Tricia's Take - Kamala Harris El Paso Trip Is Pointless

When I got an email saying that I was included in a press call about Vice President Kamala Harris' trip to El Paso I was kind of excited. I have never been on that important of a press call so I put on my lip gloss and clicked on the Zoom link.

What a waste of time. You should buckle up, buttercup, because this is going to be a bit of a rant and it might get long.

Madam Vice President, if you're going to discuss the current "crisis at the border", you have to understand what the crisis is. It isn't people coming here to pick your strawberries and clean your toilets. The crisis is the Texas GOP and governor demonizing an entire ethnic group so they can freak out the good people of "we don't like brown people in the Lone Star State unless they are taking care of our babies and mowing our lawns".

You aren't coming here to fight for migrants. You're coming here to take pics at the border like everyone else. The plain fact of the matter is that the United States has always been about immigration. English subjects immigrated to a land that hadn't even become a country. Irish immigrants came here to escape the potato famine. Italian immigrants came here to find a better life just like all the immigrants before and after them. The problem isn't immigrants. The problem is how we treat them. Immigrants have never been welcomed with open arms. Google it kids and find out the horrible things that all ethnic groups have had to endure when they got here. We treat them terribly because we are worried that there isn't enough to go around in our country of plenty, but there always has been enough to go around.

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Madam Vice President, you need to be here on the border talking about the migrant's contributions to American society, and no I'm not talking about tacos and mariachi music on Drinko de Mayo. I'm talking about the jobs they hold that no one else in this country will.

They ensure you don't pay $35 for a Big Mac. A $15 dollar minimum wage isn't going to raise prices. Chad the college grad having to work in the fields picking lettuce will. Why do you think we don't have a strong auto manufacturing industry or a strong apparel manufacturing industry or why we have to pat ourselves on the back on World News Tonight about Made In America every week? Because American workers won't do those jobs. Immigrants have always taken the bottom of the barrel jobs so that their kids can stand on their shoulders to be first generation Americans who graduate from high school and college. That is the American Dream.

Greg Abbott and the GOP want migrants working in the fields but they also want to terrify Debbie and Dirk Dallasresident by calling them an invasion so they'll vote for the GOP. Until Americans stand up and say we are a country of immigrants and we are going to welcome them so they can add to the fabric of our country, there will always be a "crisis at the border" but it won't be because of the migrants. It will be because of the kind of rhetoric that led a Dallas man to drive across the state to murder people in the Cielo Vista Walmart.

That animal didn't know one person he gunned down, he only knew that they were "invaders" like he had been told by our governor and other GOP lawmakers. Madam Vice President, if you want to talk to the people who are causing all the problems on the border, you should look to the Texas State House and the Republican Party.

And you should call them out.

I'm glad I voted for you but I'm completely disappointed that this border visit will be just another photo op to pretend like we are working on the "crisis". We aren't. We have to fix our country before we can help fix the immigration policy of our nation.

This trip isn't going to do that.