How Democrats Lost Their Way On Immigration

Not long ago, immigration was a winning issue for Democrats. When Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, his defeat was blamed, in part, on his hard-line stance in favor of “self-deportation”—making life so hard for immigrants that they would choose to return to their home country. Obama had backed a more popular approach, which balanced strong enforcement at the border and the workplace with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and an expansion of legal immigration. That policy, called comprehensive immigration reform, was supported by the immigrant-advocacy movement and by 77 percent of the public.

In the election’s aftermath, leading conservatives—including Sean Hannity (who said he’d “evolved” on immigration and supported a “pathway to citizenship”), Rupert Murdoch (“Give them a path to citizenship. They pay taxes. They are hard-working people”), and Charles Krauthammer (the GOP “requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty.”)—announced their support for reform. A bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” was approved by a resounding 68–32.

In the end, however, the bill was never taken up by House Republicans. Obama pivoted to a series of executive actions to shield some 5 million of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, but Republican state attorneys general sued to stop the largest from going forward. The pro-immigrant movement began to splinter; advocates, frustrated with the failure of a coalition that had included unions, business, law enforcement, and churches, moved swiftly left.

[Rogé Karma: Why democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]

Much has changed since then. This year, Donald Trump ran the border issue to victory. He blamed housing costs, wage pressures, and crime on a migrant “invasion”; branded Democrats the party of “open borders”; and promised extreme deportation measures. Voters didn’t care that it was Republicans who had tanked another border bill early in 2024, or that, after executive actions on border security, crossings this fall were down from the end of Trump’s presidency. Few noticed when Harris gave a major policy speech promising more action at the border. According to a postelection Navigator poll, Trump’s promise “to secure the border and fight illegal immigration” was the top reason to vote for him. Even among voters of color, opposition to immigration drove support for Trump. The GOP had successfully tattooed the “Biden border crisis” on Kamala Harris’s forehead.

How did Democrats fall so far and so quickly on immigration? It’s easy to blame Trump, and the lure of his xenophobic rhetoric. But we believe that immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left, beyond the political space available to them. Voters, feeling unheard and frustrated, may have squirmed at Trump’s racism and radicalism, but they also saw him as someone who took the problem seriously and was trying to address it.

One of us, Cecilia, spent two decades at the National Council of La Raza, America’s biggest Latino advocacy group, and later advised Obama on immigration issues as head of his White House Domestic Policy Council. The other, Frank, ran pro-immigrant organizations for more than three decades, and advised the Harris campaign on immigration. This is a heartfelt critique, informed by our decades of experience as immigrant advocates who also understand the realities of governing. Unless something changes, Republicans will continue exploiting the situation at the border, more immigrants will suffer, and Democrats will continue to lose the trust of voters—damaging their chances of unseating the authoritarians now returning to power.

Activists weren’t always happy with the model of comprehensive immigration reform, feeling that it focused too much on enforcement. But the promise of congressional action encouraged many to compromise. This changed in 2013, when John Boehner, as speaker of the House, refused to bring for a vote the reform bill that had passed the Senate. After that, many activists gave up on federal legislation and began making more militant demands. They also adopted more confrontational tactics—mostly directed at Democrats.

Grassroots activists routinely interrupted speeches by Obama to call for an end to deportations. Some targeted then-Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, who was in a tight race. Hagan had voted for comprehensive immigration reform but had joined other vulnerable Senate Democrats in asking Obama to delay announcing executive actions until after the midterm election. The week before Election Day, activists interrupted Hagan and Hillary Clinton during a joint appearance, expressing disgust at both for not pressing Obama to act immediately. This increased the salience of immigration—an issue that was already hurting Hagan. She lost to Thom Tillis, clinching the Senate majority for the Republicans.

When Clinton ran for president in 2016, activists pushed her to the left on immigration, imploring her to break with Obama and commit to a dramatic rollback of enforcement. In an interview with Jorge Ramos of Univision, Clinton did just that, promising to focus on deporting “violent criminals” and “people planning terrorist attacks.” Her platform made only a cursory mention of enforcement. Activists had assured her that she’d see an increase in Latino and Asian turnout in response, but the votes never materialized, and Trump won.

The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg was blunt in his comparison of Clinton’s approach with Obama’s. “Pro-immigration advocates won majority support for comprehensive immigration reform only after the public became confident that leaders wanted to manage immigration and that they took borders and citizenship seriously,” he wrote in The American Prospect. In contrast, many white working-class voters concluded that Clinton “wanted ‘open borders.’” The pro-immigrant movement convened no postmortem to reflect on the role it might have played in Trump’s rise.

The movement did come back together in response to the cruelty, chaos, and overreach of Trump’s approach to immigration. Activists were particularly willing to work with Democrats in Congress following revelations that Trump was intentionally separating children from their parents at the border. Family separation failed as a deterrence measure and became a political liability for Trump, thanks to skillful organizing, a massive public-opinion backlash, and a Republican-appointed federal judge who called the policy “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”

[From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of family separation]

We pragmatists hoped that the existential threat posed by Trump might lead to moderation in the movement, with the unity forged in resistance creating political space to identify solutions that enjoy majority public support. It was not to be. Four years fighting Trump seemed only to further radicalize the left.

