Former President Joe Biden entered office vowing to swing the pendulum swiftly from his predecessor’s immigration agenda. Backed by migrant advocacy nonprofits and the progressive wing of his party, he placed a 100-day moratorium on his first day of office on nearly all deportations (that was quickly overturned by the courts) and limited ICE’s enforcement to only those with serious criminal records.
He appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to “lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border.” Democratic governors and mayors, emboldened by the president and the surge of progressive activism, doubled down on their own migrant policies that prevented removals.
Yet by the end of his presidency, Biden’s immigration policies had, politically, failed spectacularly. Illegal border crossing reached record levels, with the number of U.S. border encounters quadrupling over the first Trump administration. An Economist-YouGov poll found his job approval on immigration at minus-32 points.
Harris spent her doomed campaign haunted by her appointment to lead the White House’s migration efforts in 2021. Perhaps most tellingly, Hispanics swung 16 points toward President Trump, gaining him 1.8 million additional voters over 2020. The shift was decisive for Trump’s victory in several states.
The Democrats’ basic position, to allow more people to move to the U.S., is correct, even if they spend too much political capital defending failures on the border and too little advocating for more skilled legal pathways for migrants. America is only avoiding a demographic crisis because of immigration inflows.
Working toward permanent legal status for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, defending America’s role as a destination for the world’s true refugees and ensuring American workforce demands are met through immigration are all morally and economically sound positions for Democrats. And immigration in and of itself is still popular. In June 2024, by a two-to-one ratio, Americans said immigration is “a good thing” for the country.
But Democrats, in opposing President Trump’s cruel immigration policies, ended up reflexively adopting a politically disastrous agenda of their own. They coupled a reasonable stance on legal and humanitarian immigration with border policies that voters found deeply unpopular. The resulting loss of credibility cost Democrats the political capital needed to do anything truly meaningful on immigration.
Even worse, it handed Republicans a potent campaign issue — one they successfully used to win. By aiding Republicans politically, Democrats have de facto aided in the Republican efforts to end the American immigration system as we know it.
It need not be this way.
In the 1990s, the Democrats’ tune was different. “The simple fact is that we must not — and we will not — surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice,” President Bill Clinton said in 1993.
During the address, Clinton presented a report compiled by Vice President Al Gore on the state of illegal immigration and reforms that his administration sought to pursue. The remarks were a precursor to tangible immigration reforms. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act increased non-citizen removals from the U.S., particularly for those who committed crimes or overstayed their visas.
Two months later, Clinton won re-election and gained a net approval rating that he would hold for the remainder of his presidency.
Barack Obama held a similar firm line on illegal immigration. He was dubbed the “deporter-in-chief” by his left-wing critics, and border apprehensions hit a low not seen since the 1970s. “Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable — especially those who may be dangerous,” stated the president in 2014.
Obama’s immigration approval at the end of his term remained negative, but significantly higher than Biden’s would be.
Presidents Clinton and Obama were not the maximalist immigration hawks that the Republican Party has become. Clinton increased the H1-B visa cap twice during his presidency, eventually more than tripling it, and increased job flexibility as well for H1-B holders. In 1994, he admitted over 100,000 refugees, the last time the U.S. has done so (since 2000, the average has been about 50,000 a year).
Obama instituted the DACA policy which temporarily allowed illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to remain and obtain work authorization.
Their balance between enforcement and liberalization proved more politically popular than later approaches. Enforcing stricter rules on illegal immigration created the political space for a fairer, more robust — even more expansive — overall immigration system.
Getting there now though involves new tough choices on the unpopular policies Democrats have embraced. Take sanctuary cities: The polling on the policy has been precipitous, but Democrats have yet to propose meaningful reform.
Polling in Chicago shows a plurality of residents want to end the policy. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) bussing of illegal migrants to sanctuary cities across the country also worked, at least as a political stunt. New Yorkers expressed broad concern that the city couldn’t handle the surge, and a majority polled said they wanted the state to work with the Trump administration to aid deportations.
A few Democrats seem ready to admit that there is a problem. The Laken Riley Act — an imperfect bill that attempted to address some of the most politically fraught aspects of illegal immigration — passed both the House and the Senate with bipartisan support. But only 12 Senate Democrats voted for it, as did only 48 Democrats in the House out of 215. That is perhaps a moment of clarity, but hardly a reckoning.
Some elected Democrats and activists have still downplayed the state of illegal immigration, retorting that Americans’ fears on the issue are the result of Republican misinformation. Without a doubt, Republicans have lied and exaggerated immigration fears to their advantage as a campaign issue. But Republican malfeasance is not a mandate for Democrats to govern irresponsibly.
Since the first Trump administration, Democrats have been goaded into embracing unpopular immigration policies, defining their agenda in opposition to Republicans, rather than on its own merits. There has been no success in this strategy — neither for the Democratic Party nor for immigrants. Democrats control neither Congress nor the presidency, and our immigration system remains in a state of disarray that serves no one particularly well.
Moments of clarity are breaking through that, and the party is ready to reform its approach. Only party leaders can decide if it becomes a reckoning.
Colin Mortimer is the director of the Center for New Liberalism, a leading grassroots organization that serves as an ideological home for young center-left voters.
