An immigration agenda for 2029

Strategic redeployment to keep the border secure, fight crime, and rebuild trust

Agents in the field. The next Democratic administration could decide how — and where — this power is used. (Photo by Digital Vision)

This is the final article in our series on Democrats and immigration. In Part One, we looked at how the Biden administration came to fail so badly before turning things around. Part Two looked at the more successful approach of the Obama administration, but notes that it was driven by very different underlying facts and can’t be copied in a literal sense. And Part Three explored Democrats’ biggest dilemma on immigration. These articles are all behind the paywall, but our final post is available for everyone to read. If you’re interested in reading the entire series, or if you’d like to support the work we’re doing, I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

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With George W. Bush’s second term under way, Democrats were in knots over what to say about the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. Both the base and common sense demanded that Democrats offer some kind of repudiation of what Bush had done and continued to do. At the same time, there was real — and warranted — fear of coming across as a party of pacifists, one that would err on the side of reluctance to use force in a way that jeopardized American interests and security.

During the 2006 and 2008 cycles, Democrats addressed this in part on a vibes level, putting a lot of effort into recruiting military veterans as candidates.

But the Center for American Progress also put out a policy document they called “Strategic Redeployment” that essentially argued for a withdrawal from Iraq, but in a “tough on terrorism” way rather than a “we hate the use of military force” way.

This proposal went through different iterations over the course of Bush’s presidency as the specifics of the situation changed. But it gave Democrats something to say that engaged their base and criticized the president, while also addressing concerns about weakness. And when the Obama administration came into office, they followed the same broad contours: American troop levels and combat deaths declined sharply, al-Qaeda was aggressively fought globally, and there was no sharp moment of humiliating withdrawal from the war, even though American involvement more or less ended.

All analogies are imprecise, but this is essentially my inspiration for how Democrats should think about reconfiguring immigration enforcement after Donald Trump.

It’s a tricky issue, because while he’s seen by most voters as having overreached, voters still trust Republicans more than Democrats on immigration, and it’s a topic that has inspired incredible passion among the Democratic base.

If Democrats win the presidency in 2028, they’ll be tempted to begin the next administration with dramatic announcements and policy changes that will be characterized by both Republicans and human traffickers as an open invitation for a new wave of irregular arrivals on American soil.

Democrats need to remember the lessons of the Biden administration: that no matter how many “No Human Is Illegal” signs they have in their yards, they do not actually want to welcome a big new influx of illegal immigrants. That means trying to redeploy federal law-enforcement resources away from Trump’s current wasteful and inhumane approach to zero in on the two key priorities of securing the border and apprehending criminals.

But Democrats should treat this as a matter of reallocating resources and setting new priorities, not doing what the activist community wants and creating a new formal status that immunizes whole classes of people from deportation.

Federal law enforcement is fungible

Reuters published a great story back in March about how thousands of federal agents from the F.B.I., D.E.A., and A.T.F. were being reassigned to do immigration-enforcement work, along with virtually the entire capacity of D.H.S.’s Homeland Security Investigations division.

Similarly, note that while the bulk of the personnel carrying out Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago are from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations arm, the operational commander is Gregory Bovino from the Border Patrol. It also involves personnel from the U.S. Marshals and other agencies.

On the one hand, I think this is bad. Shifting personnel away from catching child abusers and terrorists and tax cheats to do demonstrative immigration raids on landscapers in the North Shore suburbs does not make sense as a use of federal police resources.

But it also demonstrates an important underlying point: Despite the superficial siloing of the federal law-enforcement apparatus into these different agencies with specific missions, the resources at hand are actually quite fungible. You could of course reach Chicago by water from Canada by traversing the Straits of Mackinac and the entire length of Lake Michigan. But the City of Chicago is not on the border in any normal person’s definition. What’s more, this is not how Chicago’s illegal immigrant population arrived, and everyone knows it. But Bovino is running a major operation there because Trump likes Bovino and wanted to put him in charge of a major operation in Chicago.

More broadly, while the D.E.A. typically investigates people they believe are involved in drug trafficking, if you confess to them that you murdered someone for reasons unrelated to drugs, they’re probably not going to let it slide. And conversely, if the F.B.I. catches you doing drug crimes, they can arrest you for that. It’s common to have multi-agency task forces investigating cross-cutting cases. Investigators try to build the strongest cases that they can, and everything ultimately lands on the desks of federally coordinated prosecutors anyway.

