Wall Street Journal
By Byron Tau
March 19, 2016
Sens.
Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz visited the U.S.-Mexican border this week
in Arizona before the state’s March 22 primary election. But each picked
very different parts of the frontier to
emphasize in their campaign messages.
Mr.
Cruz visited a remote ranch on Friday more than four hours from
Phoenix, where a low barrier separated the U.S. from Mexico. Mr. Cruz
emphasized how easy it was to cross the fence and
criticized the poor state of border security.
“My
5-year-old could climb this in about 3 seconds,” Mr. Cruz said. He
pointed down the dirt road that runs along the border and said: “There’s
no barrier at all a couple miles down.”
He
then held a news conference at the ranch house a few miles away from
the border. Reporters traveling to the event drove nearly 20 miles on an
unpaved road, far from the nearest town of
Douglas. There, Mr. Cruz talked about the dangers that Arizona ranchers
faced from human traffickers and drug smugglers operating along the
rural frontier.
Mr.
Sanders also held a news conference along the border, but he chose
Nogales, Ariz., for his event. There, a border wall nearly 20 feet high
separates the Arizona town from the Mexican
city that shares the same name.
Instead
of border security, Mr. Sanders spoke about the human cost of the
nation’s immigration policies — saying that the U.S. too often separated
families and forced illegal immigrants to
live in constant fear of deportation.
“We
don’t need a wall and we don’t need barbed wire,” he said. “We need to
fix our broken criminal justice system. First and foremost, it goes
without saying that we need comprehensive immigration
reform, we need to take 11 million undocumented people out of the
shadows, out of fear, and we need to provide them with legal protection,
and we need to provide them with a path toward citizenship.”
The
Republicans and Democrats have diverged sharply over immigration in
recent years. Both Mr. Sanders and his rival Hillary Clinton have said
they would curtail or halt deportations and
push for allowing illegal immigrants currently here to earn U.S. citizenship. Republicans, including front-runner Donald Trump, have
vowed to significantly increase border security. Mr. Trump has suggested
a fence along the entire border with Mexico, as well
as the deportation of the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants in the
country.
The
two different photo opportunities near the border allowed the
candidates to speak to their respective party bases. Some sections of
the Arizona border are fenced only to keep vehicles
out, while other sections near more populated areas have tall walls to
discourage crossings on foot.
Mr.
Sanders’s campaign aimed to signal his opposition to the current border
security measures by standing near one of the tallest sections of the
wall. Mr. Cruz, on the other hand, aimed
to speak to concerns among his party base about the influx of illegal
immigrants into the U.S.
Same border. Different messages.
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