It's an election year and Missourians turning on their TVs are often greeted with politicians talking about issues over melodramatic music. The issue of choice for some politicians starts hundreds of miles away, at the U.S.’s southern border.
Here’s a TV spot from Republican State Treasurer candidate Vivek Malek.
Saint Louis University political scientist Ken Warren, said Missourians are hearing about the southern border because it’s a wedge issue.
“A wedge issue is usually used by one party over the other party for political gain,” Warren said.
Warren said wedge issues usually sound good for voters and are meant to drive them to the polls, but they have a spotty record when it comes to turning them into policy.
“Look, politicians promise things that will be dead on arrival either in the state legislature or the US Congress,” Warren said.
Wedge issues are meant to fire up the base, which is often the reason only one side of the ticket focuses on a given topic. In the case of the border, it's the Republican Party that primarily uses it.
Here's the Republican candidate for governor, Mike Kehoe, talking about the border.
Brandon Behlendorf, an associate professor with the University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security & Cybersecurity, said what would help secure the southern border aren’t necessarily the actions Missouri Republicans are touting in their political ads.
“The more you focus on developing stronger systems of legal immigration, the more opportunities to choose those pathways, rather than crossing the southern border,” Behlendorf said.
Warren said politicians are often left balancing trying to keep issues relevant to voters, and showing they are working on it. Which often leads to them doing things that don’t necessarily work.
“Politicians have to calculate if something they do is so absurd that it backfires on them,” Warren said.
The language of political ads seen in Missouri this election year is often inflammatory - meant to signify the supposed severity of an issue.
Adriel Orozco, a senior policy analyst with the American Immigration Council, said this kind of language often works to harm immigrants' sense of belonging, regardless of how they arrived in the U.S.
“When you have rhetoric that marginalizes people it divides people it really does impact those’ bigger broader societal things,” Orozco said.
A study done by the American Immigration Council found a decreased sense of belonging leads to less civic engagement and worse life outcomes, which works to undo some of the social good brought by new immigrants.
The University at Albany’s Brandon Behlendorf said immigrants can help provide labor to rural areas that are in need, such as some places in Missouri.
“We have these towns that have been declining why don’t we open up opportunities for people who want to live in the United States,” Behlendorf said.
So experts say ads using immigration as a means to fire up a political base can reduce the benefits of having immigrants stateside.
But it’s likely Missourians will keep hearing about the southern border, even though the state is hundreds of miles away from it because such language also succeeds in convincing voters to go to the polls.
