After designing a hyperloop to vault travellers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in thirty-five minutes, establishing SpaceX so that humans can colonize other planets, and building a satellite-powered Internet system, Starlink, that has played a role in the war between Russia and Ukraine, Elon Musk has turned his attention to the U.S.-Mexico border. Last week, he visited Eagle Pass, Texas, for a firsthand look at the unfolding migration crisis, and streamed it live on his social-media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), so that his hundred and fifty million followers could “see what’s really going on.” In an e-mail, Musk’s most recent biographer Walter Isaacson told me that the visit was another example of the billionaire’s “epic-hero complex”: Musk’s confidence that his attention will be an important part of the solution to our national, global, and interplanetary challenges. But though Musk claimed objectivity, he platformed just one side of an exceedingly complex story.
In the weeks before his visit, Musk primed his followers by posting commentary and news stories about immigration challenges in the United States and beyond. He also spoke with the Republican congressman Tony Gonzales, whose district runs along Mexico’s border with Texas and includes Eagle Pass. Three days after his phone call with Gonzales, Musk touched down wearing an outfit that made him look like a stock border sheriff with a twist: a black Stetson, black boots, and mirrored aviator sunglasses, with black jeans and a black Dead Space T-shirt. Gonzales met him at the airport, and Musk’s phone camera started to roll. He posted three separate videos, blaming a weak signal near the border for forcing him to stop and re-start the stream. The longest, taken under a bridge near the border, lasts fifteen minutes and shows him talking with Gonzales; the Medina County sheriff, Randy Brown (a Republican); the LaSalle County sheriff, Anthony Zertuche (a Democrat); and the Eagle Pass mayor, Rolando Salinas, Jr., a Democrat who has been critical of President Biden’s handling of immigration and the border.
Many media outlets have described Musk’s visit to Eagle Pass as “citizen journalism,” a term that Musk himself has used. In contrast with “legacy media,” as Musk has called it, citizen journalism promises an unmediated flow of information, allowing everyone to have a voice in public discourse and to make their own judgments about what’s important and true. “So, here we are at Eagle Pass,” the citizen journalist Musk said, “and we’re gonna be meeting with the major officials and law enforcement responsible for the border, and you’ll hear it directly from them.” The rest of the video shows these officials taking turns to share their perspectives, as their entourage and a group of migrants being led by a uniformed officer appear in the background.
Brown describes what he called the Biden Administration’s “open-border policy,” the crimes that “illegals” commit in their home countries and the United States (train hijacking, car theft, destruction of private property), and his efforts to “hold the line.” Gonzales talks about the “historic numbers” of border crossers and the thousands who are currently being held in detention centers. Musk points out that the migrants aren’t coming only from Mexico, and that the border has become “an open border for all of earth.” Zertuche says that he encounters migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Cuba, but rarely anyone from Mexico.
Zertuche adds that, at any given moment, only sixteen officers are patrolling LaSalle County’s fifteen hundred square miles, causing his office to feel “overwhelmed.” Mayor Salinas says that the hospital in Eagle Pass is also overwhelmed, with the result that locals can’t always get the care they need. Musk, revealing presuppositions about the border, tells his viewers, “In case people are wondering whether Eagle Pass is, like, you know, a run-down town, it’s actually really clean and nice.”
Toward the end of the video, Musk asks Gonzales how many of the millions of migrants who cross the border every year get sent home. Gonzales answers by discussing only those who entered at, and were returned directly from, the Del Rio sector, a span of two hundred and forty-five miles along the border, and says that number is zero. “Zero is quite a small number,” Musk says, “so, basically, there’s no repatriation. This is insane.” He concludes by musing about Latin American gang members with teardrop tattoos on their faces, claiming that they represent the number of people they’ve killed. He calls them “serial murderers,” and says that the United States has become not only a refuge for the poor but also “the place where you can go to get away from the law.”
To be sure, the scenes from the border that Musk live-streamed are real, and the elected officials shown in the video state their own views and offer numbers as evidence. But this doesn’t mean that viewers saw the whole truth. In fact, some of the statements about open-border policies and migrant returns are incorrect. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, stated in an October 2nd briefing that Biden has “deployed additional troops and federal agents to the border and removed or returned more than two hundred and fifty thousand individuals since May 12th alone.” (The number of crossers who have been returned to Latin America since Biden took office is much higher: 3.6 million as of August, 2023.) The federal officials seen in Musk’s video don’t square with the idea that federal troops aren’t policing the border. And, as press releases from the Department of Homeland Security make clear, agents sometimes try to relieve pressure on high-traffic areas by moving migrants to lower-traffic areas, where if they are determined to not have a basis to remain in the United States, they are placed on flights leaving the country. This is how border “decompression” works. Moreover, White House records show that President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris have discussed border enforcement with the Presidents of Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia. In June, 2022, at the ninth annual Summit of the Americas, in Los Angeles, they and the leaders of more than a dozen other Latin American nations committed to “facilitating returns to countries of most recent residence or origin.” This past June, the Biden Administration renewed that commitment.
Every effort to frame an issue means leaving something out of view, and in this case Musk’s framing takes conservative arguments at face value. A Fox News report on Musk’s visit opened with the host Kayleigh McEnany claiming that “the growing crisis at our southern border is being ignored by the mainstream media—the liberal media, I would say—Democrats, and the President.” The commentator Tomi Lahren praised Musk, whom she described as not conservative and not Republican, saying, “Good for him for doing it.” In a Zoom call with members of the press, Gonzales described Musk as a “concerned citizen with a megaphone.” It’s Musk’s megaphone that is the problem, though. When a reporter asked Gonzales whether Musk’s visit “moved the needle,” he responded that whenever a video “gets a hundred million views, you’re moving the needle.”
Musk’s video repeats the same thinking that has mired debates about the border for the past several decades: partisans insisting on their truth about the border, unwilling to find common ground to pass comprehensive reform. Yet, at one point, he says something that differs from the Republican Party line. Whereas Republicans have long said that enforcement needs to happen before finding a pathway for the migrants who are in the United States to remain here, Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, says, “I am extremely pro-immigrant, and I believe that we need a greatly expanded legal-immigration system, and that we should let anyone in the country who is hardworking and honest and will be a contributor to the United States. We should have expedited legal approval for anyone who falls in that category. But then, by the same token, we should also not be allowing people in the country if they’re breaking the law.” There he sounds more like vintage Republicans, such as Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, who favored more lenient immigration policies, than like today’s Republican restrictionists.
Except for that moment, Musk missed the opportunity to delve into the complexities of the border debate. Had he wanted to, Musk could have spoken with immigration attorneys who advocate tirelessly for their clients, despite knowing that many of their applications to stay in the United States will be rejected. He could have shown the bustling border towns where the most visible border crossers are U.S. citizens entering Mexico to have a meal, see a doctor, or buy art work, and Mexican citizens heading north to shop, work, and attend school. He could have shown the undocumented agriculture and garment workers toiling to feed and clothe us, or the environmental, political, and economic catastrophes that lead migrants to make the difficult decision to uproot their lives and break apart their families. These are also unfiltered truths about the border. They wouldn’t have diminished Musk’s point that there is a problem that needs to be solved, but they would have given his many millions of followers a better understanding of the gravity of the task at hand. ♦