Josh Barro (N.Y. Times), Democrats Blew It on Immigration:

Since the spring, the shine has come off President Trump’s handling of immigration. And yet there has been no apparent surge in voters’ desire to put immigration policy back in the hands of Democrats.

Frankly, Democrats have not earned voters’ trust on immigration — and I say this as a Democrat.

The most recent Democratic administration presided over an enormous surge in migration, with the unauthorized immigrant population exploding to 14 million in 2023 from 10.5 million in 2021 and likely millions more by the time Joe Biden left office, according to the Pew Research Center.

For too long, Mr. Biden and his team asserted they couldn’t stop the surge without new legislation. That proved false: In 2024, having failed to get an immigration bill through Congress, Mr. Biden finally took executive actions to curb abuse of the asylum system and slow the flow of migrants across the southern border. When Mr. Trump took office, illegal border crossings slowed to a trickle. In other words, the problem had been fixable all along; Mr. Biden simply did not fix it until much too late.

As a result, the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States today is considerably different from what it was before Mr. Biden’s presidency. In 2021, over 80 percent of unauthorized immigrants had been living here for at least five years. Now there are millions more recent arrivals without similarly deep links to American communities. Admitting all these new migrants was never an agreed-upon public policy — no voters endorsed this, no law passed by Congress contemplated it and to the extent the migrants are seeking asylum, their legal claims are too often bogus.

But it happened, and Democrats need to explain to voters why they should not expect it to happen again if they regain power. They also need a story about what happens with the millions of people who came here recently, even though they weren’t supposed to.

The longstanding preferred Democratic framework has been comprehensive immigration reform. The idea is that you secure the border, set an intentional and thoughtful immigration policy about who to admit going forward, and give some sort of amnesty to most of the unauthorized immigrants who are already here. Twenty years of legislative efforts to enact this framework failed, even when there was substantial Republican support for it, which is no longer the case. And that was before the composition of the unauthorized immigrant population changed so drastically.

Center-left commentators like Matthew Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas have been proposing policy ideas that aim to make Democrats’ plans for immigration more appealing to the public. These include refocusing immigration toward higher-skilled migrants, allowing more guest workers on nonimmigrant visas to address inflation-producing labor shortages in industries like hospitality, adding requirements related to assimilation and English-language learning, and even taxing immigrants at higher rates than native-born Americans.

The Center for American Progress has a smart set of proposals to prevent a recurrence of the abuses of the asylum system that prevailed during the Biden administration. The institution’s Neera Tanden and Debu Gandhi propose to prohibit almost all asylum claims from migrants who crossed the southern border illegally, while those who make claims at the border would be held in custody instead of being allowed into the country on a parole basis. Their claims would be adjudicated within 30 days, with rapid removal for those whose claims are rejected. The proposal would also raise the standard of proof for asylum claims and maintain a list of democratic countries whose citizens are presumptively ineligible for asylum.

These sorts of reforms to prevent abuse are necessary to maintain the long-term political viability of the right to claim asylum — though Democrats should also be mindful that the total number of migrants matters, and further restriction could be necessary if too many migrants try to seek asylum under the new system.

The idea is to emphasize that immigration policy must be designed principally for the benefit of American citizens, who stand to gain from the economic and cultural contributions of immigrants so long as immigration is managed appropriately.

This is a good project — but it won’t work without a robust and credible commitment to enforcement, including interior enforcement. That’s because you can make whatever rules you want about who is supposed to immigrate and how, but if you continue to allow millions of people to come live in the United States in contravention of those rules, the immigration situation on the ground will not match what is written in policy.

The mental block that Democrats have here relates to an instinct about deportations: a feeling that it’s presumptively improper to remove an unauthorized immigrant who has settled in our country if that migrant hasn’t committed a crime unrelated to immigration. These people have been here a long time, the idea goes. They’re not causing trouble.

But if we build a system where people very often get to stay here simply because they made it in — the system that prevailed during most of Mr. Biden’s term — then we don’t really have an immigration policy, and voters won’t have any reason to believe us when we say our new policy will produce different results about who comes here.

Liberals also note, accurately, that there are negative economic consequences to a stepped-up program of interior enforcement that doesn’t focus narrowly on criminals. Unauthorized immigrants play an important role in our work force, especially in agriculture and construction. More deportations will make it more expensive to grow fruits and vegetables and reduce the number of housing units we can add. (On the other hand, it will also reduce demand for housing.) But these near-term economic costs need to be weighed against the way that stepped-up interior enforcement makes any future immigration policy more credible and more effective by sending migrants the message that they need a valid visa to stay in the United States.

The need to make a credible enforcement threat does not require Democrats to endorse specific enforcement practices of the Trump administration, like having ICE officers cover their faces during raids or pursue a goal of 3,000 detentions per day. Democrats are right to highlight and criticize the way that indiscriminate raids can sweep up U.S. citizens and to call for a more effectively targeted approach. But that more targeted approach still needs to contemplate that being in the country without authorization is reason enough to deport someone.

There is a political risk for Democrats in Mr. Trump’s softer poll numbers on immigration. Earlier in the year, when his immigration stances were clearly a political asset, Democrats looked for ways to moderate their image on immigration and show a willingness to get tough on enforcement; for example, many moderate Democrats in Congress voted for the Laken Riley Act (which directs the authorities to detain and deport immigrants who are charged or admit to — but are not yet convicted of — specific crimes, if they are in the country illegally).

But now that more Americans disapprove than approve of his approach to immigration, Democrats have often reverted toward centering the concerns of noncitizens — which is to say, nonvoters. The fact that voters increasingly see Mr. Trump’s approach to immigration as too harsh is not enough to turn the issue into an asset for Democrats. A late-July poll for The Wall Street Journalshows the problem for Democrats. It found respondents narrowly disapproving of the president’s handling of the issue — and yet it also showed that voters would not rather see immigration policy in the hands of Democrats. Only 28 percent said that they trust Democrats in Congress to handle immigration policy more than they trust Republicans, while 45 percent say they trust Republicans more than Democrats (the split was slightly wider on the question of illegal immigration).

If we force voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s overly harsh approach and our overly permissive one, we will continue to lose on the issue.

Most voters say immigration provides net benefits to the country, but they also want rules to be enforced. We need to echo both of those sentiments.