With the Trump administration, we witnessed a hardening of border security policy and practices. Trump used his leadership and celebrity to explicitly attack and criminalize “undocumented” migrants with a discourse of threat, danger, invasion, crisis. Policywise, he took steps to further securitize the borderlands. In this paper, we examine how public opinion has differed with regards to the support or opposition to these hard security policies, especially in borderland areas when compared to the overall national population. The aim of this paper is to examine this difference by directing our attention to the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), a borderlands region which does not appear to receive adequate attention when compared to the San Diego or El Paso border regions. Drawing upon a critical political sociology perspective, we analyze how the framing of “undocumented” or “unauthorized” migration as a threat affects public perception and opinion. However, using survey data collected in 2018, we provide suggestive evidence that despite these negative political frames which have been disseminated through the media, the population in the RGV (despite living day-to-day in a “border crisis”) appear to hold more liberal attitudes with regards to immigration and border policies when compared to the national population. This highlights how the narrative of “transboundary crises” is used to justify draconian policies and practices against migrants, despite the lack of a “crisis” on-the-ground.
Angulo-Pasel et al. (Thu,) studied this question.