Since the spring, the shine has come off President Trump’s handling of immigration. And yet there has been no apparent surge in voters’ desire to put immigration policy back in the hands of Democrats.
Frankly, Democrats have not earned voters’ trust on immigration — and I say this as a Democrat.
The most recent Democratic administration presided over an enormous surge in migration, with the unauthorized immigrant population exploding to 14 million in 2023 from 10.5 million in 2021 and likely millions more by the time Joe Biden left office, according to the Pew Research Center.
For too long, Mr. Biden and his team asserted they couldn’t stop the surge without new legislation. That proved false: In 2024, having failed to get an immigration bill through Congress, Mr. Biden finally took executive actions to curb abuse of the asylum system and slow the flow of migrants across the southern border. When Donald Trump took office, illegal border crossings slowed to a trickle. In other words, the problem had been fixable all along; Mr. Biden simply did not fix it until much too late.
As a result, the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States today is considerably different from what it was before Mr. Biden’s presidency. In 2021, over 80 percent of unauthorized immigrants had been living here for at least five years. Now there are millions more recent arrivals without similarly deep links to American communities. Admitting all these new migrants was never an agreed-upon public policy — no voters endorsed this, no law passed by Congress contemplated it and to the extent the migrants are seeking asylum, their legal claims are too often bogus.
But it happened, and Democrats need to explain to voters why they should not expect it to happen again if they regain power. They also need a story about what happens with the millions of people who came here recently, even though they weren’t supposed to.
The longstanding preferred Democratic framework has been comprehensive immigration reform. The idea is that you secure the border, set an intentional and thoughtful immigration policy about who to admit going forward, and give some sort of amnesty to most of the unauthorized immigrants who are already here. Twenty years of legislative efforts to enact this framework failed, even when there was substantial Republican support for it, which is no longer the case. And that was before the composition of the unauthorized immigrant population changed so drastically.
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The post How Democrats Can Win Back Trust on Immigration appeared first on New York Times.
