A year of disruptive and sometimes deadly deployments of ICE and other federal agents to cities around the country, paired with relatively indiscriminate and clearly racist detentions of people with and without legal status (even including U.S. citizens), has managed to turn public opinion on its head: Once the strongest issue for Donald Trump and the Republicans writ large, immigration is politically up for grabs. Voters now loathe ICE and have a newfound appreciation for immigration.
The Democrats have attempted to capitalize on this shift in public opinion by holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security over demands for some basic constraints on ICE and Customs and Border Protection. But some political operators see a greater opportunity here for the party to stake out a position on immigration that’s entirely distinct from MAGA’s poisonous vision. In truth, the moment for that was years ago, but the next best time is now. The problem is, these folks are still—even after everything that’s happened this past year—overcorrecting for Donald Trump’s electoral success.
The new would-be populist Democratic think tank Searchlight—founded by Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman—recently released an immigration policy brief that is not a departure so much as a return to what hasn’t worked. Titled “No More Back Doors” and written by Blas Nuñez-Neto, a former assistant secretary of homeland security under President Biden, the paper urges Democrats to seize the moment by “recapturing the public’s trust on immigration.” It gestures at centrist orthodoxy like limited paths to citizenship for Dreamers and other limited groups, while ticking off right-wing wish-list items like building more border wall, deploying surveillance technology, sending migrants to third countries, and “no interior release for those waiting—even for families.”
Searchlight’s basic premise is that a posture of heavy enforcement is the new normal and Democrats should do the sane version of it. If the Democrats follow these recommendations, they will have failed yet again to understand that public opinion on this issue is mutable. They will also squander what is—and here I agree with Searchlight—a golden opportunity to stake out a new path. I just happen to believe in a path that’s both humane and popular.
A month before the 2024 election, I wrote at TNR that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and other party leaders were making a significant political error in responding to the Trump campaign’s anti-immigrant depravations by insisting that they would be just as effective at restricting immigration flows. She lost, of course, but to this day it’s a broadly accepted narrative that her loss was in part because the Biden administration was hounded by the left wing into backing open borders—something Biden did not actually do but that is accepted as fact not only by Republicans but by moderate Democratic policymakers and centrist pundits like The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.
One of Biden’s first big immigration decisions was leaving in place Stephen Miller’s most wide-ranging border restriction, Title 42, which for years was used to shut down asylum claims at the border using the pretext of the Covid pandemic (despite the fact that by the time the restrictions were issued, the United States was already the global epicenter). When that policy was finally wound down, the administration turned to another Miller-devised restriction: refusing to consider asylum claims from immigrants unless they’d already sought asylum in another country they’d passed through on their way to the U.S.
The fiction that Biden did away with border enforcement was driven in large part by a real growth in border encounters at the start of his term, but this had more to do with the lifting of many Covid restrictions and social instability in Central and Latin America than it did with Biden’s border policies. (Title 42 itself also incentivized repeat crossing attempts that were counted each as a new encounter.) Near the end of Biden’s term, just prior to the 2024 election, border encounters had fallen back to levels lower than at the end of Trump’s first term. Yet ask any given voter, and they’re liable to tell you that Biden rolled out the welcome mat to undocumented immigrants.
This public narrative solidified because it’s much easier to fill an empty cup. Democrats, lacking any cohesive alternate vision on immigration, limited themselves to saying they’d simply be better at enforcement than Trump. Voters, unsurprisingly, did not find that to be a credible message. Of course, they turned out to hate Trump’s immigration policies—they either didn’t pay attention to his campaign platform or didn’t believe him—but this stove touching now gives Democrats the chance to put forward a contrasting approach.
The Democrats cannot define themselves merely in opposition to Trump, though. The public’s turn against Republicans on immigration is a rejection of overreach, sure, but it is also a moment of recognition that most people actually do want and value immigration—not only in a theoretical sense but in the tangible ways that it affects their lives and communities.
