How Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration

Part one in a series examining at how the party got derailed on key issues.

There are few issues that seem to have caught Democrats more flat-footed—or left them more out of step with the American mainstream—than immigration. In the 2024 election, voters cited it as the second-most-important issue facing the country behind only the economy, and those who said it was the top issue broke overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Post-election polling has confirmed that immigration was a primary driver of his return to power, as voters lost confidence in Democrats to handle it.

But these shifts against the party didn’t just happen overnight. Rather, it has been decades in the making.

Act 1: The Sweet Spot (from Bill to Barack)

Listening to Democrats in the pre-Trump era talk about immigration might cause some whiplash in young people today. In 1996, as Bill Clinton sought re-election, he made clear that cracking down on illegal immigration was among his top priorities. He had raised the subject in his State of the Union address the previous year and worked with congressional Republicans to pass a bill addressing the problem.

The Democrats’ platform that year also reaffirmed their commitment to securing the southern border, even as they maintained a pro-legal-immigration ethos: “Democrats remember that we are a nation of immigrants. [...] We welcome legal immigrants to America.” However, “Today's Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it.”

A little over a decade later, as Barack Obama ran for his first term, he continued to straddle this line. During the 2008 presidential primary, he criticized George W. Bush for failing to control the tide of illegal immigration and noted that Americans’ concerns about this problem were understandable because “they’re continuing to see their own economic situation slip away.” He called for a “comprehensive” solution that included robust border security, punishments for employers that hired undocumented workers, steps to help these immigrants better assimilate (including learning English), and penalties for them including moving to the back of the line for legal citizenship.

Obama’s tougher stances, including his commitment to expelling people in the country illegally, led progressive critics to bestow a somewhat unflattering moniker on him: “deporter-in-chief.” Under his presidency, deportations hit a record high. But he also supported some reforms that were less punitive, including developing a path to citizenship for people who were already living here. In addition to being a staunch supporter of the DREAM Act, he pursued a comprehensive reform proposal in his second term that aimed to strengthen border security, crack down on employers that hired undocumented workers, create a path for those in the country illegally to earn their citizenship, and streamline the legal immigration process. Polls showed that the public broadly embraced this approach.¹

In essence, while Obama acknowledged the humanity and dignity of those who came to the country illegally, he also stressed the importance—practical and political—of enforcing laws and securing the border. He believed this would allow America to be “a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.”

But during his presidency, there was a notable shift in how his party thought about immigration. As the Democratic base was losing culturally moderate working-class voters, it had been gaining college-educated professionals who lived in big, diverse cities and likely came into more frequent contact with people from other countries. And this new base had more liberal attitudes about migration and the free flow of people and goods more generally.

One analysis found that around 2010, Democratic voters started moving left on several immigration-related matters, including souring on the idea of a border wall, perceiving immigrants as less of an economic threat, and believing that immigrants strengthen the United States. Though many Americans might have broadly agreed with those views, this obscured a bigger shift underway: Democrats were beginning to think of immigration less in terms of borders and national sovereignty (and even economics) and instead with a greater focus on the humanity of those destined for the U.S.

The party not only saw its increasingly liberal attitudes on immigration as morally good but also as good politics. Coming out of Obama’s re-election in 2012, everyone—including even Republicans—believed that his strong levels of support among Hispanic and Asian voters meant that Democrats were poised to be the electorally dominant party of the future. These views were perpetuated by many of the immigration-advocacy nonprofits around the party, which convinced Democratic leaders they would keep winning if they continued moving left on these issues.

Act 2: The Fall (from Hillary to Joe & Kamala)

Before long, the “Obama way” on immigration was a distant memory. After his second-term reform efforts failed, some activists had become more extreme and less compromising, demanding Democrats take more sweeping and unilateral actions to achieve their desired political goals. This included pressuring some of the party’s more moderate (and electorally vulnerable) members to voice stronger stances and creating litmus tests around views like abolishing ICE—an idea that a majority of Democrats’ own voters even disagreed with. Immigrant advocacy groups were also adopting ever-more controversial positions and calling on Democrats to join them.

