The Atlantic published a piece today which was co-written by a long-time member of National Council of La Raza and an adviser to the Harris campaign. They argue that Democrats have lost their way on immigration and won’t be returning to the White House until they fix their approach.
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.
So what is the problem exactly? According to the authors, Democrats have drifted too far left. Instead of keeping the border secure, they listened to activists who essentially wanted open borders.
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…
Four years fighting Trump seemed only to further radicalize the left…
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.
By 2019, most Democrats had moved far left on this issue.
All but two Democratic presidential hopefuls backed a proposal to decriminalize unauthorized border crossings on the second night of the first 2020 Democratic debate, reflecting the growing influence of former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro in driving the debate…
“We had a very spirited debate on this stage last night on the topic of decriminalization of the border,” moderator José Díaz-Balart said Thursday night. “Raise your hand if you think it should be a civil offense, rather than a crime, to cross the border without documentation.”
The proposal met with wide approval. Eight of the 10 candidates on stage raised their hands, including three who appeared to go on record backing the idea for the first time: Sens. Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), as well as former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper.
And of course, Biden vowed to undo all of Trump’s border control efforts and attempted to do so on day one in office. The result was a surge and over 2 million migrants per year arriving at the border in the following two years. Only after border encounters hit a record high in December 2023 did Biden decide it was time to make a real effort to control the border. By that point it was too late.
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.
The bottom line, according to the authors is that Democrats can’t afford to run far left even as they oppose Trump’s plans for deportations. “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,” they write.
Trump’s actions will be branded an overreach by the media no matter what it is. The Biden/Harris approach wasn’t seen that way at all until it became clear that it was testing the nation’s limits at being able to control the border.
My own guess is that Democrats will once again paint themselves as the adults in the room and will once again make a giant mess of things if given another chance. They can claim they have only the best intentions but we’ve seen what their actual approach looks like for 3 of the last four years. They don’t need to tell Trump no, they need to tell the far left in their own party no and they won’t do that.
