buzzword during Fox News interviews, floor speeches, and committee hearings. But its interesting to see that their messages dont land that well among the American electorate, as we saw in November.

Read more:
How the Rights Open Borders Myth Might Be Fueling the Migration Crisis - Vanity Fair