Democrats: Maybe We Went Too Far Left on Immigration

Remember this moment in 2019 when Democrats were asked to raise their hands if they supported treating border crossing as a civil issue aka decriminalize the border. Nearly ever hand went up.

In retrospect, some Democrats are realizing this may have been a big mistake.

Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau. It stands both as a vivid demonstration of a leftward policy shift on immigration that many prominent Democratic lawmakers and strategists now say they deeply regret, and as a marker of how sharply the country was moving in the other direction.

Last year, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration, nearly twice as many as in 2020, and the first time since 2005 that a majority had said so. The embrace of a more punitive approach to illegal immigration includes not only white voters but also working-class Latinos, whose support Democrats had long courted with liberal border policies…

“We got led astray by the 2016 and the 2020 elections, and we just never moved back,” said Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who introduced an immigration and border security plan in May. “We looked feckless, we weren’t decisive, we weren’t listening to voters, and the voters decided that we weren’t in the right when it comes to what was happening with the border.”

Democrats are having a lot of revelations lately. The big one was maybe we shouldn’t have lied about President Biden’s competence for four years. But the latest one is maybe we moved too far left on immigration. The problem is that even having recognized this was a mistake it’s not clear the party can backtrack now. There are some progressives who are fully committed to the idea that border control is racism and they aren’t willing to give it up.

“Democrats have to stop talking about the issue of immigration within a Republican frame,” said Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. “This has nothing to do with law and order. This is about power, control, terror, and it is about racism and xenophobia. Donald Trump wants to make America Jim Crow again, and then some.”…

“We, and I include myself in this, created a vacuum on this issue that we allowed the current president to fill,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who led the Obama administration’s domestic policy council. “And the country is now living with the results. And the results are appalling.”

The party now seems at least partly convinced that it was Hillary Clinton who took a wrong turn. Bill Clinton was in office when congress made it easier to deport people. Then Obama came in a few years later and became known as the deporter-in-chief. Hillary tried to get away from that and went along with the recommendations of “immigration activists.”

As Mr. Trump competed for his party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton was under pressure in the Democratic primaries from Senator Bernie Sanders on the left. Immigration activists persuaded her to break with Mr. Obama’s approach — not to mention her husband’s — and pledge not to deport illegal immigrants beyond violent criminals and terrorists. But that promise fueled Mr. Trump’s candidacy more than it helped hers. He hammered away at her, saying she wanted to “abolish” the country’s borders.

And as we all know, Trump won and Hillary came up with 65 excuses why the loss wasn’t her fault. But don’t forget that there was also a backlash to Trump’s tough take on the border. The child separation policy was very unpopular and Trump reversed it. Biden won, in part, on a promise to be kinder and gentler at the border.

By the time he left the White House, more Americans favored increasing immigration than opposed it for the first time in six decades of Gallup polling.

So what went wrong? Joe Biden went wrong. Under his watch we had the highest number of border crossings in history even as he refused for months to call the issue a crisis (it was a “challenge”) and refused to visit the border himself. Democrats had a small advantage on this issue and Biden squandered it. But you also have to give a lot of credit to Gov. Abbott of Texas who made the border crisis into a blue city crisis by simply busing a small fraction of the people who came across the border north.

The first buses of migrants chartered by the Texas Division of Emergency Management pulled into Washington from Del Rio, Texas, in April 2022. The White House dismissed the effort, organized by Gov. Greg Abbott, as a “political stunt.” But the buses kept rolling.

Over the next two years, Texas sent nearly 120,000 migrants to cities like New York, Chicago and Washington. Doug Ducey, then the governor of Arizona, sent buses to Denver, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida flew migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

Suddenly you had sanctuary city mayors busing migrants into the suburbs and claiming they were out of space even though the total number of migrants involved was less than one month of encounters at the border.

So what comes next? For the moment, Democrats are stuck. Their base wants total resistance to Trump on this front, if not outright violence. They have no way to tone this down at this moment. They are stuck being against border control for the next three years. And who knows, the public could shift their opinions again as they’ve already done several times. They could decide Trump is too tough and vote blue to tone things down. That’s what happened in 2020 after Trump’s first term. If the public shifts again, expect Democrats to forget all about the idea that they were too lax on border policy.