At the same time, Donald Trump was becoming a growing force in American life and politics, and his pugilistic—and often ugly—rhetoric toward Hispanics undoubtedly helped polarize Democrats even further leftward on issues related to immigration. By 2016, they had almost entirely shed their own tough rhetoric. The party’s platform barely made any mention of deterring illegal immigration except to say they supported “reasonable limits” and that “people should come to the United States with visas and not through smugglers.”

Democrats’ new standard-bearer at the time, Hillary Clinton, made a high-profile break from Obama by pledging not to deport anyone here illegally except for violent criminals and terrorists. Trying to draw a sharp contrast with Trump (and likely also placate activists), Clinton said she would make a path to citizenship a priority in her first 100 days and also use executive power to prevent deportations if need be.

Of course, Trump went on to win the 2016 election, but many of his first-term policies—especially those surrounding family separations—were highly controversial and unpopular. With both activists and Trump pushing policies that most American overwhelmingly disagreed with, Democrats might have taken this moment to carve out space in between. Heading into the 2020 presidential election, the ground was fertile for Obama-like reforms. A July 2020 Gallup poll found that for the first time on record (since at least 1965, when LBJ signed the Immigration and Nationality Act), more Americans wanted higher levels of immigration than wanted lower levels.

But rather than leaning into Obama’s vision, many Democrats began to demonstrate support for the ideas of the activist groups. In the party’s 2020 presidential primary, several candidates, including Kamala Harris, worked to outflank one another on immigration issues, with many saying they would go so far as to decriminalize border crossings, generating fodder for Republicans to attack them for favoring an “open borders” policy.² Even Joe Biden, whose more moderate tendencies during the campaign helped him eventually secure the party’s nomination, answered in the affirmative when candidates were asked whether their health insurance plans would offer federally funded coverage for people living in the country illegally.

Democrats’ 2020 platform also embodied this leftward tack on immigration. It began by criticizing Trump’s policies, including banning travel for people from roughly a dozen countries (many of which were majority-Muslim) and separating families at the border, and admonishing America that “we can do better.” However, in the nearly 2,000 words the document committed to this topic, there was not a single expression of concern about illegal immigration or border security, except to say that Democrats would “end the prosecution of asylum seekers,” fight “systemic and structural racism” in the immigration system, and oppose building a wall. The lone paragraph dedicated to enforcement spoke of making it more “humane” and “consistent with our values and international humanitarian obligations.” They also said, perhaps somewhat fatefully, that “detention should be a last resort, not the default.”

After Biden became president, one of his first acts was to freeze all deportations and rescind Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum-seekers attempting to cross the southern border to wait in Mexico until they secured a court hearing in America. These actions were widely panned as contributing to the subsequently record-high levels of illegal border crossings that occurred under his presidency.

It wasn’t until Biden had been in office for three years—and had lost the public’s trust to handle these issues—that he and Democrats attempted to take more drastic measures. Biden used his executive powers to stem the flow of migration and make it easier to expel those here illegally. Congressional Democrats worked with Republicans to pass a bill aimed at cracking down on the southern border. However, heading into an election year, the GOP, led by Trump, derailed the bill to help keep immigration a campaign issue and deny the Democrats a pre-election victory.³

The bill’s defeat gave Democrats an opening on the issue—Harris regularly cited it on the campaign trail to deflect criticisms about the administration’s own struggles—but it turned out to be too little, too late. Polling showed that voters blamed Biden for the bill’s demise as much as they did the two parties in Congress, while Trump received the least amount of blame of anyone.

This episode embodied the broader concerns people had about the Democrats: they didn’t take the problem seriously until it looked like it might be a political liability for them. Moreover, their clear leftward drift on immigration issues and lack of willingness to take more proactive measures to secure the southern border left the party vulnerable at a time when majorities of Americans were becoming more skeptical of immigration and looking to curb it.

