Ted Cruz campaign 'invasion' video shows suited businesspeople fleeing across Mexican border

Video shows women and men in suits running over sand dunes and through rivers to enter the US

The attempt to foster fearmongering over immigration has hit a new level after Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz released a new campaign video showing suited men and women in high heels jumping over sand dunes and wading through shallow rivers to enter the US to illustrate potential economic calamity.

In the one minute video, the junior Texan Senator speculates that the media would focus more on the economic viewpoint of immigration – and supposedly less on the humanitarian aspect – if it was not working class or manual workers coming over the border from Mexico, but lawyers, bankers or journalists.

“And I will say that the politics of it will be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande,” he 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.”

In the video, Mr Cruz declared immigration as a “very personal economic issue” and said that if he enters the White House he would build a new wall along the border.

“If I’m elected President, we will triple the border patrol. We will build a wall that works. We will secure the border,” he said.

Social media users lambasted Mr Cruz's attempts to "make people afraid of each other".

YouTube user Glamazonbarbie joked: "Illegal immigration has been so hard on me. I always dreamed of that strawberry picking job in California's Central Valley but had to settle on being a Software Engineer because of all the illegals. Oh My God! The GOP just keeps trying to out stupid each other."

Republican candidates have focused on immigration as a key issue for the 2016 Presidential elections. Jousting between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump continues as Mr Trump released his own campaign video, showing Mexican immigrants crossing the border into the US – which turned out to be a clip of immigrants in Morrocco in 2014.