Joe Biden’s immigration policies might have contributed to Donald Trump’s winning a second term, but a year later, Americans are increasingly unhappy with the president’s aggressive deportation tactics. For the final installment of the America’s Next Story series, the columnist Michelle Goldberg joins David Leonhardt, an editorial director in Times Opinion, to discuss her strongly held belief that America is, at its best, a nation of immigrants and that that should inform how the country moves forward.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: I’m closing out the series with my colleague Michelle Goldberg, a Times columnist. When we asked her what she thinks should define America’s next story, she said: immigration.
That makes a lot of sense. Immigration is a topic that’s come up a lot in this series. Both because it is central to America’s identity and because it helped put Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024. For that reason, a lot of Democrats have grown skittish about the subject, but Michelle says they’re wrong to be. In fact, she says they should run toward immigration as an issue.
In this conversation, she and I talk about how making America more affordable for everyone could inspire voters to be more welcoming toward newcomers. And we both reject Trump’s cruel immigration policies while holding out hope that Trump might spark a backlash that could lead to a more humane future for American immigration policy.
Michelle, thanks for being here.
Michelle Goldberg: Hey, thanks for having me.
Leonhardt: You suggested that we talk about immigration in this conversation and specifically that it’s important that we reclaim the idea that America is a land of immigrants. Given that this has been a series about what America’s next story should be — and quite clearly, the post-Trump story — why do you think that’s the place to start?
Goldberg: Well, first of all, because I just think it’s the best thing about America, quite simply. It’s the thing that we have historically done better than others. We absorb immigrants. We integrate immigrants. I still am very sentimental about the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty.
Historically, we’ve gone through these periods of racial nationalism like we’re in right now, where people want to define America as an ethnic community, and periods of civic nationalism where America is about ideas and values that are open to anyone who is willing to do the work of embracing them.
I grew up, and I think you probably grew up at a time when civic nationalism was so ascendant, we barely even thought of it as an ideology. It was just the basic American idea. It was unchallenged, or if it was challenged, it was challenged only around the margins.
The thing that Donald Trump and the people around Donald Trump, Stephen Miller in particular, have done so effectively is to basically take a sledgehammer to the idea of civic nationalism. I think that Democrats spent so much time taking it for granted that there was no need really to make an affirmative case for immigration on a moral and ethical basis but also just as a source of renewing American vitality.
But I think rebuilding civic nationalism, rebuilding the idea of immigration as a positive good and, to me, the sort of singular source of American greatness if America’s ever going to be a great country again — which I think is very much up for debate. But if it is, I don’t see any other way that you do it.
Leonhardt: To your point about this not feeling too strange because many of us of a certain age have lived through a period in which that was the norm, we can just think about the way that Barack Obama and, maybe more to the point, Ronald Reagan talked about immigration.
Audio clip of Ronald Reagan: I ask you to trust that American spirit. The spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth who came here in search of freedom.
Leonhardt: It is this wonderful thing — that many people who want to work hard, often many people who are quite talented, want to come to this country.
Goldberg: At least wanted.
Leonhardt: Yeah, that’s interesting. Wanted. I’m actually still pretty optimistic that if we could get a president other than Trump, people will still want to come to this country. It’s not like there’s a country that’s displaced us as the place where people are going to aspire to go, I don’t think. But I agree with you: It’s at more risk than I thought it was.
So, I assume you’re thinking about a language that recaptures some of that. Is that right? Or do you think that civic nationalism needs to be different from what it was in the past?
Goldberg: I think it needs to build on that tradition. I think it needs to reclaim that tradition, but obviously you’re speaking to a new set of concerns.
First of all, you’re speaking at a time when you can’t take that for granted as a base-line American ideal. When Reagan or Obama invoked those ideas, they were invoking a unifying consensus belief. Now there’s panic about immigration and there’s a general perpetual panic about the contours of who Americans are.
You see it in Europe, you see it in Donald Trump’s kind of monstrous national security strategy, which seeks to project a nativism abroad and undermine tolerance in Europe. But there’s this panic about “Islamization” or how Muslim migrants are seen to be changing — I think nobody has made the case that America, again, is just traditionally so much better at absorbing people than many European countries.
