On Immigration, A Clear and Just Vision Requires Wrestling With Hard Questions

Over the past few years, the Left has lost public support on a range of issues that used to be winners with the American people. Immigration is one of these: Nearly every source puts the issue among the top concerns of Americans, trusting conservatives more than they trust progressives for solutions.¹ The results for immigrants, refugees, children in immigrant families, among others—as well as for our democracy itself—are catastrophic. The Trump administration’s parade of horrors almost defies comprehension: Immigrants with and without status have been stalked and kidnapped by authorities, shipped to remote detention centers, or to horrific conditions in El Salvador and Panama on the invented pretext that their tattoos prove involvement in criminal gangs.²  In the immediate term, the broadest coalition possible must stand up and say that these actions threaten the rule of law principles that underpin our democracy.

In the long run, though, the underlying challenges of migration that provided the excuse for the administration’s brutality aren’t going to get better with time. The pressures on our badly outdated immigration system are as intense as they have been at any point in our history, and they are only likely to grow over time.³ The challenges at the US-Mexico border aren’t a short-term emergency; they are the result of political and social unrest in major parts of our hemisphere as well as the effects of climate change, forces that have been on the rise for more than a decade. The growing impacts of the climate crisis alone tell us that we’re experiencing only the beginning of what’s coming. If the Left doesn’t develop an affirmative vision for immigration policy—one that tackles the challenging issue of what the limits on immigration should be and how to enforce them—it will continue to strengthen the hand of the autocrats and oligarchs.⁴

The Trump immigration policy agenda, though devastatingly brutal, will ultimately fail in fixing the problems in our immigration system, and it’s possible the public will search for other solutions over time. But solving problems has never been President Trump’s aim; he is far better at creating crises and then convincing the public that he’s in a better position to fix them than his opponents. The mainstream Left needs to reclaim its position as problem solvers. Rather than “tough vs. weak,” which is the frame the president counts on, the opposition can once again own “solutions vs. chaos.” But for that, progressives need to develop policy approaches suitable for the era we are entering, which is one in which we face refugee crises in our hemisphere—compounded by climate change—and continual, record-high pressure at our Southern border.

This is not a call for pro-immigrant legislators to simply jump on board with restrictionist proposals for border enforcement. Rather, it is a call for pro-immigrant policymakers, as well as movement and policy organizations, to have a theory of the case on what a functional and balanced system would look like, one that maximizes economic outcomes and provides for generous pathways to legal immigration while also imposing structures to bring fairness and humanity to the border. If we are about to spend four years telling the public that they are witnessing the wrong way to go about an immigration policy, we must also be able to articulate what the right way would look like.   

Uncomfortable as it may be, we must create space for a discussion of a policy vision that balances welcoming immigrants with appropriate limits and ways to enforce them. There is substantial evidence that the majority of the American people are both pro-immigrant and pro-immigration reform.⁵ They see movement organizations’ well-intentioned objections to the status quo as evidence that the Left prefers an open border to any form of structure and efficiency. And to date we have not done enough to successfully disabuse them of that notion. Policymakers who are generally pro-immigrant have for over a decade been met with harsh criticism from many on the Left for any gesture toward immigration limits or enforcement of any kind. The Biden administration was not shy about immigration enforcement, but attempted to keep the issue out of the headlines, contributing to the impression that the Left had no vision for the future of immigration policy (beyond the legalization of immigrants who are already in the United States). If there’s a right way and a wrong way to manage the border and create legal pathways for immigrants, we need to create the space to loudly name the right way.  

Creating that space requires a fresh research agenda. The policy vision we need to develop should be informed by a deeper understanding of what it means that we are at record-high immigration, with the highest yearly net migration rate to the US since at least the 1850s.⁶ We need to not just understand what is driving these numbers but also have a better-researched set of answers on what the economic effects of these numbers will be. If we seek to build an immigration movement that fights for economic justice for all, and if you believe, as I do, that immigrants are good for the country economically, we need data to help us assess which sectors and people specifically are economically impacted by immigration, and whether there is a point at which negative impacts begin to outweigh the benefits.⁷ And if the data shows that some limitations are important not just to manage the politics of immigration but to manage the economics of it, we need to be willing to say that, and to develop a policy approach accordingly. An implicit or explicit open borders posture is not politically or economically helpful.   

I happen to believe that we are nowhere near the theoretical limit to immigration’s benefits, but in a moment of increasing migration pressure in our hemisphere and beyond, we need to understand where that limit might be and be willing to consider what kind of policy we should build in order to maximize outcomes for our economy, including and especially on our existing workforce. We could use a stronger evidence base to demonstrate the space—and necessity—for immigrants in the service, caregiving, construction, and agricultural sectors, among others, and to determine the levels that are appropriately generous while also supporting better wages and working conditions among low-wage workers overall. We need to build a movement that aligns immigrant organizing with worker organizing—that’s the way to conduct a conversation about the economic impact and build a policy agenda that maximizes its benefits to the sectors of our economy that too often get overlooked, or get cynically pitted against each other by political forces that don’t actually care about what happens to them.

While immigration is a politically challenging issue, the good news is that its policy challenges do not present an intractable problem. It is possible to create and manage a policy that promotes generosity alongside order, fairness and humanity, and that earns the support of the American public. But we must have the courage to ask hard questions, build a stronger evidence base, and be the ones to propose solutions rather than simply react to the horrors inflicted by the current administration. It’s one of the great challenges of our time, and our democracy itself may depend on our ability to take it on.