Politics & Power Quote by John McCain

McCain’s blunt little “to wit” does a lot of work here. It’s a courtroom turn of phrase dropped into a border anecdote, meant to signal: I’m not riffing, I’m offering evidence. The “evidence,” though, is tellingly low-grade and highly visual: a sign. Not an arrest statistic, not an agency report, not even a personal encounter, but government-posted warnings that convert a complicated policy domain into a simple mood - danger, lawlessness, exposure.

The intent is to make insecurity feel official. By attributing the warning to “the government,” McCain borrows institutional authority to validate what might otherwise sound like campaign-season exaggeration. The subtext is almost accusatory: if the state itself is warning citizens, then someone has failed at the basic promise of sovereignty. Border policy, in this framing, isn’t an abstract debate about labor markets or asylum law; it’s a breach in the everyday social contract for “the people who live” there.

Context matters because McCain’s political identity complicates the line. As a hawkish Republican with a national security brand - and later, a sponsor of immigration reform - he’s speaking to two audiences at once: voters primed for tough-border rhetoric and moderates who need a rationale for action that sounds practical rather than xenophobic. By focusing on smuggling rather than migrants as such, he steers fear toward crime and governance, not ethnicity. The move is rhetorically neat: it invites urgency without naming a scapegoat, while still delivering the emotional payload of a border “not secure.”