America has its problems. It has, obviously, its underserved neighborhoods. I’m not trying to sugarcoat it. But this is something that America and Americans should be proud of, as opposed to cowering and assuming that the worst effects of mass migration in other countries are going to be our destiny.
Leonhardt: I think that’s a really important point. When you look at the research — and the best research that I’ve read has been done by economists named Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky. They look over more than a century, and they use census records to look at how immigrants do in the U.S. and how they assimilate and climb the economic ladder.
It’s really striking that the immigrants of the last several decades, who are predominantly Latino and Asian, have climbed the ladder at an extremely similar rate to the overwhelmingly European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And as you said, we’re better at this than much of Europe.
Goldberg: Right. We have been better and we’re taking this advantage that we’ve had and setting it on fire.
Leonhardt: Yes, we have been better, and I do think we can be better.
Goldberg: There are two reasons I think that this is going to be especially important.
One is that you’re going to have the most diverse generation in history becoming adults. And if you are worried about American disunity now, imagine how much worse that gets when you have an explicitly white nationalist — which I would argue is what Trump has — vision of what it means to be an American.
And then another thing that I think the right is rightly concerned about — but all of its solutions are wrong — is that there’s a lot of warranted anxiety about falling birthrates everywhere in the rich world. These conversations can be really icky for leftists and liberals, and so they often don’t want to engage them. But it really is true that we don’t want to be on the trajectory that Japan or South Korea is on, where you become a dramatically aging and dramatically shrinking society.
Now, nobody anywhere in the world has figured out how to substantially increase birth rates. So, eventually the country that is able to attract and integrate young immigrants is going to have a huge advantage. Again, we were set up to have that advantage, and now we’re foreclosing it.
Leonhardt: One of my favorite things about your column, Michelle, is how much time you spend reporting and going out in the country and listening to people.
I’m curious, when you think about the reporting you’ve done and you think about this issue, how can you imagine that politicians and other leaders can take the next step for people and say to someone, whether they’re native-born American or an immigrant, someone who’s already here, say to them: Here is how your life will be better if we are once again a nation of immigrants?
Goldberg: First of all, I actually think that most Americans are already sort of there. There was a huge backlash to the way that Joe Biden handled the border. But public opinion on this is pretty thermostatic, and we’re already back to a place where, in polls, more Americans say that immigration is a net positive than a net negative.
It’s much easier to make these arguments for the benefits of immigration when people don’t feel like they’re operating from a position of extreme scarcity and fear. When people feel like they can’t afford their own lives and things are spiraling out of control, then I think they’re probably much more open to arguments like “It’s because all these other people that you don’t know are taking something from you.”
You hear Stephen Miller and JD Vance say the traffic will be better and the schools will be better and the hospitals will be better. Your wages will be higher. All these problems that you have are going to go away after we conduct this mass deportation campaign.
Audio clip of JD Vance: We flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought, by right, go to American citizens. And at the same time, we weren’t building enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had. So what we’re doing is trying to make it easier to build houses. We’re also getting all of those illegal aliens out of our country, and you’re already seeing it start to pay some dividends.
Goldberg: Nobody, in practice, thinks that the shrinking of their community makes their life better. My kids go to public school in New York City, and the big problem with New York City public schools is that they’re losing enrollment, not that they’re overenrolled. We have probably many more undocumented immigrants than most places. Nobody feels like a town or a city that’s shrinking is becoming, at the same time, more desirable.
Leonhardt: I want to come back to the question of what a future immigration policy should be and what lessons we should take from Biden. But I do want to spend one more minute on Trump. His policies are so extreme. They’re so cruel. I could pick any number of examples. The one that’s on my mind, because I just watched some of the videos of her, is a young woman named Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, whom you may have heard about.
She lived in Texas and she was going to Babson College up in Massachusetts and was coming home to surprise her parents over the Thanksgiving holiday. ICE picked her up at the airport in Massachusetts and seemingly, based on what the lawyers have said, without due process, deported her to Honduras — a country she hadn’t been to since she was a little girl.
When you listen to her story and think about the many other stories like it, I think there are many, many Americans who either are or will be offended by the way that Donald Trump, including Americans who voted for him, is conducting this policy.
