On Immigration, Biden Offers a Muted, Muddled Message

Former President Donald J. Trump repeated his hard-line message on immigration at the debate on Thursday, casting undocumented immigrants as a threat to American jobs, national security and the social safety net. President Biden offered little in the way of rebuttal.

Mr. Trump argued that the president’s policies had left the U.S.-Mexico border wide open, allowing crime and drugs to flow into cities and converting every state into a border state.

“We are living right now in a rat’s nest,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re killing our people in New York, in California, in every state in the union because we don’t have borders anymore.” It was one of many statements by Mr. Trump that were either false, lacked context or were vague enough to be misleading.

Mr. Biden, meanwhile, did not define any broader strategy on an issue that has become one of his party’s most nagging political vulnerabilities. He also did not counter what many historians see as rhetoric about immigrants that could fuel violence.

The president’s most forceful defense of undocumented immigrants came more than an hour into the debate, when he suggested that they were a “reason why we had the most successful economy in the world.”

The portion of the debate dedicated to immigration was brief, but Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden pivoted to the issue repeatedly.