How Democrats Should — And Shouldn’t — Moderate On Immigration

The site of ongoing state-sponsored border wall construction in La Casita-Garciasville, Texas. | Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images

It’s likely that no social issue has cost Democrats more votes in recent years than immigration. 

The Biden-Harris administration presided over America’s largest surge of new arrivals since 1850 according to data from the Census Bureau and Congressional Budget Office. A Goldman Sachs analysis obtained by the New York Times suggests that unauthorized immigrants account for a majority of that spike. 

The American electorate did not welcome these huddled masses with open arms. Between 2021 and 2024, the share of Americans who wanted a reduction in immigration surged from 31 percent to 55 percent, according to Gallup. 

This restrictionist mood redounded to Donald Trump’s benefit. Among swing voters, the most commonly cited reason for backing Trump in 2024 was that he would “secure the border and fight illegal immigration,” according to Navigator, a Democratic polling firm. Another Democratic pollster, Blueprint, found that swing voters’ second-most important reason for opposing Kamala Harris was that “too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration” (the most important reason concerned inflation). And Democrats’ perceived softness on illegal immigration was also integral to Trump’s first election in 2016, when white Obama voters with right-of-center views on that issue defected from the Democratic coalition in large numbers.

In the face of this data, there is a growing consensus among Democrats that the party veered too far left on immigration policy from 2016 through 2023 (after which, the party mounted an abrupt effort to regain credibility on border enforcement before the 2024 election). Some liberals have gone so far as to question the desirability of high immigration levels on the merits, suggesting that mass migration exacerbates inequality and saps the prosperity of America’s working class. In this analysis, Democrats shouldn’t merely crack down on unauthorized inflows or border chaos, but also admissions of lower-skill legal immigrants — and not merely for politics’ sake, but for the country’s.

This is wrong.   

In truth, of all the progressive movement’s causes, it’s plausible that increasing legal immigration is the most vital. Few things do more to increase humanity’s aggregate prosperity than allowing people to migrate from less wealthy nations to the United States. And the immense benefits that immigrants derive from moving to the US do not come at the expense of native-born Americans. To the contrary, in the long term, immigration makes Americans more prosperous, while rendering the country’s retirement programs more secure. 

Precisely because immigration is so beneficial, however, it’s imperative for Democrats to forge a politically tenable approach to the issue. The party should neither embrace full-bore restrictionism nor project complacency about chaos at the border.

Instead, Democrats must make American politics safe for mass immigration. Maintaining the party’s recent pivot toward more aggressive border enforcement and less lenient asylum policies is likely necessary for achieving that goal. 

Immigration is extremely good

Few ideas are more central to progressivism than the notion that accidents of fate should not determine a person’s life chances. Every social insurance program and civil rights bill aims to mitigate unearned disadvantage: the high health care costs of the chronically ill, the lost wages of those injured on the job, the discrimination suffered by marginalized social groups, and the economic precarity of all who weren’t born into wealth. One measure of a progressive policy’s value is, therefore, the degree to which it erodes inequities rooted in sheer luck. 

A separate measure is whether, in mitigating the misfortune of discrete groups, the policy also improves the well-being of the public as a whole. For example, increasing unemployment benefits amid a recession not only reduces the deprivation of the jobless but also promotes economic recovery by generating consumer demand.

By these metrics, increasing immigration to the United States is plausibly the most valuable policy on the progressive agenda. 

After all, inequality is far greater at the global scale than the national one. The median worker in Haiti is far less prosperous than a low-income worker in the United States. Simply allowing the former to come to America will increase their material well-being by more than any politically plausible policy could increase the prosperity of a low-income American: In Haiti, the typical worker earns less than $1,800 a year. Let that laborer come to New York City, work full-time at the 2025 minimum wage, and they will earn more than $34,000, while also enjoying the benefits of far greater public safety and political stability than their home country presently affords.

Haiti is an especially economically and politically troubled nation at the moment. But the vast majority of humanity lives in countries that are much poorer than the United States. Allowing most people from most foreign nations to become US citizens will make them dramatically more prosperous.

And the immense benefits of immigration for the immigrant do not come at a commensurate cost to native-born Americans. If a Haitian worker comes to the US — and sees their annual income increase by upward of $30,000 — this does not cause any American to earn $30,000 less. No transfer of income has occurred. Although some mistakenly believe that immigration marginally reduces employment for native-born workers (more on this in a minute), no serious analyst argues that this trade-off is one-to-one, such that every newly hired immigrant means one newly unemployed native-born American.

In reality, the Haitian immigrant’s income gain derives from the fact that their labor is more productive in the United States than it was back home, thanks to the nation’s technologically advanced and relatively efficient economic institutions. The Haitian immigrant’s arrival in the US therefore not only increases their prosperity but also the sum total of humanity’s, as an hour of their labor now produces more economic value.