Goldberg: Right. You see this on “Joe Rogan.” You see this on some of the podcasters that were all in with the MAGA movement. Now they’re looking at it and saying, “No, wait, what is this? This isn’t what I voted for.” I mean, that is what you voted for, but I don’t think they necessarily realize that that’s what they were voting for.
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I’m also really haunted by what’s happening to these Afghan refugees who are here because they helped our military and our government during the long war in Afghanistan, who are obviously not safe returning to Taliban rule, who we’re going to send back. We’re sending back refugees from Iran. We’re sending back refugees to Russia who are getting conscripted the minute that they step off the plane.
You barely need to make an ideological case against this. There’s no religion, I don’t think, on earth that would countenance this treatment of human beings. But I think we need to go beyond just “We’re not going to do this,” and explain why this thing of ours that Donald Trump has disassembled was so precious.
Leonhardt: OK. Now let’s turn to Biden and parts of this conversation that I find harder to think about. Avoiding Trump’s cruelty and his extremism and his racism seems really straightforward to me morally, and even politically in most respects. But then the question is: What should come after Trump?
I think Biden’s immigration policy wasn’t just a failure of politics or explanation, but was also a failure of policy, and I think that because even in this country that is so good at incorporating immigrants into our society, there have to be limits. The Biden folks, I think, were fairly disdainful of those limits.
This may be an area where you and I are in a little bit of a different place, which is part of why I want to talk about it. Can you give your diagnosis of what the Biden folks got wrong?
Goldberg: The essential problem at the border, and tell me if you disagree with this, during the Biden years, was the abuse of our asylum system. I think you would agree with that?
Leonhardt: I agree with that.
Goldberg: I don’t think it was that much on their radar, and I’ll admit it wasn’t really on my radar that people were so up in arms about this. This is one of those places where I will admit to being pretty out of touch with American public opinion. I live in New York City. I saw the influx of migrants, including some at my kids’ school.
I thought it was a problem for them. You see all the time now these little kids on the subway selling candy, sometimes with their mother, sometimes not. I don’t like that because they should be in school, but it’s not a problem for me. So, I never felt this sense of disorder or aggrievement. Part of that is just me being out of touch and missing something that was clearly going on with a lot of people. And I suspect that maybe many people in the Biden administration were the same. They just didn’t feel it, and they maybe weren’t in touch with the people who did feel it.
I’ve heard this from immigration advocates that another real failure was — Greg Abbott did this thing that was kind of malevolent, but really politically brilliant, which is to start busing all these migrants from the border all over the country to places that didn’t have the infrastructure to absorb them and, as a result, ended up making some parts of Blue America more skeptical of immigration.
Something I’ve heard from immigration advocates is that they think that if the administration had been willing to surge resources and try to manage that influx, and not just put it on state and local governments to handle as best they can, then they could have ameliorated that crisis a lot.
Leonhardt: Maybe. I think a lot of immigration advocates in this country basically are in favor of more and more immigration, and I understand why they’re in favor of that. But I think the fundamental problem was the Biden administration allowed too much immigration.
Goldberg: But when you say “allowed,” what do you mean? What do you think that they should have been doing? I think that they should have been surging resources to the border. I think that they wanted to do that legislatively, and that was a big failure. So, short of ending asylum, what do you think they should have been doing to lessen this flow of immigration?
Leonhardt: I think they made at least three big mistakes. When Biden ran, he not only rejected Trump’s rhetoric, which I think was appropriate, but he just kept sending the message, “Come, we want to welcome you.”
Audio clip of Joe Biden: I would, in fact, make sure that we immediately surge to the border. All those people are seeking asylum, they deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation that says if you want to flee and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come.
Leonhardt: People in Latin America understandably heard that as “Come, we will let you in” — and the numbers surged pretty much immediately after he took office. Then they took office and did a whole bunch of executive actions to make it harder to deport people and easier for people to get temporary status here through various policies.
And then they spent much of 2021 and 2022 claiming they really couldn’t do anything about this, that it wasn’t about their policies, it was about Covid or Venezuela. Then suddenly when they feared for their re-election in 2024, the Biden administration got stricter about who could come and get in and apply — and the numbers really fell.
