Analysis: Comparing border apprehensions to D-Day falls flat in one or two ways
By Philip Bump Philip Bump National correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics Email Bio Follow March 6 at 3:34 PM Rep. Clay Higgins , in his second term in Congress, is making a name for himself in Washington. One way in which he’s doing so is his trademark vest, worn with a tie even during committee hearings. The other is the questions he asks during those hearings, questions that, of late, have been . . . interesting.
“Let me just put this in context for the American people,” Higgins said about the increase. “Perhaps the most famous invasion in the history of the world — D-Day — 73,000 America troops landed in the D-Day invasion. We have 76,103, according to my numbers, apprehensions on our southern border last month. We have a D-Day every month on our southern border.”First of all, Higgins’s numbers are wrong. There were 76,103 apprehensions and inadmissibles stopped at the border in February.
That doesn’t make the recent increase unimportant, of course. But to continue Higgins’s bad analogy, in 2000, we were “having a D-Day” every two weeks. Notice, too, that the spike last month is about as high as the ones seen in 2014, when the summer months brought a surge of migrants — mostly children traveling alone who were fleeing violence in Central America. This was a national crisis, forcing President Barack Obama to come up with a way to address the surge. In September 2014, there were 61,357 apprehensions on the southwest border, before slipping back down.
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