What a liberal immigration enforcement policy might look like

Democrats need to think beyond progressive pugnacity.

Photo by Molly Adams via Wikimedia Commons

ICE’s brutality is souring much of the electorate on the Trump administration. The Democrats look increasingly likely to win at least the House of Representatives in the midterms — so likely that Trump is now panicking and starting his election denial routine early. But Trump shows signs of realizing that he overreached, demoting the head of the Border Patrol and making some other halting moves toward de-escalation.

This is progress (at least if you dislike unaccountable secret police, race wars, warrantless searches, summary executions of protesters, and so on…which I do). But it’s possible that Democrats — and especially progressives — will take the wrong message from their first small victories in the battle against autocracy.

For one thing, the Minnesota anti-ICE protests are starting to show some signs of being taken over by the same kind of radicals who made the 2020 BLM protests go overboard in Seattle, Portland, and a few other cities. Some protesters in Minneapolis are setting up illegal checkpoints to stop vehicles and screen them for ICE. Others have been harassing various people. Some leftist protesters have even denounced progressive activist Will Stancil, who was recently punched in the face.

Obviously, if this kind of thing continues, all Trump and Stephen Miller and ICE will have to do is to back off and not kill any protesters for a while, and watch as the more extreme street activists reenact the ill-fated CHAZ from Seattle 2020. That would sap some (but not all) of the momentum from the backlash to the recent ICE killings.

But the other danger is that Dems will take a midterm victory as a sign that they don’t need to recalibrate their position on the immigration issue. In a post two weeks ago, I pointed out that although they hate Trump’s heavy-handed tactics, Americans still don’t support the permissive immigration policies of the Biden years.

Recent polls confirm this. For example, a recent Fox News poll found that Americans still favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party on immigration in general, and on border security in particular:

The same poll found that although the public now disapproves of Trump’s overall immigration approach by a substantial margin, he’s at +5 on border security specifically.

Other polls find much the same, as Eric Levitz reports:

In a Wall Street Journal poll taken after Good’s killing, voters said that the Republican Party was “better equipped” to handle immigration than the Democrats by an 11-point margin…Apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.

This is a big red flashing warning sign for Dems. Watching Trump’s ICE in action has reminded Americans of the danger of authoritarianism, but it hasn’t changed their basic idea of what immigration policy ought to be.

Right now, Democrats and progressives are primarily reacting to ICE’s brutality and Trump’s authoritarianism. That’s fine, but it’s not enough. Democrats need to proactively think about what kind of immigration policy they want — not just because they’ll need a plan if and when they get back into power, but because they need to credibly promise the American public that they’re going to do something about the public’s legitimate concerns. If voters think Dems are just going to snap right back to the permissive Biden-era immigration policies that everyone hated, it will be a lot harder for Dems to win in 2028 — and it’ll give Trump much more of a free hand to pursue his authoritarian policies.

Thus, Dems should be thinking about what a liberal immigration policy would look like. Here are some of my own suggestions.

Don’t delegitimize America with “stolen land” rhetoric

Donald Trump and the MAGA movement want to delegitimize immigrants as a group — to say that people who choose America are fundamentally less American than those who have ancestral blood ties to the land. It’s natural to sort of kick out against that idea by trying to turn the tables, and delegitimize the MAGA people themselves. This, I think, is why progressives often respond to anti-immigrant movements by saying that America itself is “stolen land”:

The idea here is that if America itself has no rightful claim to the land on which it sits, then the claim of any MAGA supporter to belong on this land is no better than the claim of any immigrant — legal or otherwise.

There are three problems with this. The first is that no one cares. Those who are inclined to welcome immigrants will become no more welcoming upon hearing that “no one is illegal on stolen land”. And those who believe that America is the legitimate owner of its land will not be persuaded to change their beliefs simply by a reminder that the land once belonged to Native Americans. Trust me, they already know.

