Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

In the time before the election, I’ve become a TV junkie. So, I did see a clip of Donald Trump trying to win votes in Pennsylvania by telling penis jokes. It shows how low he and his applauding fans can go.

Arnold Palmer’s daughter told ABC News Donald Trump had disrespected her late father’s memory by fawning over the size of the golf champion’s penis. There’ll probably be a cross burned in their front yard.

It’s now nine days until voters decide the fate of the nation and possibly the whole world. I’m on pins and needles. Anxious, and frankly, scared.

The polls show Kamala Harris needs Pennsylvania. My wife and I voted by mail and grandkids voted at the Ankeny library, which won’t help in Pennsylvania. But I’d love to see the two local women Molly Buck and Heather Matson, both Democratic incumbents from Ankeny, returned to the Iowa House.

The negative TV ads are dark and dirty, portraying the opposition as evil choices because of this-or- that. For Molly Buck, the opposition alleges and demeans her for (get this) voting to ban gas cook stoves, requiring people buy electric vehicles, and allowing government watchdogs to monitor home thermostats. All ridiculous, of course, and she’s denied anything about cook stoves. She has a gas stove herself.

But even more ridiculous is that the ads are played multiple times a day on MSNBC, where the likelihood of reaching a persuadable voter is about .0001 percent.

We voted for Lanon Baccam in Iowa’s third Congressional district. He graduated from Mt. Pleasant High School with the son of former Governor Tom Vilsack and Christie Vilsack. Iowa’s former first lady filmed a nice TV ad for Lanon before the Democratic primary.

More recently, Republicans have run negative ads claiming Baccam supports Biden’s “open border” policies and has spent billions on fancy hotels and luxurious meals for illegals in New York City. There is no “open border policy,” and he has articulated no support of funds for New York City, although the issue is so much more complicated.

I watched the first Congressional district debate between Democrat Christina Bohannan and Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks on Iowa PBS. Abortion and border security were the big issues. Neither the candidates nor the journalists asking the questions seemed to have studied border and immigration issues in depth.

But to the point. Going on to next Tuesday’s election. I’m worried about at least a half dozen things. The big one for me centers on the border, and the potential for racism and bigotry to sway the results.

CONTORTED HISTORY

I get a history feed on my Facebook. I didn’t subscribe but clicked on it once, and the AI guy-in-the-sky signed me up for free. If I click again I’ll be offered a subscription where, for $5.99/month, a real professor will give me a history lesson.

Anyway, the one I looked at was a picture of a wagon train on the Sante Fe Trail with Conestogas lined up for miles struggling across unforgiving terrain through Indian territory into (what was then) Mexican territory.

There was a chapter on westward expansion in my high school U.S. history textbook. I don’t remember the word “migrants” being used to describe the white Europeans who sought a better life out west, in California or Oregon.

Like modern day migrants, these people were fleeing poverty or wanting to strike it rich in the West. Among them were some ruffians. Most television shows when I was a kid told how quick-draw lawmen brought peace to outlaw villages.

There are many movies about the Sante Fe Trail or wagon trains. The trailer for a 1940 version flashes the words “lusty,” “lawless,” and “baptized in flames” on the screen. These words, I suppose, were meant to whet the appetites of teenage movie goers.

This weirdly inaccurate film has Errol Flynn as Jeb Stuart and Ronald Reagan as George Custer battling the abolitionist John Brown in Lawrence. Kansas territory is as unreal as their competition for the love and affection of Olivia de Havilland’s character. All fiction, of course. 

I’m willing to bet though that teenagers who left the theater in 1940 spent a lifetime believing that Custer and Stuart served together in Lawrence, supposedly the beginning of the Sante Fe Trail and the endpoint of the railroad, which actually arrived there years later.

My point is that high school texts and movies have depicted the pioneers who crossed Native American and Mexican borders as heroes. Their hardships must have entitled them to property. My mother’s parents were Norwegian immigrants who became homesteaders on 160 acres of Indian territory granted them by the swipe of Abraham Lincoln’s pen.

