There are plenty of arguments against the wall.

It would be too expensive, and the $5 billion the White House now requests won’t come close to covering total construction costs. It won’t work because illegal immigrants can tunnel under or fly over. It is an ugly eyesore along the southern border.

Each of those is at least a valid argument against hammering hundreds of thousands of steel slats into the dust between the United States and Mexico. Rep. Pramila Jayapal didn’t make any of them.

The Washington State Democrat argued instead that President Trump is a racist goon hell-bent on creating a white America. When asked by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes whether the wall debate was an existential question, Jayapal went off.

“It is fundamentally existential and if he continues to insist on a wall—you just said it so beautifully, Chris; this has never been about a wall. He actually could have gotten funding a couple of years ago, or a year ago, for a wall,” Jayapal replied.

“It was part of a deal that was proposed, not all of us agreed with that deal but it was proposed to him and he turned it down because his ultimate goal is, as you said, to make America ‘pure' in the sense of not having immigrants, not having folks of color here, and shutting down every form of legal immigration,” she continued.



Democrat Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal blatantly lied tonight on @MSNBC by claiming that President Trump wants to eliminate all people of color from America in hopes of bringing forth "purity" in America. An absolutely shameful & desperate lie. pic.twitter.com/l0uAoMlLHl — Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) January 11, 2019

Moral arguments like Jayapal’s aren’t new to the debate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has argued from the beginning that a wall is immoral. Never mind, of course, that the U.S. already has more than 700 miles of physical barriers along the border, much of it in the speaker’s home state of California.

It is true that a DACA-for-Wall deal broke down in 2018. Democrats offered $25 billion for border security while the White House floated the idea of making protections for the so-called “dreamers” permanent. The deal fell through when domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller demanded more limitations on legal immigration.

The White House wanted to reduce lottery visas and reform family-based immigration programs. It didn’t make sense to fix one problem, they argued, without addressing the larger factors feeding that problem. They wanted to address more at once. This might not be wise politics but it's absurd to posit that reforming our immigration system away from its current hodgepodge is evidently racist.

If Trump didn’t want “immigrants of color” as she charges, the White House would never have suggested making DACA permanent as part of a larger immigration fix. For the last year though, the president has done exactly that. And if Trump wanted to somehow “purify” the country of non-white immigrants, his administration wouldn’t have boosted the number of H-2B visas for low-skilled workers. Trump made another 15,000 available.

Jayapal doesn’t bother with any of those considerations, because they complicate her argument, which seems to be that efforts to reform immigration, if they include anything other than amnesty-type provisions, are racist.