Kamala the Border Hawk? Not So Fast

The New Center: A Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

I’m not going to lie: When I first heard that Kamala Harris had come around to backing Trump’s border wall, I thought to myself, “Wow, now that’s a real pivot to the center on immigration”—one of this election’s two defining issues (the other being inflation and the economy). But then I looked into the reporting, and it turns out her shift—framed as a “flip-flop” by the left and right alike—is actually a lot less dramatic.

The basis for the “flip-flop” is little more than a reference in her address to the Democratic National Convention last week, in which she pledged to sign the bipartisan(-ish) immigration package negotiated earlier this year by Senate Democrats and a handful of Republicans—before Donald Trump ordered the right to kill it. “The bill,” as Axios reports, “requires hundreds of millions of dollars of unspent funds to be used to continue building a wall on the border.”