Perhaps an indictment of Biden’s actions (or lack thereof): the same July 2020 Gallup poll that found growing support for more immigration toward the end of Trump’s time in office showed a complete reversal during Biden’s presidency. When he took office in 2021, 33 percent of Americans supported higher levels of immigration versus 31 percent who wanted lower levels. But by the next year, those numbers were 27 and 38, respectively. As of 2024, fully 55 percent supported decreasing immigration levels—a more than two-decade high—compared to just 16 percent who wanted to increase them. The latter included a meager 26 percent of Democrats, which was down from 40 percent in 2023.

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If that weren’t damning enough evidence of how the Democrats lost their way on the immigration issue, the results of the 2024 election made it eminently clear that it had helped power Trump back to the Oval Office. One-in-five voters (21 percent) identified it as the top issue facing the country, and they broke overwhelmingly for Trump over Harris, 88–10. Post-election polling reinforced just how detrimental the issue had been for Democrats:

• A November 2024 Blueprint survey gauged 25 possible reasons why voters had chosen not to support Harris. Among the top 2–3 issues cited across all major demographic groups—all swing voters, swing voters who backed Trump, black voters, and even Hispanics—was the belief that “too many immigrants illegally crossed the border during the Biden-Harris administration.”

• A January New York Times poll found that Americans were highly receptive to policies that cracked down on immigration levels. This included support for deporting people who crossed the southern border illegally over the past four years (66 percent); deporting all immigrants who are here illegally and have a criminal record (88 percent); and deporting all immigrants who are here illegally, period (55 percent). Even large shares of Democrats supported deporting those that had committed crimes (83 percent) and expelling those who had illegally crossed over during the past four years (44 percent).

• A February Times poll showed that tackling illegal immigration was a top priority for Americans, and while they believed Republicans shared their concerns, they didn’t think Democrats did.

Importantly, as we at The Liberal Patriot have covered extensively, Trump’s victory was powered by immense gains with Hispanic voters, with whom he earned historic levels of support last year. Though this has perplexed some on the left, polling has routinely shown that many Hispanic Americans often hold the same views as everyone else on immigration, including hostile attitudes about illegal border crossings—a lesson Democrats seemed to have learned too late.

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Democrats’ problems pretty clearly stem from an overcorrection to Trump’s first term, even though some of his policies were not very popular at the time. In response to both Trump and the activist groups, the party could have set out to cultivate a more sensible vision, one that embraced America’s identity as a nation of immigrants but that also understood the wisdom of a nation being able to control its borders. Instead, many of their leaders adopted the views of the activists and the highly progressive staffers who ran immigration-advocacy organizations—views that turned out not to be very representative of the very communities those groups purported to speak on behalf of.

In 2023, The Liberal Patriot commissioned a survey with YouGov to gauge what type of immigration policy Americans actually support. We tested three messages to gauge support for lenient, moderate, or strict policies and found that the overwhelming majority of Americans preferred an Obama-like approach, promoting more “legal and managed immigration paths” while also calling for increased border security. Majorities or pluralities of every single demographic group backed this option, with the exception of liberals. They preferred the most lenient option, which only a quarter of Americans supported: “People around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country.”

So, it’s time for the Democrats to reset on immigration issues. They must understand that this isn’t just about concerns over economic competition; Americans fear a loss of a national identity in the face of unrestricted immigration. The party doesn’t need to completely abandon its more humanitarian impulses or belief that immigrants help make America stronger. It is still important to have a party that can articulate and champion a vision of immigration that embraces its many positive aspects. As 2024 U.S. House candidate John Avlon framed it to our own Ruy Teixeira last year: “We need more legal immigration and less illegal immigration.”

But the party must also acknowledge that its recent leftward movement on these issues has become a vulnerability, which was made clear in last year’s election. They’ve shown early signs under Trump that they understand this, but they still have a long way to go to win back the public’s trust.

1. Republican House Speaker John Boehner eventually derailed this plan.

2. This came back to bite Harris in 2024.

3. Notably, most immigrant-rights groups also opposed the measure.