A fully separate and cohesive vision of immigration will ultimately get into a lot of granularities, but for the benefit of policymakers and consultants seeking a clean and repeatable message, it all flows downstream from a single guiding principle: Mass immigration is good, socially and economically; is the single most significant factor in America’s current position as the global locus of commerce and culture; we’ve been lucky to have it; and we should want more. The fact that this well-supported and easily defensible position would trigger anaphylaxis among a huge swath of elected Democrats in Washington is frankly an embarrassment and a symptom of a deep dearth of political imagination.
To be an effective message, it has to be forceful and stand-alone, not caveated. That doesn’t mean it can’t be linked to, say, the party’s flagship message of making life more affordable. In this low-hire, low-fire environment, most job growth is coming from the health care sector, which shows no signs of slowing as the population ages (a related issue that promises to stall economic growth and cultural vibrancy). Perhaps it’s worth noting, then, that immigrants account for more than one in four physicians at U.S. hospitals and are broadly seeded throughout the health care workforce in a load-bearing capacity.
If Democrats want to build more housing, expand renewable energy, and promote the nation’s food security, that all requires both manpower and expertise—the sort that won’t soon be automated away, and which depends on people from all around the world. As for the fascination with the idea of people seeking asylum—as is their lawful right—at the border, let’s just say it plainly: The equivalent of one-third of a percent of the U.S. population annually arriving at the border and being allowed to live and work while undergoing a full adjudication of their case is not an emergency. It never was, and these numbers could easily be accommodated with relatively minimal investment, certainly far less than we’re spending on detention.
For Democrats who are perennially worried about losing voters in depressed postindustrial communities, immigration is once again a winning message. Buffalo, New York, is an oft-cited example of how a city with a declining population and a stagnating economy received a much-needed injection of talent and labor from refugee and other immigrant arrivals over the last 20 years. It’s not the only example; there’s plenty of evidence that immigration has been a net boon from Phoenix to the Great Lakes. Even recent surges in so-called unauthorized immigration fueled gross domestic product growth while having no upward effect on inflation, according to the radicals at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Over and over, serious and careful research has put the lie to the notion that restricting immigration is bad for domestic workers.
This narrative being false does not seem to have stopped mainstream Democratic elites from seeing it as a land mine to avoid, but this is a self-reinforcing cycle; the narrative is potent because it is the only one on offer. It is not the job of the party to draw its own positions around the falsehoods promulgated by its opposition—it is the party’s job to have a unified and assertive message that exists counter to that. And it’s not true that general support for immigration cannot coexist with otherwise moderate or even conservative politics. Just look at my recent report on Utah, a state whose cherry-red legislature has overwhelmingly approved pro-refugee measures in recent years. Or consider President Ronald Reagan, who said in a 1984 presidential debate, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally”—and then, in 1986, signed a bill allowing some 2.7 million to obtain status.
Nationally, regularizing Dreamers is extremely popular, but that covers only a tiny fraction of “those who have put down roots” since the Reagan era, and things like “We will streamline requirements for H-2A processing” are unintelligible to the general population. Democrats should say, “We will reinstate the full ability to seek asylum, a shining example of this nation’s fundamental ideals, and provide a path to regularization for the millions of people who have lived and raised families in the United States without incident for years”—which effectively was the policy of the United States during the half-century that most people consider its golden age.
The Immigration and Nationality Act, which is the basic framework of all of our immigration law, was passed in 1965, four years before the moon landing, at a time when the U.S. population was around 40 percent smaller and manufacturing was still the dominant economic sector. It’s time to start over—lift nonsensical caps on annual family and employment green cards, reformulate visas entirely (how about a health care–specific visa?) and wrest back control from the executive branch, which is invoking obscure provisions to rewrite immigration law on the fly. Oh, and get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, the creation of which was one of the worst decisions in the panicked wake of 9/11.
It is an optimal moment to do so now because the public at large is as close as it’s ever been to welcoming this message. There are countless “I thought he would be going after the criminals!” stories from Trump voters who have seen friends, co-workers, neighbors, even spouses lose status or be detained and deported. The effects of MAGA’s all-or-nothing immigration approach are being viscerally seen and felt around the country, and many people otherwise tuned out of politics are watching as their social and economic fabric unravels amid a brutal immigration crackdown. They’re as primed as they’ll ever be for a new, positive vision of immigration in America. Can Democrats finally summon the courage to give it to them?
