You’ll notice immigration isn’t one of my four planks. That’s deliberate, and you deserve to know why: I don’t have a comprehensive immigration plan. Neither does anyone else — the honest ones just admit it. What I have is a district that shares a border with Sonora, a test for every vote, and a refusal to sell you fear.
Here’s what living here teaches you that cable news can’t — and it’s two things, not one. The border is an economy and a neighborhood: Mexico is Arizona’s largest trading partner, the produce in your grocery store crossed at Nogales, and most of the people I met driving this district for two years were doing business, raising families, and worrying about the same grocery bills as you. And — I’ve sat with ranchers along that border and listened to what it’s like to find strangers crossing your land at night, to have cartel traffic moving through your property, to carry that stress year after year with no one coming when you call. That fear isn’t a cable-news invention. It’s Tuesday. Anyone who tells you the border is only a neighborhood is lying to you exactly as hard as anyone who tells you it’s only an invasion.
So here’s the meta-observation this campaign was built for: the fear machine doesn’t invent fear — it harvests it. And it’s been harvesting a long time. Immigration was “in crisis” for my entire adult life. It was “in crisis” in the South Dakota I grew up in during the ’80s. It was “in crisis” in my grandfather’s time up there, when the fear was that the new people would take the brick factory jobs. Same speech, new faces to be afraid of, for a hundred years. That rancher has been promised a solution in every election since before I could vote — he still has cartel traffic on his land. Because a problem this profitable to campaign on does not get solved; solving it would end the fundraising. The machine uses the rancher as a prop and the migrant as a villain, cashes the checks, and delivers nothing to either of them. It ran on my grandfather. It’s running on you. Fear is the product. I’m not selling it.
What my one vote does:
Due process for everyone — citizen or not, papers or not. Not because it’s nice. Because a government that can detain and deport anyone without a hearing has made everyone’s papers worthless, including yours. Due process isn’t protection for them. It’s protection for you.
Treat cartels like the organized crime they are. Go after the networks — the smuggling operations, the money, the guns running south — with real resources and real coordination, and stop pretending that raiding a dairy farm or a church parking lot is the same thing as fighting a cartel. One is theater. The other is dangerous, unglamorous law-enforcement work that border residents have been asking for, for decades. Fund the second one. And when a rancher calls for help, someone should come.
Against making it worse: no raids on schools, hospitals, and churches; no indefinite detention without a hearing; no treating protest, filming, or witnessing as a crime. Crimes are crimes — charge people for what they did, not for who they are or what ideology the government decides they have.
For the boring fixes nobody fundraises on: more immigration judges to clear a court backlog measured in years, modern ports of entry that move commerce and catch contraband, and legal pathways that match the labor this state’s economy actually runs on. Ask any farmer in this district.
I can’t legislate anyone’s fear away — no one can, which is why it sells so well. What I can do is take the real fear seriously, refuse to feed the manufactured kind, and vote like human beings are human beings — the ones crossing the desert, and the ones whose land it is. That shouldn’t be a controversial platform. The fact that it is tells you most of what’s wrong.