Tom Cotton, Scott Brown: Republican Senate candidates are back on the stop-illegal-immigration beat.

Republican Senate Candidates Are Back on the Stop-Illegal-Immigration Beat

Republican Senate Candidates Are Back on the Stop-Illegal-Immigration Beat

Weigel
Reporting on Politics and Policy.
Aug. 6 2014 1:53 PM

Republican Senate Candidates Are Back on the Stop-Illegal-Immigration Beat

That didn't take long. In Arkansas and New Hampshire, states that modern maps suggest are quite far from the Mexican border, Republican Senate candidates have put up ads that blame the child migrant crisis on incumbent Democrats. Arkansas' Tom Cotton approaches the topic with little subtlety.

Asking "really? really?" in a campaign ad is a tactic that really took too long to graduate from '80s teen movies. Depending on how you look at the question of "safety" on the border—immigrant deaths? Crime waves?—dangers absolutely declined from 2004 to 2011. There's no evidence yet that they've spiked as the migrant crisis spiked, and this may have something to do with the youth of the population currently overloading the system.

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Legal New Hampshire immigrant Scott Brown takes a softer approach, in front of, for some reason, a green screen of a TSA checkpoint.

Raising the specter of TSA-style security for illegal immigrants is one way to be tough on them without looking obviously nasty.

David Weigel is a reporter for the Washington Post.