How Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration

David Leonhardt—who until recently ran the New York Times’ flagship newsletter, “The Morning”—has been trying to understand what Democrats need to do to win elections again. He recently explored this issue at length in the Times Magazine. The story focusses on Denmark, where a center-left party has managed to achieve political success at a time when the far right is rising across Europe. Leonhardt attributes that success in large part to the party’s willingness to pursue a restrictive immigration policy. He uses the story of Denmark to explain how and why he believes Democrats have struggled, and what the Party might do going forward. As he writes, “For center-left parties around the world, Denmark offers a glimpse at what a different version of the left can look like—more working-class, more community-focused and more restrictive on immigration.”

I recently spoke by phone with Leonhardt, who is about to become the editorial director of the Times’ Opinion section, and is the author of the book “Ours Was the Shining Future.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why he thinks the Biden Administration stumbled on the immigration issue, why Barack Obama’s relatively harsh immigration policies were not enough to prevent Donald Trump’s rise, and how much the economic debate over immigration’s effects on wages really matters to voters.

Of all the issues that Democrats had real control over in 2024, do you think immigration was the one they screwed up the most?

Yes, and I think the second half of that is important. I think the Democrats had three really problematic issues. Inflation, which is probably the biggest, and I think they had some control over that, but it was limited. Then there was Biden’s age and the notion that he and the people around him, including [Vice-President Kamala] Harris, weren’t especially honest about it, and they probably had some control over that, too.

Yeah, they had some control over that.

Yes. And then the third is immigration. And under President Biden, we had the largest surge of immigration over a short period in American history. The pace was even faster than the peak pace of the Ellis Island years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We had eight million net immigrants come into the country. It appears that about five million of them entered illegally, a vastly faster pace than under Trump or Obama. You had Biden telling people during the 2020 campaign that he wanted more people to come to the country and then loosening a whole bunch of policies. Almost immediately, immigration surged. And it was never what most American voters wanted. It particularly was not what lower-income voters across races wanted. It was unpopular from the beginning. And it happened in large part—not exclusively, but in large part—because of the policies they enacted.

Do you think part of the reason they enacted those policies is that polls were more positive on immigration when Biden’s term started?

Definitely. But, when you look at the actual policies that he put in place, there was never reason to believe that they were popular. I’ve gone back and read every Democratic Party platform on immigration in the twenty-first century, and you see this pretty radical shift between 2012 and 2020. Under Obama, in 2012, it’s this really balanced approach. It brags about having the border be more secure than at any point in the previous decades. It talks about deporting criminals who endanger our communities. It also, of course, talks about this being a nation of immigrants and needing to provide a citizenship pathway for undocumented people who follow the law. And it celebrates Dreamers and all of that stuff.

And then it starts to move in 2016. And by 2020, there’s not a single sentence in the Democratic Party platform on immigration that is about border security. All of the mentions of deportations are essentially negative, and it repeatedly talks about the idea that we should make it easier for people to enter the country. And, if you look at the polling, there’s just no evidence that that is ever what Americans wanted. It was part of this broader shift to the left of the Democratic Party between roughly 2015 and 2020 to follow the wishes of very progressive, largely affluent members.

In the Times Magazine piece, regarding solutions for Democrats going forward, you write, “There can be an answer that is both consistent with progressive values and politically sustainable. It was not so different from the answer that many Democrats, including Barack Obama, offered not long ago. It combined a hardheaded approach to border security and deportation with a celebration of immigrants and an effort to expand pathways to citizenship.” During Obama’s term, there was serious immigration enforcement. Border crossings were also declining compared to the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations. What followed Obama’s second term was the election of Donald Trump, who won the Presidency largely on anti-immigrant bigotry. If Obama was the way to immunize Democrats from these attacks, why didn’t it work?

That’s a really fair question. And I think there are two important responses. The first is that, even if Obama’s moderation is much more popular than Biden’s more radical position, Obama is still President during a period where, for the most part, immigration rules are loosening in this country. When I wrote my book, I spent a lot of time studying the 1965 immigration law. [The law ended decades of bigoted immigration restrictions, which made admission determinations by country of origin.] When Democrats and Republicans passed that law, they repeatedly promised that it wouldn’t lead to a major immigration surge, and they were just wrong. They made promises they didn’t keep, mostly because of the loophole in the law that allowed huge numbers of people to come as family members of immigrants. And in the decades that followed, we continued to have loosenings of U.S. immigration law. There’s a new law in 2008 that makes it much easier for kids to enter the country. There’s a judge’s ruling in 2015 that also makes it easier for children to enter the country.

And so I do think Obama in many ways adopted a more popular and more moderate tone. But I also think that there was lingering dissatisfaction among a lot of people about immigration because we had much higher immigration than our laws called for, than our politicians promised. And we had it during a period when inequality was rising and working-class incomes and living standards were stagnating. People were frustrated. And, even if they put too much blame on immigration, they were right to think that the government hadn’t delivered the immigration policy it promised.

Another thing is that I think Barack Obama would have beaten Donald Trump if Obama had run in 2016. But Obama didn’t run in 2016; Hillary Clinton did, and she didn’t talk about immigration the way Obama did. She very much adopted this sort of élite-left social-justice language rather than more working-class language.

Does this suggest that it’s the rhetoric and not the policy realities about immigration that really matter?

I think it’s both. When you go back and you read some of Obama’s rhetoric on this, it’s a little bit jarring when you compare it with the Democratic Party’s today. Obama says, “Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.” And so I do think rhetoric matters a lot. I think the mistake that you sometimes see the progressive wing of the Democratic Party make, not just on immigration but on other subjects, is this notion that rhetoric is the only thing that matters and that, if somehow the Democratic Party were to decide to keep a whole bunch of policies that are clearly unpopular with most voters and mostly popular among relatively affluent voters, the Party can somehow make up for that by just using different rhetoric.