On Immigration and "Popularism"
Yesterday, in what the Wall Street Journal called “an early test of how far right Democrats could shift in the second Donald Trump presidency,” 48 Democrats in the House of Representatives joined the Republicans to vote for the Laken Riley Act. The bill would require DHS to detain any unauthorized immigrant who “is charged with, is arrested for, is convicted of, admits having committed, or admits committing acts which constitute the essential elements of any burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting offense.” And it would authorize states to sue DHS for failing to enforce immigration laws in a wide variety of circumstances.
There will be great pressure on Democrats in the Senate to provide the votes to overcome a filibuster and send this bill to the desk of President-Elect Trump. As the Journal story suggests, Democrats have been taking a pretty strongly restrictivist turn on immigration, at least since the 2022 midterms–a trend that has accelerated greatly since Trump’s win in 2024. Immigration was an extremely salient issue in the election, with many voters apparently believing that the Biden Administration had failed to control the border effectively. From the very beginning of his involvement in national politics, Trump has made a nativist, often explicitly racist, push to restrict immigration one of his central issues. And recent polling suggests voters continue to find the issue exceptionally important:
About half of U.S. adults named immigration and border topics in an open-ended question that asked respondents to share up to five issues they want the government to work on this year, according to a December poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s up from about one-third who mentioned the topic as a government priority in an AP-NORC poll conducted the previous year.
The faction of Democratic operatives and allied pundits known as “popularists” have spent the last few years hammering the Biden Administration and progressive Democrats for failing to take a more restrictive stance toward immigration–and they’ve spent the time since the election gloating that they were proven right. They have some data on which they can rely. Here’s Ruy Teixeira, one of the most aggressive of these popularists, writing just a few days ago:
In other polling, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought these phrases about the Democrats were accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.
The response from many Democratic elected officials in the wake of the election has been to move aggressively to the right on immigration. Note that Biden had made that pivot well before the election. He kept the Title 42 immigration restrictions–ostensibly a public health measure responding to COVID–in place well after most experts thought there was any minimally plausible public health rationale for them. (Most experts thought the restrictions, initially imposed in the first Trump Administration, were a pretext from the beginning.) He adopted restrictive asylum rules, first as a temporary measure before making them permanent. By election day 2024, much of the pro-immigration rhetoric (and many of the accompanying policies) that I recall fondly from my early days in the White House became a distant memory. (Before moving over to HHS in 2022, I worked as General Counsel at the Office of Management and Budget. My work there pushing through the early Biden executive orders on immigration, and unwinding the Trump border wall, will always be a highlight for me.)
The many Democratic votes for the Laken Riley Act in the House, and the Democratic support that bill will likely receive in the Senate, reflect that turn to the right. But the bill is just the beginning–a vehicle Republicans designed to give Trump a quick early win in his new term, and to divide Democrats in the process. Trump will come back with more and more restrictive and repressive measures on immigration, supported by more and more inflammatory and racist rhetoric. Democrats will be pressured, by popularists like Teixeira, to support many of these measures. And I suspect there will be a lot of Democrats, like the 48 who voted for yesterday’s bill, who will succumb to the pressure. They’re likely to follow a version of the Bill Clinton “triangulation” strategy–go along with the most popular measures that the Republicans push, but draw a line at the measures that can be readily characterized as far outside of mainstream opinion. (Clinton signed a harsh welfare reform law but drew the line at cuts to the popular Medicare and Medicaid programs. Perhaps the analogy to Medicare and Medicaid here is birthright citizenship.)
I think that triangulation strategy would be a mistake–a moral one, if not a political one. A newsletter post is not the place to go into detail on the normative points–people have written books on the subject, and I’ve toyed with writing one myself–but I’ll just say here that from my perspective the moral and policy case for a humane and welcoming approach to immigration is incredibly powerful. The case starts from the perspective that people who are born in or already live in the United States are no more morally worthy than people elsewhere. It’s therefore presumptively wrong to deny people outside of this country–particularly people who currently experience lives of destitution and physical threat–the opportunity to live a better life by coming here. And the case is especially strong for those whose life conditions have been severely adversely affected by US policies and actions through the years–supporting repressive regimes in the Americas and elsewhere, a militarized war on drugs, destabilizing military actions in the “global war on terror” or whatever we call it these days, actions that have caused and exacerbated climate change, etc.–policies and actions on which none of these folks had a vote.