THE TRUMP ATTITUDE

I want readers to see a comparison between 19th-century hero-pioneers who migrated or immigrated in search of a better life and how migrants coming to the Mexican-American border today are seen and treated.

Movies made a hundred years hence may show Latin Americans as pioneer heroes of our time. But not if Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters tell the story.

Trump’s narrative has led 70 percent of Americans to question the legitimacy or humanity of foreign-born migrants, even when they become workers. Trump has made migrants the butt of constant political haranguing.

According to a recent article in The Atlantic, on December 4, 2020 — in a meeting in the Oval Office, convened to discuss some national-security issue — then-President Trump asked for an update on the “McCarthy” investigation. The secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, had overseen the investigation into the death of Natalie Khawam, a soldier of Mexican descent. Khawam had been murdered by another soldier and her body hidden, a well publicized sexual assault case in the military.

Trump had met with the family and promised to pay for the funeral, intimating he’d pay personally.

Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense … was in attendance, along with Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel. At a certain point, according to two people present at the meeting, Trump asked, “Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?”

According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000. Jeffrey Goldberg reports,

Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”

FEAR OF OTHERS IS UBIQUITOUS

Harvard historian Erika Lee writes that Trump’s policies are the “logical evolution” of xenophobic pressures in American life. She says, “Xenophobia has been neither an aberration nor a contradiction to the United States’ history of immigration. Rather, it has existed alongside and constrained America’s immigration tradition.” (Read an excerpt of her book here. “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States.”)

Lee seems to be saying Trump tickles a faulty enzyme lying dormant in every American. Whether pre-existing or newly invented, almost 100 percent of Republicans are pulled along by the gravity of his Trump’s argument about border crossers. His passion creates new converts. Most evident is the hostility to immigrants coming from every country south of the USA’s southern border.

New York Times columnist, Carlos Lozada, a naturalized citizen of Peruvian descent, and a co-host of the Times’ weekly “Matter of Opinion” podcast, wrote earlier this month: “It would be wildly ahistoric to say that Trump, on his own, has eroded the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants. His opponents love to say that ‘this is not who we are,’ even if, in truth, it is who we have often been.” Lozada continued,

For all of Trump’s particular efforts — the wall, the travel ban, the family separations and now the pledge of mass deportation — he is part of a long tradition. You don’t have to go back to the expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, or the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 19th century, or Benjamin Franklin’s musings on those inassimilable Germans. But you could. […]

That evolution continues. Trump’s pledge to build the wall was his essential promise in 2016; the call for mass deportation is his crucial commitment today. The immigrant threat has been redefined from those who are coming—remember the caravan arriving just before the 2018 midterm elections? — to those who are here. The wall purported to protect America; deportations are meant to purify it.

THE U.S. SOUTHERN BORDER

The map at the top shows the United States southern border with established border crossings marked. Those legal crossing points admit and egress hundreds of thousands on foot, by rail, bus, personal cars and commercial vehicle 24-hours of every day.

Mexico is the largest U.S. trading partner, ahead of China and Canada. The U.S. port at Laredo is the busiest commercial entry point. The San Ysidro crossing south of San Diego is the busiest in the Western Hemisphere. “Closing the border” is an impossible demand.

Nearly all illegal drug traffic arrives through legal ports hidden in vehicles and carried by U.S. citizens, either unawares or paid by a cartel. Everyone knows that. Migrants may carry small amounts as part of payment for escort, but travel hazards make porting anything other than bare necessities nearly impossible.

The numbers of migrants arriving to the border is not necessarily determined by U.S. laws. That number is determined by the number of refugees in the informal “system,” coming or escaping from countries elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Writing in the July/August 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs, Julia Preston clarified the problems on both sides of the border. Preston is a contributing writer at the Marshall Project, which has fact-checked Trump’s allegations about migration and migrants. Preston was the national immigration correspondent for The New York Times from 2006 to 2016 and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her reporting on Mexico. I recommend her essay, especially this passage:

In part, the influx has been fueled by extraordinary external pressures. Over the past few years, a toxic combination of political instability, criminal violence, and the punishing economic aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed the highest levels of migration in the Western Hemisphere since World War II.

