Truce on immigration

How long can Democrats’ truce on immigration last?

Democrats’ moderate pivot on immigration isn’t stressing progressives — yet.

by Christian Paz

Since Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, a careful truce has settled in place between centrist, liberal, and progressive Democrats.

No loud or public spats among elected Democrats or Democratic voters over Harris’s candidacy or campaign have made headlines, save for some premature skepticism by online progressives over Harris’s vice presidential selection; Harris has nearly universal favorability among her fellow partisans. The Democratic National Convention (DNC) did not succumb to the kind of chaos and division that was anxiously predicted when Biden was the presumptive nominee; in fact, Democrats are showing heretofore unseen levels of being in array.

Perhaps no issue is more emblematic of this party unity than the thorny topic Democrats have long hoped to avoid: the politics of immigration and the southern border. At the DNC last week, Harris and the speakers who addressed the nation made clear that the Democratic Party of 2024 is moving right, toward the political center, when it comes to how they talk about immigrants, migration, and security at the southern border. While humanitarianism, openness to migrants, and rolling back restrictive Trump-era policies used to be the Democratic focus, Democrats are locked in on stopping the flow of migrants, limiting asylum, and funding more Border Patrol operations.

That’s partially out of a need to appeal to moderate, swing, and independent voters in the various battleground states that will decide the 2024 election. But it’s also a recognition of the very different national environment Democrats are operating in. American adults of all stripes have turned much more negative in their thinking about immigration and border security. The days of talking up a humanitarian approach to immigration, of expanding opportunities for asylum seekers, and racing to outflank other Democrats from the left, are gone.

Presidential candidates pivoting to the middle on key issues ahead of a general election is unsurprising. What is surprising is that, on immigration, the Harris campaign is doing so without facing much opposition from liberal politicians, progressive activists, or even longtime pro-immigrant advocacy groups. Progressive activists and advocates say that truce will likely hold — at least until after Trump is defeated and a more receptive President Kamala Harris is elected.

“Yes, there is a palpable and deep worry about how much Democrats are willing to compromise on immigration,” Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of the pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice, told me. “We’re in a very different political moment than years past. We’re going to have to make hard choices. But ultimately as advocates, we need to keep our eye on the ball and make sure we win as much as possible.”

The Democratic Party’s shift on immigration was on full display at the DNC

Harris previewed her new vision, and the Democratic Party’s new direction, during her acceptance speech last Thursday when she promised to “bring back the bipartisan border security bill that [Donald Trump] killed.”

That bill, negotiated earlier this year by Biden and a bipartisan group of senators, would have put $20 billion toward new security measures at the southern border and imposed new, more restrictionist policies toward asylum seekers and other migrants. The bill failed once Trump began to voice his opposition, on the grounds that it could defuse an issue that, left unaddressed, could benefit him in the election, but its mere existence was remarkable for the absence of a pathway to citizenship or other pro-immigrant priorities Democrats have traditionally advocated for.

Harris’s embrace of the bill is a major signal for how her administration would deal with immigration: She’s just fine with border policy that is tough on migrants and strengthens border security without offering much to pro-immigrant groups.

But her support for the measure has received scrutiny from Trump’s campaign and some in the press, who note that the bill included hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for southern border wall construction, something Harris previously criticized and called “un-American.” The VP’s campaign argues that the money was just a continuation of spending authorized during the Trump presidency, updated with new guidelines on where it can be spent.

And she’s not making a full break with Democratic tradition.

“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” she also said to thunderous applause in her DNC speech. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship — and secure our border.”

Pro-immigrant activists described the position Harris articulated in her DNC speech to me as a “both/and” approach to immigration: reforming a broken system for processing asylum claims, providing a pathway to citizenship for those undocumented immigrants living in the US for a substantial period of time, and restoring order at the southern border without demonizing immigrants.

It’s a palatable balance for now but one that may not be sustainable in the longer term given some of the harder-line stances, including embracing the bipartisan border bill, that Harris, Biden, and the rest of the party have taken. The 2024 DNC platform, for example, acknowledges that part of the reason immigration reform is critical is to speed up the deportation of economic migrants and those deemed not to have a legal reason for immigrating. It also calls for Congress to “strengthen requirements for valid asylum claims” and boosts Biden’s executive actions to limit asylum when border crossings reach an untenable level.

Why the left is holding back its ire for now

For some progressives, the party’s embrace of the border bill is worrying because the negotiation process that produced it in early 2024 marked a significant departure from the way Democrats have traditionally dealt with immigration and border politics.

For most of the last decade and a half, Democratic politicians would generally only consider enforcement and border security funding when paired with pro-immigrant reforms or policies. Biden’s deal with Senate Republicans didn’t address the human side of the immigration debate and instead dealt only with border security.

“Some of the lessons learned in the past are that sometimes Democrats give in so much to enforcement, and it’s not congruent with what is obtained on the legalization side,” Cárdenas said. “We are concerned about the often-cited Senate bill — we’re concerned that that might be the starting point of any legislation.”

But elections are binary choices, Cárdenas and other advocates point out. Right now, Harris is triangulating a position that responds to real-world factors: the images of people crossing the border, the overwhelmed border communities dealing with constant flux, Republicans politicizing the issue and demonizing migrants, and public opinion turning away from the pro-immigrant movement.

The RNC and DNC offered “a very clear difference on how both parties and candidates are speaking about immigration,” Yadira Sanchez, the executive director of the progressive organizing group Poder Latinx, told me. One convention was a rally in favor of mass deportations and used “the border and immigrants themselves as scapegoats to spread hate and xenophobia around the border crisis,” Sanchez said. The other convention presented their candidate as the daughter of immigrants, who honors the country’s immigrant past while wanting to crack down on transnational gangs.

Sanchez also pointed out the Democrats’ pivot to the center in speeches and the party platform, but she noted that the alternative to Democratic governance would be untenable for immigration advocates and immigrants alike.

“Yes, we didn’t get everything that we wanted as an immigrant rights organization. We want to have fair, equitable, dignified, humane asylum processes for folks that are seeking that refuge, that are experiencing that turmoil in their countries, that are looking for safety. The border talk was something where we saw the shift, but I wouldn’t say it completely complicates our advocacy work because our advocacy work goes beyond any candidate, in the sense that we will hold them accountable,” Sanchez said.

The overriding sense I picked up from these activists is that they and their constituencies understand the trade-off in front of them: To accomplish their policy goals, they need a Democratic president and Democratic congressional majorities, so they’ll remain part of the big-tent coalition that Harris and the party are trying to build in order to win in November. It mirrors what moderate candidates like New York Rep. Tom Suozzi did to respond to suburban concerns about immigration, and what even some progressive candidates, like Michelle Vallejo in the Rio Grande Valley, are doing now: recognizing that electoral victories are the top priority and pivoting to tougher talk on the border in the hope of winning congressional majorities.

That doesn’t mean progressives don’t have some strong disagreements with the approach Harris and the Democratic Party are currently taking, but they’ll likely avoid direct confrontation.

“Right now, the assignment is very clear,” Cárdenas said. “We have to make sure that Trump is defeated, and in February 2025, we can have a conversation about what kind of reforms we need to make.”