This became evident when, in the run-up to the 2020 election, some movement leaders decided to discard and discredit comprehensive immigration reform. Calling it “an outdated and flawed strategy” that criminalized and punished some immigrants in exchange for legal status for others, these leaders demanded a “bold, new vision for our immigration system, one that rivals the boldness of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.”

This call had its intended effect. Virtually overnight, most of the movement shelved the concept of comprehensive reform—despite the fact that this approach enjoyed strong public support, had put Democrats on the offense for nearly a decade, had the support of prominent Republicans, and was backed by Democratic senators including Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin.

Emboldened, self-described “abolitionists” pilloried mentions of border enforcement, deportations, or immigration limits as legitimizing Trumpian extremism. Activist groups rolled out their bold new vision in a platform called “Free to Move, Free to Stay,” which called for “freedom from deportation” and “freedom from the enforcement machine.” The platform, perhaps understandably, focused on condemning Trump’s harshest measures, but it opened the door to criticism that advocates were less focused on U.S. interests than on the right to migrate in a borderless world. It also revealed the extent to which progressives had stopped worrying about persuasion. In an analysis in The New York Times, the writer Jason DeParle described their stance as lacking an “affirmative case for immigration—an argument for how it strengthens the economy, invigorates the culture and deepens ties to the world.”

Candidates sought to connect with the progressive shift. In one early debate during the Democratic primary, eight out of 10 candidates raised their hand when asked if they favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But decriminalization was deeply unpopular. A poll at the time found that just 27 percent of people surveyed supported decriminalizing it. (Harris was among those who raised her hand. Her progressive posturing in 2019 would come back to haunt her 2024 candidacy, drawing brutal and relentless attack ads.)

For its first three years, Joe Biden’s administration was hit by the right for being too soft, by the left for being too tough, and by congressional Democrats for having no clear plan. Border encounters averaged 2 million a year; under Trump, they never exceeded 1 million. Many news reports amplified the right-wing narrative. Certainly, smuggling networks exploited the new administration’s change in tone and policy in their recruitment efforts. But blaming the increase on Biden ignored the fact that immigration numbers had begun to rise significantly while Trump was still president, and that the phenomenon was a global one. The postwar era of refugees and displacement is being overtaken by a new age of global migration, challenging policy makers just about everywhere.  

Finally, with border numbers sky high and the bipartisan border bill thwarted by Trump and his supporters early this year, Biden took additional executive actions to address the situation. The administration invoked emergency authority to make it easier to remove those without a legal right to stay; secured help from Mexico to crack down on smuggling networks; increased the number of removals and deportation flights; expanded legal pathways for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans by soliciting U.S. sponsors and granting humanitarian visas, resulting in a 99 percent decline in illegal crossings for people from these countries; increased refugee admissions; and encouraged migrants to apply for admission through new Safe Mobility Offices in Latin America, and through an app.

These policies send a message: Wait your turn, apply through an orderly process, and you have a chance; come to the border and cross illegally and you won’t. In fact, you will be barred for reentry for five years, and if you are a repeat violator, you can be charged with a felony and imprisoned for two years. Better to apply away from the border than risk it all with an illegal entry. The combination of discouraging illegal immigration and encouraging legal immigration is working. Monthly crossings are down 77 percent from the all-time high last December.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the shift came too late to persuade skeptical voters. Meanwhile, the gap between activists and Democrats grows. Take the bipartisan border bill: Biden endorsed it; Harris promised to sign it if elected; 85 percent of Senate Democrats voted for it; and the public solidly supported it. With only a few exceptions, pro-immigration advocacy groups opposed it.

Now that Trump is preparing to take office again, Democrats and immigration advocates share the same priority: to fight his radical mass-deportation plans. He promises to deploy the military; conduct raids; target schools and churches; rip family members from jobs, homes, and communities; set up open-air camps as staging areas for deportation flights; and invoke obscure laws to justify it all. Standing up to this cruelty is essential, and will be difficult and consuming.   

But this defense must be supplemented by an aggressive offense, particularly for Democrats in office. They need to brand themselves, once again, as the party of balanced solutions. The message should be: “Illegal immigration is a problem, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with it. The right way is by imposing order on the border, removing public-safety threats and those found ineligible for asylum, creating pathways to legal status and citizenship for those with deep roots, and making sure our legal-immigration system addresses labor shortages and reunites close families—as long as American workers aren’t undercut by unscrupulous employers in the process. The wrong way is by ripping families apart, especially those that have been contributing to their communities for decades.”

[David Leonhardt: The hard truth about immigration]

Democrats need to insist on more control and more compassion; more order and more immigration; strict limits and wider legal pathways. This stands in stark contrast to both right and left. The right argues to kick out and keep out all immigrants. The left argues to let all comers stay. Both amount to overreaches that will eventually backfire. Voters want a middle way, but if they’re forced to choose between those who promise control and those who seem indifferent to chaos, they will choose the former.

Democrats have to win the argument, regardless of whether the advocacy groups come along. Immigration is a defining feature of our past, present, and future. We don’t have to choose between being a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. The best way to be either is to be both.