The movements began a decade ago with families fleeing rapacious gangs and hopeless poverty in the northern countries of Central America. In more recent years, hundreds of thousands of migrants have also come to the U.S. border from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, countries where misrule and repression have driven people out and where the United States has few options for mitigating the underlying causes. Following newly forged migrant trails from South America, people from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru have also started to arrive in numbers not seen before.

But the scale of the migration does not alone explain the dysfunction at the border. At the core of the crisis, from the borderlands to the American interior, is the U.S. asylum system. It was created nearly half a century ago to assess foreigners’ claims of persecution case by case.

Over the past decade, however, the asylum system has become something else: for lack of other legal avenues, it has turned into the main channel for mass immigration across the southwest border, a function it was never designed to serve. By the end of 2022, almost 800,000 asylum cases were awaiting adjudication in the immigration courts, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research center; these were part of huge backlogs of all kinds of immigration cases now swamping the courts.

The average asylum claim took more than four years to decide. Yet in fiscal 2022 the courts nationwide granted asylum in only 22,311 cases; a larger number of the cases decided last year, more than 26,000, were denied. Since there have been no clear-cut procedures for deporting asylum seekers whose claims are rejected, many of those people and their families—along with tens of thousands of asylum seekers denied in previous years—have quietly joined the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country.

People fleeing countries south of Mexico are now forcibly escorted and abused by traffickers employed by cartels who have made trafficking one of their businesses. The U.S. immigration laws allow a person setting foot on U.S. soil to be eligible to apply for asylum (legal protection).

Traffickers usually escort refugees to borders between legal ports of entry. Professor Jason De León’s book Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling is a good read about migration. An excerpt is available here.

The U.S. does everything imaginable to impede migrants crossing the U.S. border, including walls, razor wire, dogs, barbed wire rolls in the rivers, and, worst, laws that treat migrants as criminals. There is broad support for such laws, some allegedly in violation of existing asylum laws.

Interesting to note is that during the Iowa PBS debate, Miller-Meeks lauded H.R. 2, a Republican bill supported by all Iowa’s U.S. House members. This bill addresses issues regarding immigration and border security, including by imposing limits to asylum eligibility. It requires the Department of Homeland Security to create an electronic employment eligibility confirmation system modeled after the E-Verify system and requires all employers to use the system. It does not address asylum.

If successful in crossing, a migrant can request legal asylum. There are too few immigration judges to hear the cases of those migrants apprehended, so they are admitted under parole to await a hearing, which can take years. Some migrants trafficked to the border are not apprehended and move into the U.S. population as undocumented (illegal) residents. With people dying or moving out of the U.S., the number has remained steady at 11 million for 20 years. Trump has said he wants to round up these people, put them in detention camps, and then deport them.

Like in pioneer times, among the border crossers are some ruffians, some violent, who need to be apprehended and immediately deported. The Trump campaign conflates these numbers with ordinary job-seekers who travel as families with no nefarious intentions other than survival.

The fact is, the U.S. needs a new comprehensive immigration law. People living and working here need a pathway to citizenship. Doubly so for people brought here as children and who know no other lives.

The Trump campaign hopes people, like those viewing historically inaccurate movies, will leave his rallies believing Reagan was a cavalry officer and brown-skilled people are coming here to steal jobs and rape their wives.

At the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, California in June 2022, the Biden Administration launched the “Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.” The declaration seeks to mobilize the entire Western Hemisphere region around bold actions that will transform country’s approaches to managing migration in the Americas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has managed the project, meeting for the third time in Guatemala in May 2024.

Upheaval in the region is endemic. Venezuela, for example, was hoping to escape a totalitarian regime that had rejected the election in 2018 and again in 2024. Some 7.7 million people left the country, many waiting for political relief. Although the Democracy opposition won, the dictator used his hand-picked Supreme Court and army to putdown protests. The Democracy candidate fled to Spain where he took refuge. The millions of refugees waiting in nearby countries are generally afraid to return, and another 15 percent say they plan to leave within the next six months.