It’s also in the United States’ national self-interest to allow more immigrants into the country. Those who reflexively oppose immigration say “we’re full,” but the contrary is true. We need more people in this country to promote national productivity and support institutions like Social Security. This is particularly true in places like my home region of the Midwest. In my home state of Michigan, the population grew in 2023, but that increase was entirely the result of immigration.
Now, there are serious policy questions about how to ensure that immigration is orderly, how to support immigrants in their new communities (and how to ensure that the burden of support–which is a transitional expense–does not fall disproportionately on some communities rather than others), how to ensure that there is an adequate supply of housing for new migrants, and so forth. But the restrictions that the Trump Administration promises are not likely to focus on these difficult policy issues. They’re likely to be much harsher efforts to close the border and conduct mass deportations.
Given the election results and the polling, I understand why some Democratic elected officials will go along with many of these efforts. That’s what elected officials do. But I am deeply disturbed by the popularist discourse, from Teixeira and others, that takes as a given that following the polls is all that matters. That discourse, as Peter Beinart said, confuses popularity with truth.
Max Sawicky let loose a cri de coeur on this point yesterday; it resonated with me. And something Michael Podhorzer wrote a year and a half ago has also stuck with me:
I’m most struck by the contrast between the moral ambitions and certitude of the Trump years and the defeatism of the last two. In the Trump years, there was a palpable resurgence of moral clarity which reached a crescendo in the George Floyd protests and the national resistance to MAGA. But over the last two and a half years, too many sat on the sidelines reverting to a learned helplessness, more interested in hectoring and second guessing those who remained committed. If the Trump years were characterized by the nation’s greatest readiness to acknowledge its faults, the last two and a half were characterized by backlash – not just by those still determined to “make America great again,” but by a peanut gallery of opinionators who insist we discard our most basic moral commitments as political liabilities.
I know it’s hard to push against strong public opinion. I think that may be particularly true for those of us on the progressive side when it comes to immigration. Across different times and different countries, most people–very much including working-class people–seem consistently to be less willing to support robust institutions of social democracy in the context of freer immigration. This is an important fact of life that people like me–who very much want more robust institutions of social democracy in the United States–need to take account of. And it’s something that I am planning to write more extensively about in the next few years. (Maybe that’s the book I teased above?)
The popularists would say that we should accept this fact of life as basically fixed in the short to medium term–that we should move Democrats right on immigration so that Democrats can win and move policy left on economic policy for those who are in the US. Perhaps, they might say, the effects of that more robust social-democratic economic policy will make people in the US more comfortable with immigration over time and lay the groundwork for a more humane and welcoming immigration policy in the future. But, either way, they would argue that Democratic elected officials now need to be overtly and ostentatiously restrictive on immigration–and that ordinary citizens aligned with the Democrats, not to mention the much-vilified “groups,” need to stop putting pressure on Democratic elected officials on this issue.
I’m not running for office–I tried that once; it didn’t work out. And I certainly won’t second-guess the short-term political calculus that elected officials are making about what will serve them best in the next cycle. (Though I’m really pleased that my own Member of Congress, Debbie Dingell, voted against the Riley bill yesterday.) But I find it unacceptable to stop, as a private citizen and participant in civil society, pushing for a more welcoming and humane immigration policy.
I, for one, expect to focus a lot of my pro bono legal work during the next few years on fighting Trump-era abuses related to immigration, and I will do so even if Democratic elected officials would rather people affiliated with the party not take public pro-immigrant stances. And I hope to see some efforts by some of our elected officials to actually try to move public opinion on this issue. As Gabriel Winant wrote in his postmortem of the 2024 election, “A successful campaign draws on the material of the existing society and assembles it into a portrait of the present and a vision of the future: it does not simply reflect frozen facts of public opinion and common sense but reorganizes them and ultimately produces new forms.” That is just what we need to see Democratic officials do on this issue.