Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Last Tuesday, a crowd of angry people gathered on a road in Oracle, Arizona, a small town near Tucson. They’d heard that about fifty children from Central America—some of the unaccompanied thousands who have crossed the border in recent months—were being brought to a youth home nearby, and they wanted to turn them back. Then someone spotted a yellow bus down the highway. “Bus coming in,” Adam Kwasman, a Republican state legislator, tweeted. “This is not compassion. This is the abrogation of the rule of law.” With supporters and cameramen in tow, he charged toward the bus. It drove away, but not, Kwasman told a reporter, before he had got a look at the passengers. “I was able to actually see some of the children in the bus—and the fear on their faces,” he said. The reporter replied, “You know that was a bus with Y.M.C.A. kids?” Only slightly ruffled, Kwasman acknowledged that he had made “a mistake,” as did many amused headline writers (“ARIZONA POLITICIAN MISTAKES Y.M.C.A. CAMPERS FOR MIGRANT CHILDREN”).

Since last October, nearly forty-four thousand Central American children have been apprehended at the border, after making their way across Mexico; in the 2012 fiscal year, by comparison, there were about ten thousand. Many were fleeing violence in Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador; their parents, fearing for their lives, had sent them north. Others were looking for relatives who were already in this country. As holding cells in detention centers filled up with small figures wrapped in Red Cross blankets, the situation presented a humanitarian crisis. That is why children were being sent to places like Oracle.

All this, according to Barack Obama’s critics, is his fault—the result of his unwillingness to protect the border. In 2012, after the Dream Act failed to pass, the President signed an executive order allowing undocumented immigrants who arrived in this country as minors prior to 2007, and who met certain other conditions, to remain here, at least temporarily. The children making their way to the border now don’t qualify, but their parents don’t know that, the critics contend. Another problem, as they see it, is the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, signed by George W. Bush, which says that any child from a country not adjacent to the United States—that is, not Mexico or Canada—who appears at the border unaccompanied must be given an immigration hearing. The purpose of the law is to see whether such a child has a legal right to stay, as, perhaps, a political refugee; for that reason, it is wrong to presumptively call the border children illegal.

The President has said that part of his plan for dealing with the crisis is to speed up those hearings; he has asked Congress for three billion seven hundred million dollars, emphasizing that the money would be used not only to shelter the children but also to facilitate deportations. (During Obama’s first term, the average number of deportations per year was close to four hundred thousand, compared with two hundred and fifty thousand under President Bush.) John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said last week that the President would not get anything close to that figure unless changes were made to the 2008 law, which, Boehner said, was being “abused.” Senator Ted Cruz said that he’d require undoing the 2012 executive order as well.

Other Republicans have gone further, suggesting that the surge of immigrants is part of a plot. Governor Rick Perry, of Texas, who has been using the crisis to reassert himself as a national figure, following his disastrous 2012 Presidential campaign, said, “We either have an incredibly inept Administration or they’re in on this somehow,” invoking a theory that children were being lured into the country so that they would grow up to be Democratic voters—agents of a President whose own Americanness has never been accepted by many in the Republican base. On the G.O.P.’s Tea Party wing, Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas, said, “Our continued existence is at risk with what’s going on at the southern border.” He added, in a line that revealed many conservative fixations, “And this Administration wants to talk about other people having a war on women when they will not defend the women that are being sexually assaulted by illegal aliens in this country.” Republican congressmen and county sheriffs have referred to the children as possible predators, gang members, and bearers of the sorts of diseases that might have been found in the holds of nineteenth-century ships—as anything, really, but children.

Such attacks, though, leave the Republicans vulnerable. It’s no secret that the Party has a “demographic problem.” The G.O.P. once hoped that Latino voters, whom it assumed were socially conservative, would be among its natural supporters. But, in 2012, Mitt Romney received only twenty-seven per cent of the Latino vote. (Bush got forty per cent in 2004.) The Republican National Committee’s postmortem report on the 2012 election warned that “if Hispanic Americans hear that the G.O.P. doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.” Among the report’s recommendations: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” That sentiment now seems to belong to another decade. Immigration reform was, at best, prodded and circled, rather than embraced. Then, with the surprise defeat of Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, by a primary opponent who had made an issue of Cantor’s willingness to talk about the path to citizenship, it was shunned.

It is one thing for Republicans to decide that they will not be the party of immigration reform, but it is another to decide that they will be the anti-immigration party. If they do, they will define themselves in opposition to America’s future and, incidentally, to its past—one built by newcomers like the gold prospector from Canada who, in 1876, sailed on a ship around South America and staked a claim that became the town of Oracle. In the short term, there may be benefits, in the form of an energized base, but enjoying them requires a distinct lack of shame. If Adam Kwasman was abashed by his Y.M.C.A. mixup, many of his allies don’t think that chasing down a busload of kids was a mistake at all. No children had been brought to Oracle since then, and that was enough for some to call the episode a victory. For the Republican Party as a whole, it might be better described as a dangerous temptation. ♦