Immigration is the most politically vexing topic of our time.
The Trump actions that I and most people I know — high-socioeconomic-status Democrats who follow the news closely and post about it on the internet — find most morally outrageous overwhelmingly relate to immigration.
Here, for example, is a Homeland Security officer shooting a Presbyterian minister in the head with a pepper ball.
And beyond the flagrant abuses of power, curtailment of civil liberties, overt racial profiling, and other problems, immigration enforcement kind of gives me the ick. I do not feel this way about law enforcement more generally. I believe strongly in the need for police and policing, and I think the number one thing that progressives could do to improve criminal justice in America is encourage more people who share their values to become cops. It’s an underrated way to contribute to your community and make the country a better place, especially if your political views are not currently well-represented in the law enforcement community.
But the sort of person who wants to be a deportation officer with the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations division strikes me as weird. If you want a gun and a badge, why not be a normal cop?
I think my view on this is correct as a matter of personal honor and moral psychology. Making a career out of locking up and deporting people, most of whom aren’t hurting anyone, is weird.
As a policy matter, though, I also need to check myself on this.
I do not believe that we should allow uncontrolled flows of immigration to the United States. I also don’t believe we should close the borders to business travelers and tourists. Nor do I think it would be practical to hermetically seal the border by doing intensive searches of every vehicle or piece of cargo that enters the country. If we give people who manage to sneak in or overstay a visa carte blanche to get away with it, then a lot more people are going to break the rules. And the more people who break the rules, the harder it is in practice to catch rule breakers and the more draconian the countermeasures need to be to get things under control.
This article begins with my own deeply mixed feelings about this because it’s the launch of a multi-part series on immigration in which we’ll explore the question of how to make openness to immigration politically sustainable. That requires excavating in some detail what went wrong under the Biden administration, and looking at why this seemed so much less fraught under Obama (and why we can’t just straightforwardly go back). It will require examining how immigration intersects with the themes of the abundance movement and, of course, the forward-looking policy options.
At the end of the series, we’ll share basic conclusions and a summary of recommendations for all subscribers, but these are sensitive topics and the detailed analysis and discussion will be behind the paywall.
I’m doing the series because I share the intuition that, in important ways, what Trump is doing on immigration is more immoral than what he’s doing on health care. And because, despite the broad decline in Trump’s poll numbers across issues, immigration remains his strongest issue and the topic on which Republicans have the biggest trust advantage over Democrats.
I don’t think it’s a big mystery why.
The voters believe, accurately, that elite liberals — including fairly moderate ones like me — are uncomfortable with the idea of being mean to sympathetic immigration cases. And even if some of these voters are absolutely convinced that Trump is going too far on immigration, they’re also worried that putting soft-hearted Democrats in charge will lead to disaster.
Which, after all, is what happened when Joe Biden was president.
This is not an insurmountable political problem. Immigration is just one of many issues, and it’s easy to imagine Democrats winning while being at a trust disadvantage on this topic, just as Republicans won in 2024 without securing the public’s confidence on health care. It’s a tricky governance problem because a new Democratic administration is likely to take office full of moral fervor for reform, even as the mass public worries about a new influx of asylum seekers and other irregular arrivals.
And the first step in defining a better but realistic approach is to understand what happened under Biden.
A decision not to decide
The Biden administration’s approach to immigration policy is, in my view, the weird dark matter of the election postmortems.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.