How the Right’s “Open Borders” Myth Might Be Fueling the Migration Crisis

Every year the United States spends many billions of dollars securing the 2,000-mile border it shares with Mexico. This perpetually growing investment has made Customs and Border Protection—which is staffed by more than 60,000 federal employees—one of the largest law enforcement organizations in the world. 

But you wouldn’t know that by tuning in to Fox News, which depicts the US-Mexico border as an unmonitored wasteland where all are free to come and go at will. Since just before the 2020 election, the term “open borders” has been featured in right-wing media with startling frequency: From November 1, 2020, through March 16, 2023, Fox News pundits used the phrase a whopping 3,282 times, according to data compiled by America’s Voice and Media Matters, while Newsmax clocked 2,727 mentions over the same period. This coverage, according to America’s Voice, aired during time slots collectively valued at nearly $27 million for advertisers.  

While right-wing media’s “open borders” messaging has proven salient for stateside viewers, there’s also reason to believe that it’s impacting perceptions of the border abroad. “I met with migrants in Costa Rica that were turned back, and their sense was that they will be able to enter freely,” Representative Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat, told me, arguing that the “confusion” stems squarely from right-wing disinformation. “The perception from them was that the border is open and they could just walk through.” John Modlin, a chief Border Patrol agent, shared a similar insight last month. Testifying before the House Oversight Committee, he relayed how detained migrants often said they were led to believe the border “was open.” 

Just how this misinformation is reaching migrants is not entirely clear. But it’s well known that human smugglers, who ferry migrants across the border for a fee, have widely promoted the “open borders” lie as a way of driving business, according to Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a nonprofit that works with migrants. “Smugglers are constantly peddling that type of misinformation because they’re looking to feed their bottom line,” he said, noting that traffickers falsely advertise “open” crossings to migrants desperate for a way into the US. The “open borders” myth is also spread on Facebook and WhatsApp, where it reaches unwitting migrants. “We had a group of Venezuelans who approached a bridge because they had seen something online and were under the notion that the border was open,” Corbett added.

Still, Corbett noted that while migrants might latch on to “any glimmer of hope that can sustain them on their journey,” including bogus conservative talking points that end up on social media, policy debates in Washington and on Fox News is hardly what’s fueling the crisis. “We know what’s going on in their countries: hunger, poverty, and social insecurity,” he said. “Those are the things that drive migration. Not the political situation in the US.”  

Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, said that she, too, has heard accounts of migrants receiving misinformation about the porousness of the border from social media and smugglers. “The best ‘open border’ propaganda machine is, in fact, the GOP,” she said in an interview. “We know the impact this disinformation has on migrants, who largely get information through online platforms. And we know that smugglers take this information and use it for their own purposes––to recruit and encourage irregular migration.”

The “open borders” narrative, while especially prominent now, has been circulating in the US for years. In the mid-2000s, when Lou Dobbs hosted a nightly show on CNN, he aired a recurring segment called Broken Borders, in which he baselessly portrayed migrants as disease-ridden criminals. That style of coverage, viewed at the time as both disturbing and novel, is now par for the course on Fox, the network Dobbs joined when he left CNN. Tucker Carlson regularly smears South and Central American migrants as invaders freely rampaging across the border, even claiming they make the US “dirtier” and are being used by Democrats to “replace the current electorate.”