Few deny that immigration is beneficial to both the vast majority of immigrants and economic growth. Some liberals, though, such as New York Times columnist David Leonhardt and author John Judis, insist that these facts don’t settle the question of whether high levels of legal immigration are desirable. 

In their view, the American nation-state is primarily accountable to the interests of its citizenry, not to those of humanity writ large. And although “low-skill” immigration increases American economic growth, they insist that it also erodes the wages and bargaining power of the native-born working class.

Leonhardt and Judis are undoubtedly right that, in practice, the US government cannot prioritize the interests of poor people abroad over American citizens and retain democratic legitimacy. But their account of the economics of immigration is simply wrong. 

To be sure, the notion that immigration aids employers at workers’ expense is intuitive. After all, American workers benefit from tight labor markets, in which businesses must bid against each other for a scarce pool of potential employees. Large inflows of foreign workers would seem to tilt the balance of power back toward business owners, especially if those immigrants hail from poor nations and, thus, have relatively low wage expectations. 

But there is a problem with this reasoning: The tightness of labor markets is not determined solely by the supply of workers. Demand for labor also matters. 

Immigrants expand the size of the labor force. But they are not automata who shut off the minute they clock out of their shifts; they are human beings who want and need to purchase goods and services. As a result, they both fill jobs and create them. 

What’s more, immigrants also make native-born workers more productive by complementing their skills and filling gaps in local labor markets.

For these reasons, subtracting immigrants from an area’s labor force does not reliably increase the bargaining power or prosperity of the remaining, native-born workers. Between 2008 and 2014, the US deported roughly 500,000 undocumented immigrants through the Secure Communities program. The policy reached different parts of the country at different times, and this provided economists with a natural experiment: By comparing counties subject to Secure Communities at a given time with counties that were as yet unaffected, they could gauge the labor market impacts of mass deportation. They found that when the government expelled undocumented immigrants from a country, native-born workers there tended to see lower wages and employment, likely due to falling consumer demand and job creation. 

This finding is not anomalous. Myriad other studies and meta-analyses have similarly found that immigrants do not generally reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born workers. They do, however, make Medicare and Social Security benefits easier to finance. 

Expanding legal immigration is therefore the progressive reform par excellence: It radically mitigates the disadvantages suffered by those born into poor or unstable countries, while making Americans more prosperous. 

Democrats must inevitably forswear some worthwhile policies, for the sake of political expediency. The party needs to pick its battles, and the fight for more legal immigration should be one of them. 

Why Democrats must stand for order at the border

While the substantive case for expanding legal immigration is strong, the political outlook for that project is less than bright at present, as the Gallup data cited above makes clear. Changing this reality will require Democrats to both win back power and cultivate a more permissive public mood toward immigration. Achieving either of those goals will likely require a commitment to combating irregular flows of unauthorized migrants across the southern border.

This is not a novel proposition, of course. Conventional wisdom long held that progress on expanding legal admissions — or securing legal status for longtime, undocumented residents of the US — was contingent on establishing order at the border. This was the foundational premise of the push for “comprehensive immigration reform” under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In those years, immigration advocates rallied behind bipartisan bills that would have increased opportunities for legal admissions, provided legal status to millions of undocumented Americans, and ramped up border enforcement. This approach nearly delivered landmark change, with versions of comprehensive reform clearing the Senate but not the House in 2006 and 2013.

Nevertheless, the effort failed. As the GOP took a hard right turn on immigration and prospects for bipartisan reform dimmed, progressive activists embraced more uncompromising stances on the issue. Through protest and lobbying — the latter abetted by dubious opinion polling — these advocates succeeded in pushing Democrats to the left on virtually all aspects of immigration policy. 

In 2016, Hillary Clinton pledged not to deport anyone but violent criminals and terrorists, while centering her campaign on a celebration of immigration and diversity. In 2019, at a Democratic primary debate, eight of the 10 presidential hopefuls onstage, including future nominee Kamala Harris, said they would favor decriminalizing illegal border crossings, a stance that put them at odds with two-thirds of US voters, according to a Marist poll taken at the time. When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he rolled back some of Trump’s border enforcement policies, paused deportations, and expanded eligibility for asylum.

In my view, these stances — and the tolerant attitude toward disorderly migration they reflect — are morally sound. 

Precisely because most workers in Latin America can greatly improve their living standards by coming to the United States, deterring them from crossing the nearly 2,000-mile southern US border requires acts of callousness and cruelty. Many have celebrated the Biden administration’s remarkable success at reducing migrant inflows since June 2024, when his administration took a series of actions to limit eligibility for asylum and abet rapid deportations. 