These separate federal agencies all have different missions and institutional cultures and hiring standards. But Section 878 gives D.E.A. officers general authority to execute warrants or “make arrests without warrant (A) for any offense against the United States committed in his presence, or (B) for any felony, cognizable under the laws of the United States, if he has probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing a felony.”

There’s no requirement that the arrest have anything to do with drugs. A.T.F. has a different mission, but its special agents have the exact same authority.

The authority granted to immigration officers under Section 1357 is only very slightly narrower than the general arrest authority given to federal special agents. It copies the same language about warrantless arrests, but limits them to situations in which the officer “is performing duties relating to the enforcement of the immigration laws at the time of the arrest.”

In other words, Trump took a bunch of non-immigration cops off their beats and threw them into interior immigration enforcement.

His successor can not only send them back to whatever they were doing before, ICE personnel can be pressed into any kind of law-enforcement work that has any nexus with immigration. The next Democratic president doesn’t need to have some giant fight on Capitol Hill trying to claw back Trump’s enormous investment in expanding ICE any more than Trump proposed cutting the F.B.I. budget in order to immigration-max.

The party will need to find smart, broadly qualified Democrats to run all of these agencies, and then the president can order them to do the things he or she thinks are important — securing the border and fighting crime.

Immigration is largely about crime

Lakshya Jain’s recent poll for The Argument showed that, by a considerable margin, crime is the public’s biggest concern about immigration. I think this pairs nicely with Searchlight Institute polling that shows crime is the public’s biggest concern about new housing supply in their neighborhood.

Immigration doves are at pains to reassure people that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, which is true.

But I think the housing point — and the perception of New York City as dangerous despite its low crime rate — underscores that the commonsense view of crime is in part a pure counting statistic. If a million new immigrants come to the United States, it would be kind of wild for them to collectively commit zero crimes, and in that sense immigration makes crime worse.

Left-of-center circles feature a slightly weird dynamic, in which economic concerns about immigration are held to be legitimate, so many on the left who want Democrats to be tougher on immigration end up dramatically overstating both the substantive case that immigration is bad economics and the extent to which this is driving public concern. Then immigration doves on the left put a lot of effort into quibbling about economic impact studies.

But Trump didn’t launch his 2016 campaign with a discussion of George Borjas’s labor market studies. He said “they’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us; they’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.”

If you pay the slightest attention to the subtext of Trump administration social-media propaganda, they are obviously driving at something other than optimal crime control policy.

But progressives sometimes get so invested in proving how smart they are at investigating the semiotic subtext of conservative propaganda that they forget to pay attention to the text itself. The administration is just constantly talking about how they’re arresting criminals, fighting crime, and deporting criminal aliens.

Now, it’s not true that they are optimizing federal law-enforcement resources for crime control purposes. But it is smart to say that you care a lot about crime and are really passionate about arresting and punishing criminals.

The first order of business for a new Democratic administration should be to state explicitly that it’s worried Republicans will team up with human traffickers to lie to the global poor and say the U.S. border is now open. There should be an immediate short-term redeployment of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations personnel to the southern border, in full cooperation with the border state governors, to address and deter any surge.

But the longer-term goal should be to make it clear to federal law-enforcement middle managers that there’s a ton of immigration-enforcement personnel who are up for grabs to work on any investigation or crime suppression mission that has an immigration nexus. If it involves people who are foreign-born or goods that are moving across borders, we have people who can help, because fighting crime is priority number one.

You have to care about fighting crime

Outside of the specific context of the 2020-22 period when crime was rising sharply, I don’t think crime has been a huge issue in that many elections. But because lots of other topics touch at least tangentially on crime, it’s really helpful to have a strong image in the eyes of the public as a politician or a political party that sincerely believes that crime is bad and that criminals should be punished.

In this immigration message from Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, he’s offering a traditional account of why many local police departments don’t participate in immigration enforcement. It makes perfect sense and is a totally reasonable immigration message if you believe that, at heart, Mike Johnston is a tough-on-crime guy who sincerely believes that crime is bad and that criminals should be punished. In the Democratic Party of 15 years ago, when John Kerry (in 2004) and Barack Obama (in 2008) were winning endorsements from the national police unions, any Democratic politician who explained that his approach to immigration enforcement was motivated by holistic concern for crime and public safety would have a relatively easy sell. Today, I’m sure people in the blueish state of Colorado find this credible, but skeptical voters probably don’t.

