Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned for the presidency on the toughest immigration platform of any Democrat in decades: She vowed to continue the Biden administrations’s crackdown on asylum and to impose order on the southern border. She championed her record as a border-state prosecutor and her support of a bipartisan border bill that failed after former President Donald J. Trump urged Republicans to reject it.
But her message fell flat, as voters across the country doubted her resolve, associated her with the Biden administration’s failures at the border or were simply won over by Mr. Trump’s starkly xenophobic rhetoric.
His relentless portrayals of migrants crossing the southern border as an invading force, and Republicans’ false claims that Democrats were welcoming migrants into the country in hopes that they would vote for their party, effectively overwhelmed Ms. Harris’s milder attempts to neutralize the issue.
“I don’t think she had a message on immigration, and even if she did, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Kathy Maranville, 70, a systems analyst in Waverly, Ga., who described herself as a conservative.
In the suburbs of Houston and Atlanta, Republicans denounced undocumented migrants who were charged in the killings of girls and young women. In blue cities and states like Chicago and Massachusetts, they cast newly arrived foreigners as a drain on schools, housing and hospitals.
“It was one of the issues that invoked an emotional response from voters,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist and former spokesman and aide to Mitt Romney, who is now a Utah senator.
And it was one that Republicans could lay at Ms. Harris’s feet: Early in President Biden’s administration, he deputized Ms. Harris to tackle the root causes of migration, a thorny task that Mr. Trump’s allies used to misleadingly criticize her as Mr. Biden’s failed “border czar.”
That made for “a very easy messaging target,” Mr. Williams said.
A priority for voters
Immigration was not the top issue on most voters’ minds in the presidential election this year, according to exit polls and pre-election surveys, but it often came in as a close second. Border concerns, driven as much by real challenges as manufactured ones — and wrapped up with voters’ other worries about the economy, housing prices and crime — built up an appetite for Mr. Trump’s staunch isolationist approach. They helped make blue areas less blue and fueled rightward shifts across the country, pollsters and strategists said.
An exit poll conducted by Fox News and The Associated Press showed that about 20 percent of voters said immigration was the single most important issue for their ballot decision, more than the percentage of voters who named abortion as their top issue.
In North Carolina, Derrick Crews, 51, a registered Republican who said he had voted for Democrats and Republicans alike, was just the type of swing voter Ms. Harris’s campaign tried to reach.
Mr. Crews, who has worked in law enforcement for 30 years, said he did not buy the Republican argument that Ms. Harris had been the “border czar.” But he nonetheless doubted her promise to fight traffickers and criminals at the border as she said she had as a prosecutor.
“You have been in office long enough,” Mr. Crews said, addressing Ms. Harris and adding that she should have drawn on that prosecutorial experience more as vice president.
In Athens, Ga., an undocumented Venezuelan migrant is awaiting trial on charges that include malice murder and aggravated assault in connection with the death of Laken Riley. Kelly Girtz, the city’s Democratic mayor, said that “any violent crime is horrible and a blight on the community.”
Mr. Girtz said that deaths like that of Ms. Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student whose killing in February became a political flashpoint, helped amplify the anger over immigration. Some of that frustration was based on practical concerns over the large number of people entering the country, but he said much of it could also be traced to false fears of immigrants.
Mr. Girtz, who spent the final stretch of the presidential race knocking on doors for Ms. Harris, said he agreed with residents who expressed a desire for an orderly process at the border. But he said he also found it difficult to counter many claims echoed on right-wing media that were not based on facts, including contentions that migrants were coming to take jobs that would otherwise be held by American citizens or that they would degrade communities.
“I would try to correct them, but I would be one voice trying to correct things that they would hear day in and day out from their television,” Mr. Girtz said.
Immigrant rights activists and lawyers now girding for mass deportations and an expansion of detention under a second Trump administration attributed Mr. Trump’s victory to uglier forces. “The results of this election have demonstrated that xenophobia and racist hatred remain very present in this country,” said Milka Uribe, a leader of Make the Road Action Pennsylvania, which focuses on mobilizing working-class Latinos.
Reversing course
Democrats have struggled for years to shore up their vulnerability on the issue of immigration. Shortly after taking office, President Biden rolled back restrictive Trump administration policies. But in the years that followed, as the number of people arriving at the southern border hit records, he reversed course and embraced some of the same measures he had previously derided.
During those early years of the Biden administration, Democrats mostly avoided talking about the issue.
Govs. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, and Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, forced Democrats to address it in late 2023 when they began shuttling migrants, in buses and airplanes, from the southern border to blue cities. Democratic mayors and governors scrambled to assemble temporary housing, medical care and social services, and pleaded with the Biden administration for help with paying for it all.
The messaging campaign by Republicans, on the other hand, was in lock step with Mr. Trump’s arguments and echoed by candidates up and down the ballot. They blamed unchecked borders and immigrants for rising housing costs, increased crime and the flow of fentanyl into cities. Their warnings came not only in campaign ads and right-wing media, but also in courtrooms, state legislatures and the halls of Congress, as Republican-led legislatures sought to empower states to enforce immigration laws and curb access to voting.
Immigration Hub, a national group that backs progressive immigration policies, reported data from AdImpact, an ad tracking firm, this month that found that Democratic candidates, political action committees and other groups spent only $107 million on campaign ads about immigration from January to October this election cycle. Republicans and other groups spent $573 million on negative messaging about immigrants.
The right-wing messaging dovetailed with anti-immigrant narratives that had already been taking hold across Mexico and Latin America — and spread to Latino communities in the United States that Democrats would come to count on. In May 2023, as Mr. Biden prepared to ease Mr. Trump’s pandemic-era restrictions on asylum, YouTube influencers on the Mexican side of the border were depicting recently arrived Venezuelans as unruly, unwilling to work and a drag on local economies.
A shift in the electorate
Calvin Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, said polling over the past year showed that more people were increasingly supportive of tightening the nation’s borders.
Mr. Jillson said that Hispanic voters, particularly in communities along the border, were concerned that undocumented immigrants would take jobs and drive down wages. Those concerns, coupled with the perception that Democrats were letting too many people in, most likely led to major shifts among the electorate, he added.
More than half of voters supported building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll last month; that is an increase from 2016, when about 40 percent of voters supported the wall. And 57 percent of voters now say they support deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, including about one-third of Democrats and a majority of independents.
Mr. Crews, the law enforcement officer in North Carolina, said he knew immigration crackdowns damaged the ability of the police to build relationships with some communities. He was not entirely pleased with Mr. Trump’s approach, he added, and preferred more moderation.
“But if I have to choose between the two extremes, I would choose Trump’s extreme,” he said.
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