But much of this success is attributable to a draconian change in Mexican policy. In recent months, at America’s encouragement, Mexico has taken to keeping migrants on a nightmarish carousel: Police forces intercept migrants in the north of the country and then bus them to middle-of-nowhere towns in Mexico’s south. This enables the government to escape the financial and legal burdens of deporting migrants back to their home countries, while still preventing them from reaching the US southern border. Yet the policy also entails serially depositing desperate and often undernourished people in southern Mexican towns that have few resources with which to care for them. 

It isn’t hard to see why someone would look at the suffering of these migrants and then at the economic benefits of immigration and conclude that there are worse things than disorder at the border.

If this is a reasonable moral calculus, however, it is not a politically tenable one. The Biden-era surge in unauthorized border crossing erased two decades of leftward drift in the American public’s attitudes toward immigration in Gallup’s data, while helping to propel an authoritarian nativist back into the White House. 

Some on the left argue that Democrats could have prevented this backlash through a more vigorous and forthright defense of immigration. In their view, by ceding any ground to restrictionist sentiment, Democrats validate the right’s basic narrative about the danger posed by undocumented immigrants, thereby tilting the entire terrain of American politics rightward.

The ideological convenience of this analysis renders it suspect on its face, and it does not hold up under scrutiny. At the national level, Democrats’ messaging on immigration may not be uniformly progressive. But in recent years, Democratic officials in blue cities have zealously defended vanguardist positions on immigration policy. In 2021, New York City provided payments of up to $15,600 to undocumented residents impacted by the pandemic. Meanwhile, throughout Trump’s presidency, New York loudly refused to hand over undocumented immigrants arrested on suspicion of a criminal offense to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Democrats in other blue states have similarly fought — in word and deed — for a vision of immigration policy that gives priority to humanitarian concerns. 

This did not stop voters in blue states from turning against immigration amid the Biden-era surge in asylum seekers. One 2023 poll found 58 percent of voters in the Empire State agreeing with the statement, “New Yorkers have already done enough for new migrants and should now work to slow the flow of migrants to New York.” By a 46 to 32 percent margin, meanwhile, respondents said that migrants had been a “burden” not a “benefit” to New York in recent decades. Polls have shown similar spikes in restrictionist sentiment in Illinois and California. And all three states swung hard against the Democratic Party in 2024. 

These backlashes could be mitigated through better economic policy. Resentment against migrants in New York City derives in part from the strain their arrival has put on social services and shelter space, in a city that was already struggling to care for its homeless. If the federal government provided more financial assistance to municipalities tasked with resettling large numbers of asylum seekers, such migrants would impose less of a fiscal burden. If New York had not engineered a housing shortage through restrictive zoning policy, it would be easier and cheaper for the city to house new arrivals. In general, combating all forms of artificial scarcity — in housing, energy, medicine, and beyond — is indispensable to creating a favorable environment for mass immigration.

But so is preventing large surges of unauthorized immigration. This entails maintaining support for the various measures that Democrats already embraced over the past year: expediting the asylum process, increasing the legal standard for advancing a claim for protection, and increasing funding for border management agencies, among other things. 

Critically, the policies that enabled Biden to reduce unauthorized immigration in recent months weren’t uniformly restrictionist. The president did not merely deter migration, he also diverted it toward legal channels. Using his so-called “parole” authority, Biden expanded opportunities for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the US on humanitarian visas. This led to a 99 percent decline in illegal border crossings by people from those nations. And although such legal immigration can also inspire backlash, it is significantly less fiscally burdensome and socially disruptive than irregular surges of asylum seekers, as immigrants who come to the US through the parole system generally have a legal right to work (which renders them less dependent on state aid) and American sponsors (who help integrate them into established communities). 

Getting tough on border enforcement makes progress possible, not certain

Biden’s success in curbing unauthorized immigration during the final months of the 2024 campaign did not save Kamala Harris’s candidacy. It does not follow, however, that Democrats could not have mitigated the public backlash against immigration and their party had the Biden administration done more to avert the surge in unauthorized migration before its term’s 11th hour. 

There is no surefire way of overcoming the political obstacles to dramatically expanding legal immigration or securing legal status for longtime, undocumented Americans. Trump has turned the bulk of the GOP against these goals while nullifying the party’s political incentives for pursuing them: Republicans now know that they can win a record share of the Hispanic vote without moderating on immigration.

Projecting a commitment to border security — and delivering a modicum of it once in office — are not sufficient conditions for Democrats to progressively reform the American immigration system. But the Biden era indicates that they are necessary ones.

Progressives are right to abhor the suffering of migrants who make long and perilous journeys in pursuit of material and physical security and whose presence in the US would, in the long run, make the nation more prosperous. But ignoring public opinion and acquiescing to chaotic surges in unauthorized migration is not a viable strategy for aiding immigrants. Rather, it is a recipe for nativist rule.