Vivek Ramaswamy Wants to Build a Wall Between the U.S. and Canada

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a new feature where we pull a particularly wild statement from the news as a reminder of just how extremely normal everything has become.

“Don’t just build the wall. Build both walls.” —Vivek Ramaswamy, Wednesday in Miami, third GOP debate

During Wednesday night’s GOP debate in Miami, five of the Republican candidates for president graced the stage (minus, of course, Donald Trump) and spent two hours sparring over a slew of different topics, including how they would handle the opioid crisis if elected president.

One of the moderators, right-wing talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, set up the question in what can only be described as a leading way. “I talk to voters every day,” he said, and “they all say that the border is a top issue. It can mean a lot of different things. It can mean 2 million people who crossed illegally last year. It can mean more than 150 arrests of people on the terror watch list. It can mean the burden on states from having migrants move into their states from the southwestern border. But I want to talk about opioids specifically, and fentanyl.”

He asked: “What can you do as commander in chief on the first day to stop fentanyl and the waterfall of it into this country?”

Linking fentanyl to the migration crisis at the U.S. southern border is now basically a bread-and-butter Republican talking point. But Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this year that it is “unequivocally false that fentanyl is being brought to the United States by noncitizens encountered in between ports of entry who are making claims of credible fear and seeking asylum.”

Nevertheless, Tim Scott rambled about Mexican labs and dealing with “our ports of entry.” Chris Christie talked about beefing up law enforcement. Ron DeSantis pledged to send more military to the U.S. border and saber-rattled about shooting people who are with drug cartels and are “sneaking fentanyl across the border when I’m president.”

But Vivek Ramaswamy took it one step further. “Don’t just build the wall. Build both walls,” he proclaimed. The U.S., Ramaswamy said, received more fentanyl from Canada last year than it did from Mexico. Therefore, in order to combat the opioid crisis, Ramaswamy argued, we needed to shut out Canada too.

However, that’s not exactly true. The U.S. does get illicit fentanyl from Canada, but it’s pretty minuscule in comparison to the amount that comes in via Mexico. In 2022 Customs and Border Protection seized 14 pounds of fentanyl at the northern border of the U.S., while 14,100 pounds were seized at the southern border. (And of course, the opioid crisis is mixed up in global trade; it doesn’t come from just one place. Eight China-based companies were recently indicted for allegedly sending chemicals used to make fentanyl to the U.S.)

Ramaswamy doubled down on his northern border wall idea, noting that he was the “only candidate on this stage, as far as I’m aware, who has actually visited the northern border.” It is, he has previously argued, “wide open for invasion.”