The right-wing candidates vying to become Chile’s next president are falling over each other to show voters who’ll do more to stop migrants from slipping across the border. Heading into Sunday’s elections, they’re promising internment camps, walls, trenches, mass deportations and, in one case, even deadly land mines.

Hundreds of thousands of foreigners, mainly from Venezuela, have arrived in Chile over the past decade, often through informal paths across the high-altitude northern desert that once served as a natural barrier. As Chileans clamour for more control, the nativist campaign platforms portend a crackdown, the latest example of growing anti-migrant sentiment sweeping the globe. Yet as the population here rapidly ages and the birth rate sinks below Japan’s, Chile risks going too far by locking out desperately needed foreign workers.

José Antonio Kast, the hard-right former congressman who recent polls show would triumph in a likely run-off ballot in December, describes clandestine migration as a national security threat. “Chile will be for Chileans and for everyone who complies and respects the law,” Kast said in a speech earlier this year. He’s promising to expand a military deployment to seal the border and to deport tens of thousands of people.

Kast is now warning undocumented immigrants to get out while they can.