And that’s something for Democrats to ponder as they try to execute a strategic redeployment of law-enforcement resources away from persecuting immigrants and toward catching criminals. When Obama was talking about immigration in 2014, he said he wanted to “keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security — felons, not families; criminals, not children; gang members, not a mother who’s working hard to provide for her kids.”

Again, that’s a completely reasonable message. If the border is secure, federal cops are scoring major busts, crime is falling, and you don’t have stories in the news about foreign-born repeat offenders because they’ve been deported on the first offense, then people aren’t going to be upset that you’re not doing big raids on Home Depot parking lots.

But I think one problem with that message is that right around 2014 is also when voters really began to question Democrats’ credibility as a party that really wanted to punish people for committing serious crimes. I think if you really, truly believe in the economic benefits of immigration and the desirability of stepping away from things like the racial profiling and harassment of American citizens that invariably comes with untargeted immigration enforcement, you ought to really, truly invest yourself in the idea of fighting crime and creating a reassuring overall context for making policy around legal immigration.

But that also means copying early Obama in maintaining a distinction between resource-prioritization and just giving a free pass to people who broke immigration laws.

Prioritization, not permissiveness

The distinction here is that while the Obama administration was setting enforcement priorities throughout his term in office, he faced consistent pressure not only to prioritize efforts to deport criminals, but to create formal immunity from deportation for non-criminals.

Ambiguity about this features in a lot of progressive thought on immigration-enforcement questions.

Pre-2014, the Obama administration took a lot of criticism for deporting people who hadn’t been convicted of crimes, or who hadn’t been convicted of serious crimes. That seems to be like a category error. Setting priorities in terms of what your law-enforcement resources are doing is about what you do on the front end. You send federal agents to investigate fentanyl trafficking rather than groundskeepers. But when you do the drug bust, you’re going to apprehend people and some of those people might be illegal immigrants who you can then deport. Some of them may well be committing only “minor” crimes. But the point is that the federal government should be trying, in good faith, to deploy its resources to tackle major problems rather than just hassle and assault people at random.

It’s borderline impossible to do untargeted immigration enforcement without licensing racial profiling and creating problems for working-class citizens who happen to have the wrong skin color or speak Spanish too well.

But immigration laws are still real laws, and if you get caught up in something or other and turn out to have violated them, you’re still going to get deported. That’s an important part of maintaining deterrence and preventing a new influx of illegal immigration. Note that this is true even if — in some ways especially if — you support a path to citizenship for the large majority of people living and working illegally in the country.

If you don't want tons of people overstaying visas, sneaking across the border, or trying to abuse the asylum process, it’s important to maintain the principle that having gotten across the line is not a “get out of deportation free” card. It’s also true that the federal government should not be particularly invested in rousting long-settled illegal immigrants from their homes and jobs.

The important thing here is that on this issue (and sadly not on this issue alone), I think many Democrats underestimate exactly how radical what their side’s “groups” really want is: not a strong enforcement focus on dangerous criminals but essentially an end to immigration enforcement as anything other than the culmination of a felony trial. That’s only viable if you think the incentives created by domestic enforcement are totally unrelated to new waves of illegal immigration, which I don’t think is correct.

A fight worth having

I realize the take I’ve offered in this piece, and really in the whole series, doesn’t match the emotional fever pitch of the most engaged Democrats.

Expressing high dudgeon is not my forte as a writer, and I don’t blame anyone who’s watched coverage of the outrages committed hither and yon in the name of border security for seeking out other writers to help them articulate their feelings about all this.

My role, as I see it, is to remind everyone that making expressive immigration policy without paying much attention to practical consequences or political defensibility is a big part of how we ended up here. If the Biden administration had been more purposeful from the get-go about what kind of immigration outcomes they wanted, and more focused on making policy choices that would generate those outcomes, it’s likely that Trump would not be in office today and we wouldn’t have the Border Patrol tear-gassing protesters in Chicago or any of this huge expansion of the basic immigration apparatus.

Given where we are, though, an incredible amount of good can be done by refocusing that apparatus in the first instance on the area around the southern border, and then beyond that, on investigations and enforcement actions targeting violent people and transnational criminal enterprises.

D.H.S. does not need to be putting out groyper social-media content, and ICE officers don’t need to be wearing masks. Federal law enforcement could be cooperating with mayors and governors rather than trying to make trouble, and in dozens of other ways, we could be in a saner, more humane place. That would give us a chance to reset the immigration debate around the benefits of a well-organized system of expanded legal immigration, which in turn is by far America’s best chance to remain the number one power in the world and secure a long-term future for freedom and democracy.

But we can’t afford to screw it up again.