Democrats can’t just “go back” to Obama’s immigration approach

It worked pretty well, but the situation has changed.

Barack Obama pauses mid-speech as a heckler interrupts his address on immigration. (Photo by Ralf-Finn Hestoft)

This is the second part of an ongoing series on how we got to where we are on immigration and how we can get to a better place without losing control of the border and sparking massive political backlash at home. Part one looked at how Joe Biden took office riding high on massive public revulsion at Trump’s approach, only to end up tanking the Democratic Party’s credibility on the issue. 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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When I talk to smart, sensible, politically minded Democrats about the way forward on immigration, most of them say that we just need to go back to the Obama-era formula of rigorous border security paired with a relatively relaxed approach to interior enforcement.

That worked fine politically in 2008 and 2012, and it set the stage for Democrats to pursue the policy goal of a path to citizenship for millions of long-resident illegal immigrants as part of a swap for other changes to immigration policy (see all the many details of the immigration grand bargain).

As a purely political analysis, this makes sense.¹ Barack Obama had the issue parked in a more or less acceptable place, and his forward-looking policy ideas were good. The problem is that, while I think it’s perfectly reasonable as a slogan or something to say to people who don’t follow immigration policy that closely, it’s not actually doable.

The situation has changed too much.

It’s not just the politics — the actual facts on the ground changed. The equilibrium Obama achieved on immigration in his first term was in part a product of the weak economic conditions he inherited. By his final years in office, he was struggling more to deliver on his own objectives. People also forget, but Trump was struggling mightily with influxes of asylum seekers during much of his first term. Immigration is responsive to policy choices, but it’s not a pure function of the subjective desires of the person sitting in the White House.

And this was the problem that Biden faced.

A lot of Democrats have implicitly bought into right-wing conspiracy theories that Sleepy Joe just decided one day to open the borders for no good reason. That is definitely not true; senior leaders in the White House expressed real distress at the volume of disorderly immigration taking place.

But they were dealing with a situation in which demand to immigrate to the United States had dramatically increased relative to Obama’s term. They had to figure out how to respond to this surge, and their efforts were muddled and slow. The Obama outcome was good — the border was secure and orderly, and we weren’t letting child predators and gun smugglers off the hook or detaining U.S. citizens in a spasm of interior enforcement. And if we want to achieve that outcome again, it’s important to understand what actually happened.

Immigrants are mostly looking for work

It’s pretty clear if you look at polling that the public’s biggest worries about immigration relate to crime and disorder. And the Trump administration is, in its rhetoric, emphasizing crime and disorder as the motivation for their crackdowns.

Rational people understand, though, that the vast majority of people who immigrate to the country illegally do so in order to work. And Obama’s first term in office was a historically terrible time to try to find a job in the United States.