The second and bigger problem is that “stolen land” rhetoric makes it look as if progressives don’t believe that America is a legitimate country at all. If you don’t think that American citizens have the right to collectively, democratically decide who gets into the country and who doesn’t, you’re telling American voters that their democratic will is illegitimate. And that’s not going to sit well with voters outside of the most progressive circles. Matt Yglesias makes this argument succinctly and powerfully:

No land acknowledgments, no remigration

The third problem with “stolen land” rhetoric is that it’s immoral. It’s an attempt to counter blood-and-soil racial nationalism with an invocation of another kind of blood-and-soil racial nationalism:

No, you are not on Indigenous land

The Democratic Party shouldn’t go anywhere near this sort of atavistic moral reasoning. The land acknowledgements need to disappear from the Democratic Party platform, from Democratic Party events, and from progressive rhetoric and culture in general.

Instead, Democrats and progressives should focus exclusively on rhetoric that stresses the ways that immigrants contribute to the United States, and on the American culture that unifies us all as a nation. This sort of rhetoric makes it extremely explicit that Democrats see the U.S. as a legitimate entity, worthy of enhancing and strengthening. It rules out the possibility that progressives see immigration as an act of “decolonization”. And it emphasizes that the purpose of immigration is to benefit American citizens.

Deport all illegal immigrants (not just criminal ones), but humanely

When criticizing ICE’s raids, many Democrats and progressives complain that ICE is arresting people with no criminal records in the U.S.:

And Democratic proposals on the topic of illegal immigration center on refocusing enforcement on those who commit crimes in America.

It’s true that Americans would probably like to see more of ICE’s focus on illegal immigrants who commit crimes. But Democrats need to acknowledge that criminality isn’t the only reason that Americans don’t like illegal immigration. Some polls still show majority support for deporting all illegal immigrants, not just those with criminal records. Here’s a recent example:

Source: Cygnal via InteractivePolls

Other polls show only a substantial minority in support. But these results suggest that criminal behavior isn’t the only concern that Americans have about illegal immigration. Some are undoubtedly worried about the strains on local government finances, others think immigrants compete with locals for jobs and housing, and still others are fearful of the cultural changes that immigration brings. But after years of reading the polls, I think many Americans are simply mad at the act of illegal immigration itself. When people cross the border illegally, they may not have hurt anyone, but they have flouted the American people’s democratic will:

On immigration, what Americans want is democratic control

If anyone on the planet is allowed to enter America and remain here as long as they don’t commit any other crimes, that is an open borders policy. And most Americans do not want open borders. Nor, I think, would most Democrats like to be associated with the idea of open borders. And yet that is exactly where the rhetoric of deporting only criminal illegal immigrants immediately leads.

Thus, Democrats need to remind the American public that illegal immigration is not to be tolerated, even when the people who come illegally are well-behaved. Bill Clinton did this in 1995:

But at the same time, Americans don’t support a policy of forcible mass deportation, of the type ICE is currently trying to do. Nor should they. So Democrats need to come up with a humane alternative for getting illegal immigrants out of the country.

There are basically two ways to do this:

1. Enforce laws against companies hiring undocumented workers.

2. Change the law on asylum-seeking.

We know that almost all illegal immigrants come to America for job opportunities — even those who try to stay in the country by claiming asylum. It’s natural to want to come work in a rich country! When there are few or no jobs to be had, illegal immigrants leave, as they did during the Great Recession:

Source: Bloomberg

Obviously we don’t want to create a recession just to make undocumented immigrants leave! But if we have the government investigate and fine companies that employ them, then companies will become much more averse to hiring people who are in the country illegally. That will decimate demand for undocumented labor, and there will be a big flood of illegal immigrants out of the country — without any detention centers, arrests, etc.¹

The second thing Democrats can do is to close the asylum loophole that allows illegal immigrants to become legal residents simply by requesting asylum. Recently, Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu took some heat for saying that “Every single human being has the legal right to come to the United States and seek shelter”. But in fact, she’s correct. Anyone on the planet can show up at a U.S. port of entry and request asylum. That’s a good law, and we should keep it. In addition, anyone who simply takes a plane to America on a tourist visa can request asylum once inside the country. That’s fine.

