That America is in the midst of a border crisis is no secret to anyone who watches the news even every once in a while—just as it wasn’t a surprise in 2020, when Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off in the last presidential election. “But there does seem to be bipartisan agreement now that the border’s a problem,” said Jon Stewart on Monday’s episode of The Daily Show.
In December 2023 alone, there were more than 300,000 border crossings. “That’s an all-time high,” Stewart explained, “and that is not sustainable.”
But rather than act quickly to address the problem, Republicans seem more interested in keeping the border issue as just that—an issue—until the 2024 election is decided, “because of how confident they are that fearmongering will be an effective election year strategy,” said Stewart.
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For Trump’s part, he’s doing his damnedest to create a word association link between the phrases “migrant crime” and “Joe Biden.” Over the weekend, at a speech in Michigan, Trump explained how he’s now truncating “Biden migrant crime” to “Bigrant crime,” which received loud cheers from Trump’s audience of supporters—but two thumbs down from Stewart.
“It’s a portmanteau,” Stewart said mockingly, before adding that: “I’m not completely sold on ‘bigrant.’ It really just sounds like a migrant who’s open to crossing either border.”
While Stewart acknowledged that “there are some documented migrants who are committing crimes—some of them horrific—but isn’t that true for every demographic, including natives?”
But Stewart wasn’t just gunning for Trump and his cronies. After talking about the Dems and how they “hold to our country’s cherished ideals,” he was faced with the backflip seen by the likes of Eric Adams. Back in 2022, the New York City Mayor delivered a rousing pro-immigration speech in which he called his city the place “where the Statue of Liberty sits in the harbor and says, ‘Bring us your tired, those who are yearning to be free.’ That’s what these asylum-seekers are doing.”
“Bedrock,” said Stewart. “American values of compassion and empathy. And there’s not a damn thing that you can do to change that.”
Except, maybe, sending a couple of busloads of immigrants to New York City—prompting Adams to declare that, “We have no more room in this city.”
“What about the yearnings and the tiredness?” asked Stewart. “And the tiredness of those who are doing the yearning?”
Ultimately, Stewart concluded, “This is the terrible cycle America is caught in. Democrats—whose high-minded values and principles did not survive a contact high with reality—and Republicans—whose desire to solve the problem isn’t nearly as strong as their desire to exploit it.”
