Colin Mortimer in The Hill - Democrats Lost the High Immigration High Ground. For What?
Former President Joe Biden entered office vowing to swing the pendulum swiftly from his predecessor’s immigration agenda. Backed by migrant advocacy nonprofits and the progressive wing of his party, he placed a 100-day moratorium on his first day of office on nearly all deportations (that was quickly overturned by the courts) and limited ICE’s enforcement to only those with serious criminal records.
He appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to “lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border.” Democratic governors and mayors, emboldened by the president and the surge of progressive activism, doubled down on their own migrant policies that prevented removals.
Yet by the end of his presidency, Biden’s immigration policies had, politically, failed spectacularly. Illegal border crossing reached record levels, with the number of U.S. border encounters quadrupling over the first Trump administration. An Economist-YouGov poll found his job approval on immigration at minus-32 points.
Harris spent her doomed campaign haunted by her appointment to lead the White House’s migration efforts in 2021. Perhaps most tellingly, Hispanics swung 16 points toward President Trump, gaining him 1.8 million additional voters over 2020. The shift was decisive for Trump’s victory in several states.
The Democrats’ basic position, to allow more people to move to the U.S., is correct, even if they spend too much political capital defending failures on the border and too little advocating for more skilled legal pathways for migrants. America is only avoiding a demographic crisis because of immigration inflows.
Working toward permanent legal status for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, defending America’s role as a destination for the world’s true refugees and ensuring American workforce demands are met through immigration are all morally and economically sound positions for Democrats. And immigration in and of itself is still popular. In June 2024, by a two-to-one ratio, Americans said immigration is “a good thing” for the country.
But Democrats, in opposing President Trump’s cruel immigration policies, ended up reflexively adopting a politically disastrous agenda of their own. They coupled a reasonable stance on legal and humanitarian immigration with border policies that voters found deeply unpopular. The resulting loss of credibility cost Democrats the political capital needed to do anything truly meaningful on immigration.
Even worse, it handed Republicans a potent campaign issue — one they successfully used to win. By aiding Republicans politically, Democrats have de facto aided in the Republican efforts to end the American immigration system as we know it.
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