So, I completely agree with you. This is a really hard problem, and it’s hard because ultimately, it involves telling a lot of people who don’t qualify for asylum in a political way, but who would benefit from living here: “Sorry, you can’t come because we’re not going to admit anywhere near most of the people who’d like to come to our country.”
But, to me, what’s important about the lesson from the Biden administration is that the levels themselves were part of the problem — and I think it’ll be hard to get back to something if a Democrat tries to rerun the Biden strategy.
Goldberg: Well, I don’t think any Democrat wants to rerun the Biden strategy.
Leonhardt: Right.
Goldberg: I think that there’s an understanding, whether or not they believe it was substantively catastrophic, there’s a wide understanding that it was politically catastrophic. Maybe that’s where you and I have the real disagreement — about whether it was a substantive problem or a political problem.
But, I sort of see the reverse. I think that Democrats now are going to be inclined to fight the last war and show that they, too, can be really tough on the border. To some extent, that’s necessary. There’s a certain threshold of migration — and this may be something that you can even like discover empirically, although I don’t know — beyond which regularly and in almost every country triggers right-wing reaction. So, I think that one goal of American immigration policy should be to stay below that. But you and I are having a conversation about undocumented immigration, which is the thorniest issue because it involves enforcement against desperate and suffering people.
But we’re also seeing a wholesale attack on legal immigration.
Leonhardt: Yes, we are.
Goldberg: We’re seeing a wholesale attack on bringing over the best and brightest scientists and mathematicians and the kind of people who are in many ways responsible for America’s unparalleled prosperity — and that’s maybe the easier thing for the next Democratic president to solve, because we just should be letting those people back in if they still want to come.
I don’t think we should underestimate how frightening it is. I don’t know if you hear this, but when I talk to highly skilled immigrants — close friends, people with green cards — there is a constant sense of “Even if I got thrown into ICE detention, maybe I would get out, but three weeks in really torturous conditions can break a person.” If you’re just going through your life feeling that at any moment you could be plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare that would leave this permanent imprint on your soul, then maybe an offer from Canada or an offer from Denmark or something starts to look really, really nice.
Leonhardt: Yeah, I think there’s huge fear among people who have any tie to the immigration system, including naturalized citizens, and I think there’s huge fear among Latinos, even many who were born in this country.
Goldberg: Oh, yeah, absolutely — and it’s justified.
Leonhardt: Yeah, it is justified. When you think about the future, what kind of immigration policy do you want us to get toward?
For the longest time, people talked about a grand bargain in which we would have both money for border security and enforcement of our laws inside the country, and we would also add new pathways for legalization — including for people who were already in this country and had come here illegally, but who’d followed the law since they’d been here.
To you, is that still conceptually the right framework, even if the political language probably needs to change so it doesn’t sound so repetitive?
Goldberg: Yes, I think so. Although, whether or not it’s possible, I have no idea. My guess is that you would need a pretty substantial wave election for that to become possible. It’s one of these things — like Israel and Palestine or something — where the outline of where you want to get to isn’t the hard part. The hard part is all of the intractable interests that need to be balanced in order to get there.
The one thing that I think about a little bit differently is that I used to think that if our immigration system was tilted toward skilled immigrants, the way that Canada’s is, that there would be less backlash. And given the utter rage that you see in some quarters toward Indian immigrants, in particular, who are mostly seen as highly skilled immigrants, I no longer think that’s true.
Especially as many of these jobs in technology that were once seen as a safe path to the middle class are lost to A.I., there’s going to be more and more of a reaction to outsiders who are seen as taking those jobs.
Leonhardt: Yes. In a narrow way, I’m sort of optimistic that we could get an overhaul of immigration law within normal politics. Because if the post-Trump Republican Party loses in a significant way — I just mean Democrats having control of Congress and the presidency in 2029, which who knows if that’ll happen, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility — I think people will see their cruel immigration policy as a central reason that they lost.
And if Democrats can get it together to get rid of the filibuster, to me, it is not out of the question that politics could change more quickly than it seems sitting here today. We really could have a better set of immigration laws in the 2020s, but maybe I’m naïvely optimistic.
Goldberg: I don’t know. Again, I don’t think that anybody thought 10 years ago that the truly monstrous set of policies that we now see would be possible. So, the only hope that you can take from that is that with both the right narrative and the willingness to use political power on its behalf, things that once seemed impossible can become possible.
