The past decade has seen a dramatic public opinion turn against immigration across the democratic world. In Europe, one mainstream government after another has either been toppled by resentment against immigrants, or has been forced to execute a sharp pivot away from its previous commitments, most recently when Germany's center-left government effectively abandoned the European Union's Schengen Area freedom-of-movement policy by reinstalling land border controls in a transparent effort to appease the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
It's unlikely to work, because nativism can't be appeased or eradicated. In societies like Germany and the United States that depend on immigration for a large part of their economic vitality and labor force, immigration simply has to be managed more competently with one eye kept firmly on the capacity of the political system to absorb new arrivals. Going too far too fast, as many of these governments may have done this century, can trigger a fierce backlash that leaves everyone worse off. A failure to competently implement the policy makes things even worse.
In the United States, voters who were only recently aghast at the Trump administration's inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers now appear ready to endorse the GOP nominee's draconian mass deportation fantasy. Public opinion polling suggests that uprooting millions of people, many of whom have been here for many years, may currently command a public opinion majority, though the guess here is that this will vanish the second a Trump administration actually tries to implement its insane plans.
As the Trump campaign's rhetorical demonization of immigrants escalates, it is reasonable to wonder why Democrats and liberals around the world have decided to effectively abandon the issue to their adversaries. It has not been lost on anyone that Vice President Kamala Harris and other leading Democrats have not only walked back many things that they said about immigration in 2019 and 2020, but are also refusing to defend the administration's policies.
That's odd because during the 2020 campaign then-candidate Joe Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations that "We should grant Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans already in the United States and support countries like Colombia, which are caring for millions of Venezuelans who have fled their country in desperation."
And then as president, Biden did exactly that, using the obscure TPS designation in 2021 to instantly shield thousands of Venezuelans from deportation back to their politically and economically troubled country. The decision appears to have catalyzed an even broader migration from Venezuela to the United States, which the Biden administration then used as pretext to expand the TPS again in 2023 to cover even more new arrivals.
Immigration is an enormously complex issue, and people come to the U.S. both legally and illegally for all kinds of reasons that defy easy explanation. The U.S. government is also bound by treaty obligations that carry the force of domestic law, including the Refugee Act of 1980, and those obligations mean that no one can just wave a magic wand or build a wall and make this problem go away. But if I could point to one single decision that has soured Americans on the Biden administration's handling of immigration, it would be its decision to expand TPS.
There are now at least 545,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, many of them in quite desperate circumstances. Red-state governors like Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL) have exacerbated the problem by busing or flying Venezuelan migrants to blue-state metropolises like Chicago, New York, and Boston, where they have visibly overwhelmed local capacity with no discernible policy direction or help from the federal government.
As I've argued elsewhere, a national emergency declaration could conceivably have unlocked resources to properly care for immigrants, which at least would have diminished the undeniably poor optics of the situation. But just as importantly, Democrats need to advance their own vision of immigration rather than playing a game of Lucy and the football with Republicans, who have now three times this century negotiated compromise legislation about immigration with Democrats only to abandon it at the last minute.
And because Democrats have leaned so heavily into security-focused solutions to and rhetoric about the border problem, that means that only two groups are really making a positive case for immigration—advocacy groups and economists, most of whom believe that immigration is one of the few factors that continues to make the U.S. economy more dynamic and resilient than those of its European counterparts.
But this message isn't reaching people, for the very simple reason that leading politicians in the Democratic Party are no longer saying it out loud. Harris could make that case, but she has made a strategic decision not to do it. She could talk about how serving as a refuge for people fleeing tyrannical regimes like Venezuela's is part of our DNA as a country. But she won't do it, which leaves her and the Democratic Party in the awkward position of presiding over a wildly unpopular policy and yet simultaneously having no appetite to justify it.
That's a lose-lose political proposition for Democrats, who need to think more carefully about how they will implement their immigration policies in practice as well as how they can package them and sell them to the American people. And that means trying to shape public opinion rather than just responding to what they think it is.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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