Democrats’ biggest immigration dilemma

Getting deportation policy right is harder than finding a message.

A corrections officer walks beside people holding candles during a vigil for immigrants in detention. (Photo by Giorgio Viera)

In Part One of an ongoing series on Democrats and immigration, we looked at how the Biden administration came to fail so badly before turning things around. Part Two looks 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. The individual articles will be behind the paywall, but we’ll share major policy takeaways at the end of the series.

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Jeff Maurer recently made the excellent point that, as long as the Democrats’ 2028 nominee isn’t specifically tied to the Biden administration, they probably don’t actually need to give a rigorous account of what Biden got wrong on immigration. Instead, they can just sort of hand-wave and articulate an appealing, forward-looking story.

But the politics of immigration aren’t the whole story — or even necessarily the most important part of it.

Immigration is the issue on which the gap between voters’ trust in Republicans and Democrats is largest. I would obviously like Democrats to close that gap but, realistically, they’re probably going to win in spite of weakness on immigration, just as Republicans win in spite of weakness on health care. The salience of illegal immigration among moderate voters has dropped (and will probably continue to drop because the number of illegal immigrants in the country keeps going down), and to win, Democrats need to focus on developing a compelling message on the issues that are increasing in significance.

The big problem on immigration is that if Democrats do win the election, they actually have to do something about it.

And I think that Democrats have muddied the waters, even among themselves, on what they actually think about immigration policy.

For example, since the 2024 election, Bernie Sanders has repeatedly criticized the Biden record on immigration. That’s a throwback to past Bernie Sanders, who opposed the 2007 comprehensive immigration reform bill but supported the 2013 version that had more labor union support, and was positioned somewhat to Hillary Clinton’s right on immigration in the 2016 campaign. But Sanders is also a guy who really loves left-wing movements. And when he ran in 2020, he ran by wholeheartedly endorsing left-wing activist demands on immigration, even while his message was pretty monolithically focused on economic concerns.

But consider what he promised to do if he won that election:

1. Formally immunize 85 percent of the undocumented population from deportation through executive action.

2. Decriminalize illegal entry into the United States.

3. Create community-based alternatives to detention for people who violate immigration law, unless they were convicted of a violent crime.

4. Eliminate ICE and C.B.P. and redistribute their functions across Treasury, State, and Justice.

5. Halt construction of the border wall.

Sanders has, I think, a pretty clear-eyed, traditional social-democratic view of the politics of immigration. But if he’d won the election and attempted to implement this policy agenda, he’d have had the exact same problems as Biden — likely even more severe.

By the same token, if you look at Democrats who did well in frontline races in 2022 and 2024, most of them criticized the Biden administration’s immigration policy in a pretty nonspecific way. Voters are typically not immigration policy wonks, so “you’re right, what Biden is doing is bad and not working” was a pretty good message. But if you actually become president, you need to craft a policy that doesn’t just sound reasonable, but delivers on the goal of being more humane than Trump while maintaining a sense of order and control.

The old policy was based on an old situation

One of the signature conversations of my career happened during the Trump-Biden transition, when I was talking about the coming Congress with a staffer for one of the top Democratic congressional leaders.