Leonhardt: Yes. You used this word at the beginning of our conversation, “scarcity,” that sticks with me, and I actually think is a really nice way to try to wrap up this series.
Even if I’m narrowly optimistic about the possibility of better immigration law within the next several years, in a way, our problems with immigration are related to so many of our other problems, which is that many Americans have felt a sense of scarcity — and when people feel scarcity, politics get really nasty, and they’re not generous.
We began this series at the Jefferson Memorial talking about the ideas that animated the founders, flawed though the founders were. I’m curious, when you think ahead to 2026 and the 250th anniversary of the country and the notion that you and I share, which is that this is a country of ideals, it’s not a country of religion or ethnicity. I’m curious, in the broadest terms, what you think should be the ideals that we aspire to live up to to come out of this incredibly dark period that Donald Trump has dominated?
Goldberg: Well, I think that if you’re going to come out of it — and that’s, to me, very, very much an open question — you would need the same political struggle and political will that allowed us to emerge from a previously Gilded Age. Only the malefactors of great wealth have much greater wealth and much less of a sense of social responsibility than they ever had before.
What you need to break the back of that and restore some kind of fair system of taxation, some sort of reinvestment in American infrastructure is — just the enormity of it, I think, seems quite overwhelming. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t see any other way out.
Leonhardt: I don’t either. Look, it’s a weird form of optimism to say that the country’s overcome worse problems before, because our problems now are really big. They’re bigger than I expected us to have if you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago. But it’s also true we’ve overcome bigger problems, and we’ve done so often with people who sketched a new vision of what was possible here and changed politics in truly surprising ways.
Goldberg: I just want to say, in terms of that vision, people are hungry for that. I think we have different views about Zohran Mamdani, but I keep thinking about his victory speech. He said this is a city of immigrants, and now it’s going to be led by an immigrant.
He’s someone who has been able to combine both this cosmopolitan vision of American — or at least New York identity, which maybe is slightly distinct with this war against scarcity. And in doing so, you see how that inspired people. You see how that vision, whether or not you think he can accomplish that vision, has the power to mobilize people.
Leonhardt: It certainly mobilized people in New York. And yeah, you and I might differ on how well it will travel outside New York ——
Goldberg: Well, I don’t think that particular bit — look, I don’t think you want to run a self-described democratic socialist in Virginia. But I do think the combination of we are a welcoming, cosmopolitan, polyglot society — maybe not everywhere wants to be that, but I think a lot of people actually do want that — and with a granular focus on how people are able to afford their lives. Those two things I think do travel.
Before I even got to The Times — this must have been a decade ago, when Donald Trump was first entering our lives — I went to this town called Twin Falls, Idaho, and it’s this fascinating place. Here’s a small town in Idaho, pretty far from the nearest airport, that had been a center of refugee resettlement. So, it’s this little town, but it’s one of the most cosmopolitan places you’ve ever been. People were really proud of that. It became a big source of tension around the time that Donald Trump entered the scene, but for a long time, people had taken pride in how opening and welcoming their town was.
I don’t think we should be naïve. Not every place wants to be a multicultural utopia. But there’s also a lot of places where — even if they think that the border’s chaotic and they have mixed feelings about mass immigration, conceptually — they can appreciate what these new people that they know have brought to the places that they live.
Leonhardt: One thing that Mamdani makes me think about is when you think about the modern era of American politics, roughly the 21st century — in it, we’ve had Zohran Mamdani elected mayor of New York, coming from absolutely nowhere. We’ve had Donald Trump elected president twice. And we’ve had Barack Hussein Obama, as his critics like to call him, elected president twice, not long after he was an obscure Illinois state legislator.
So, I do think that there is this real hunger for something other than the ordinary and that whoever is the next successful politician, whoever follows Trump, whoever is the national version of Mamdani, if they don’t tap into that desire for something fresh and something new and something exciting, they’re probably not going to succeed.
Goldberg: I think that that’s absolutely right. It seems at least possible that if a Democrat wins in 2028, it’ll be someone that if we mention their name now, we would both say, “Who?”
Leonhardt: Which will certainly make it more interesting. Michelle Goldberg, thank you very much.
Goldberg: Thank you so much.
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