The tactic of portraying the border as under invasion has proved useful for efforts to undermine confidence in the election—and has proved profitable for Border911’s members. Last summer, Maltz, the former DEA special agent, and Jones, the former DPS captain, testified in Washington, D.C., before the House Homeland Security Committee about the border, identifying themselves only as private citizens and former law enforcement. Jones didn’t mention his Border911 public relations role, his private intelligence company, or the $20,000-30,000 speaker fees he advertises that he charges as a border expert. He did not disclose his Border911 speaker role or his job with a firm that has earned more than $250 million in federal government security contracts.

The simple Econ 101 story turned out to have a blind spot: Immigrants aren’t just workers who compete for jobs; they are also consumers who buy things. They therefore increase not only the supply of labor, which reduces wages, but also the demand for it, which raises them. In the end, the two forces appear to cancel each other out.

Right-wing media and Republican politicians sought to turn Biden’s policies into a liability. By mid-2022, the percentage of Republican voters who said immigration should decrease had risen by 21 points. And with Trump no longer in the White House to mobilize the opposition, Democratic immigration attitudes began by some measures to creep closer to their pre-2016 levels as well. “The paradox of Trump was that he inspired an unprecedented positive shift in immigration attitudes,” Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me. “But because it was a reaction to Trump himself, that positivity was always extremely fragile.”