Can Kamala become the Border Czar? Trump and Biden set a low bar for immigration

For days now, US politics has been roiled by an incredible rumour, mentioned in the middle of last week’s presidential debate: migrants in Springfield, Ohio are kidnapping and eating cats, dogs and even geese at local ponds. The two parties have reacted in familiar ways. Republicans fell into hysterics, playing up the cartoonish depiction of Haitians as wild dog-eaters; Democrats, in turn, gleefully mocked their opponents as racist fearmongers. Lost amid the partisan furore, however, is any mention of a solution to the perennial problem facing the US: an uncontrolled border and a desperately flawed immigration system, which neither conservatives nor progressives ever came close to fixing.

Critics from the centre-left may be right to fault Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for “creating stories”, but they are yet to articulate how they would improve the flailing status quo. Kamala Harris may assert that Trump “doesn’t have a plan”, but it is the Democrats who have fallen short in this respect, despite their best efforts to pivot to the Right on the issue. It begs the question: what can Harris do, beyond her usual rhetorical acrobatics, to reclaim the border issue from Republicans once and for all?

The solution has to go beyond the realm of policy to win over voters. Rather than simply coming up with yet another wonkish 10-point plan, Democrats must figure out a way to convince both the American public and themselves that the border must be defended, that ordinary citizens are right to be concerned, and that order and predictability in the immigration system are positive goods.

First, it is important to establish an honest account of what’s gone wrong over the last eight years. For there can be no resolution to the border crisis without acknowledging that Trump and Biden together share the blame. But where to begin? There can be no hiding from the fact that the Biden era witnessed the worst upticks in irregular migration in recent history, with more than 10 million encounters at the southern border according to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This amounts to a 1,240% increase since 2021 and a backlog of more than 591,000 individuals in the shambolic CBP app’s mass parole programme. All the while, a misguided strategy of documenting those crossing the border — or “managing the flow” — as opposed to trying to halt the flow of irregular arrivals has resulted in a virtual open invitation to economic migrants from Central America and elsewhere to crowd the US asylum system.

Harris should start by admitting the failures of her own party. In 2021, she was made Biden’s spokesperson on the border. But she was hardly the “border czar” the GOP make her out to be. The role gave her little to no actual responsibility over policymaking, which remained in the hands of DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. So rather than pretending her stint in the job was a success, she could admit that the present course is wrong and unsustainable. This would go a long way toward distancing herself from the Biden record — something she has already begun to do in other policy areas. 

Indeed, given the Republican’s consistent failings on immigration, Harris does not have to stay on the defensive. The most remarkable aspect of tracing the volume and trajectory of irregular migration flows to the US is not the cleavages but rather the continuities between the Biden and Trump administrations. Contrary to the former president’s claims of presiding over the “lowest illegal immigration in recorded history”, Trump’s four years in office saw an effective decrease in deportations from the Obama era according to data collected by Pew Research. As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2020, near the end of the Trump era: “Barack Obama’s ICE arrested and deported more than twice as many people during his first term in office.”

What’s more, both Trump and Biden failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation despite their respective party’s control of Congress for their first two years in office. To the extent that both presidents did see dips in border activity, it was as a result of acting belatedly near the close of their time in office: in Trump’s case during the pandemic, with Title 42 restrictions, while in Biden’s case, the ongoing decline in border encounters resulted in “the lowest border numbers of [this] presidency”. Both were instances of improvised responses coming in “too little, too late”.

The most damning piece of dishonesty was presented by Trump himself during the Butler, Pennsylvania rally in which he nearly died. The big chart which he turned to look at as a bullet whizzed past his ear may have saved his life, but it was still chock full of lies. Most notably, an arrow on the X-axis of the graph indicates January 2020 as the point at which Trump left office, which precedes an uptick of irregular crossings — yet Trump left office in January 2021. It slipped beneath the news of an otherwise important day, but according to the same chart, the latest increase in illegal migration actually began under Trump and simply continued unabated under Biden.

Looking at Trump’s deeply mediocre record on immigration control, we get the impression of a president who does not really care about fixing the problem so much as drumming up support from it, ergo the enthusiasm for horror stories about Haitian migrants. The Trump era, after all, produced a parade of failed immigration bills, which illustrated the gap between GOP rhetoric and results. These included the 2017 Raise Act that would have deemphasised family reunification and established a Canadian-style points system; and then the two 2018 Goodlatte bills, which between them would have funded the wall and brought in mandatory E-Verify. Yet these proposals were defeated not by Democrats but by the then-Republican majority. Alongside these legislative duds was Trump’s own reluctance to support mandatory E-Verify in the White House budget, just as reports of illegal immigrants being hired at Trump Organization properties came to the fore in 2019.

A clever Harris counterattack on immigration would highlight these myriad Republican failures and hypocrisies before throwing the gauntlet back at Trump. Just as the former president mocked his opponent at the end of the recent debate, asking of the Vice President’s pledges “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and half years…” so too could Harris retort “Why hasn’t he done it? Where is that ‘big, beautiful’ wall that Mexico was going to pay for?” But an even more important objective for any progressive realignment on the issue would be for Harris to catalyse a genuine transformation of attitudes from within the Democratic Party.

For this to happen, the issue has to be reframed away from the emotive narratives that have so far dominated the discourse; instead, the discussion could be centred around the material realities and economic costs of runaway migration. It’s a debate that’s already happening in places such as the UK, Western Europe, and Canada where the centre-left is trending toward a pragmatic restrictionism.

However, this is harder to pull off in the US, where entrenched donor elites in both major parties are committed to the open borders status quo. Realignment-minded Democrats must therefore find a countervailing set of interests to combat the influence of the professional elites who run their party, who generally combine material reliance on the undocumented serf class with moralistic views around immigration maximalism. This intra-party bloc could be assembled from unions and working-class minorities, who would be among the first to benefit from any tightening of the labour market that would come with a crackdown on illegal migration, through higher wages, more jobs and greater bargaining power.

A novel wing of “Border Democrats” could then emerge to take up the pro-immigration control arguments of heterodox Democratic leaders such as Bernie Sanders, Vicente Gonzalez, and late civil rights icon Barbara Jordan. After this, the policy momentum will be sure to follow: a progressive agenda could include the aforementioned mandatory E-Verify (far more effective than a wall), and a new “Alliance for Progress” that combines strong border security with generous developmental assistance. If Harris intends not just to defeat Trump but to diffuse many of the factors that gave rise to his movement, she would be wise to follow such a course. It would empower Democrats, humble Republicans, and restore the broad patriotic appeal of progressivism in an era of economic populism. 

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