Immigrants are streaming across our border, and they’re wearing pumps and wingtips — at least according to Sen. Ted Cruz.
The Texas Republican on Tuesday morning released a new presidential campaign ad that showed a different side of border security, featuring actors wearing business suits and clutching laptops and briefcases fording rivers and running through the desert.
The images play as a voiceover runs in the background of Cruz delivering part of his stump speech, where he says illegal immigration would be taken more seriously if the people coming into the country were working different jobs.
“The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were coming across the Rio Grande,” Cruz said. “Or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press. Then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation.”
The ad will start airing in New Hampshire on Tuesday, according to the Cruz campaign.
Cruz’s take on the border comes a day after a dust-up between the Donald Trump campaign and the media over an ad he unveiled about border security, in which Trump used footage from the Moroccan border instead of the Mexican border, as the ad narration implied.
The Trump campaign said that decision was intentional.
The Cruz ad closes with a line from the senator from the last Republican debate, in which he says: “If I’m elected president, we will triple the Border Patrol. We will build a wall that works. … We will secure the border.”
The ad edits the line, however, to omit a dig at Trump.
“‘If I’m elected president, we will secure the border. We will triple the border patrol. We will build a wall that works and I’ll get Donald Trump to pay for it,” Cruz said in December.
Candidates and super PACs have been releasing a stream of ads since the new year as the first votes in the primary are just weeks away.