What’s far more problematic is that anyone who crosses the border illegally is entitled to request asylum without any discrimination against their application due to the fact that they entered illegally! I explained this back in 2024, and argued that we should change the law so that this is no longer possible:

[T]he U.S. wrote its asylum law to follow the 1967 version of the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, which states that people who cross the border illegally are entitled to asylum hearings. These asylum seekers exist in a gray zone between “legal” and “illegal” immigration — they’re illegal when they cross the border and turn themselves in, then they’re legal while they await their asylum hearing, then if they get denied asylum (as most do) and stay in the country anyway they’re illegal again.

Most Americans simply do not understand how that system works. If they did understand, they’d probably vote to change the asylum law to deny hearings to — or at least penalize — people who crossed illegally. Meanwhile, among the few Americans who do understand how this system works — lawyers, policymakers, and various NGOs — there’s little appetite to reform the system. As a result, the American public sort of vaguely senses that its democratic will is being violated, but doesn’t exactly know how. And so general anger builds…

The solution, of course, is for Democrats — and responsible conservatives, and political leaders in general — to change America’s immigration system to make it more congruent with the democratic will. The asylum loophole should be abolished — crossing the border illegally should not be rewarded with the chance to stay in the country while awaiting an asylum hearing. Accepting lots of people into the country legally is fine — I will continue [to] support that, and I think Americans in general will agree with me. But if the American people have decreed that a person should not get in, they should not get in. And Democrats should make it clear to the public, with loud and certain rhetoric, that this is being done.

Enforcing laws against hiring undocumented labor on the corporate side, and changing our asylum law to penalize those who entered illegally, would send illegal immigration into reverse — all without the brutality of ICE.

End “sanctuary cities”, go back to Obama’s first term

Critics of Trump’s immigration crackdown often note that Barack Obama deported large numbers of illegal immigrants, especially during his first term. And this is true — by some measures, Obama deported people at an even faster pace than Trump has. And yes, one of the ways he did it was by focusing deportation efforts on illegal immigrants who commit crimes — just as many Democrats are now promising to do.

But the people who tout this record need to think a little harder about how Obama accomplished this. Much of it was done through ICE’s Secure Communities Program, which was established during the waning days of the Bush administration. Under this program, whenever state and local cops arrested someone, they would send their fingerprints to ICE to check their immigration status. ICE could then deport them if they were in the country illegally.

This program was extremely effective in deporting large numbers of illegal immigrants — who also happened to mostly be people who had committed crimes. But many progressive cities decided that programs like this were bad, and became “sanctuary cities”. Sanctuary cities enacted policies that made it difficult to transfer illegal immigrants from local custody to ICE custody, and which limited cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE in various other ways. This undermined the program. The Trump administration has spent a lot of effort trying to force cities to stop concealing illegal immigrants, and progressives have strongly resisted these efforts.

And yet if Democrats really do want to deport criminal illegal immigrants en masse, it will require cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE in blue cities. That means efforts like the Secure Communities Program under Obama, and it means not using local obstructionism to foil the federal government’s efforts to deport criminal illegal immigrants.

The problem here appears to be that while many Democrats pay lip service to the idea of deporting criminal illegal immigrants, they are unwilling to challenge progressive activists who thwart those efforts. At the grassroots level, many progressives see protecting the undocumented from deportation by hook or by crook, regardless of their criminal status, as a sort of crusade. Democrats at the national level need to tamp down this behavior by condemning this behavior. And Democrats at the local level need to understand that this “crusade” hurts the national party.

So combining all of these elements, we can see the overall contours of a liberal approach to immigration enforcement. It would concentrate on replacing violence and brutality with impersonal economic incentives, while making sure to deport criminals who are in the country illegally. And it would be animated by the idea that America is a good and legitimate country, and that welcoming immigrants is something Americans choose to do for their own benefit.

That, I think, is the kind of program that could present a durable, workable, favorable alternative to Trumpism, and help the Democrats win back power.

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1. As Matt Yglesias explains, you can’t just do this by forcing employers to sign up for an “e-verify” system, because those who employ illegal immigrants simply won’t enter them in the system. But what you can do is investigate, prosecute, and fine companies that hire undocumented workers. This will exert quite a chilling effect.