Do Border

This story was originally published by n+1.

“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.” These were the words not of Donald Trump, but of President Joe Biden, speaking in January in support of a bipartisan immigration deal then being negotiated in the Senate. As often happens, Biden’s impolitic pronouncement captured the larger dynamics at play. The Democrats are defending themselves against Republican attacks on immigration by going on offense  —  but for the most part, they’re doing so on Republican terms.

The legislation Biden was promoting, the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, included a host of border security measures. It would have significantly expanded ICE capacity for detention, made it harder to win asylum and effectively blocked asylum seekers who had crossed the border irregularly (that is, without authorization between ports of entry)  —  all Republican priorities. The bill would have also sent military aid to Ukraine (as Democrats and the remaining national security traditionalists on the Republican side wanted) and to Israel (as everyone but a depressingly small number of left-wingers in Congress wanted) and sent humanitarian aid to several regions, including Gaza (as Democrats looking to differentiate themselves from Republicans wanted). For migrants, the bill promised increases in the allocation of employment- and family-based visas, and protections for certain youth green-card applicants and Afghan evacuees  —  good things, but not nearly enough to make the rest palatable.

This border security crackdown was designed to either placate or set a trap for MAGA border restrictionists, whose obsessions inspired much of the bill’s content. Biden’s grand overtures did not win over Donald Trump, who urged Republicans in Congress to vote it down, thereby torpedoing its chances. Trump has no incentive to let Democrats take credit for the anti-immigrant agenda that  —  as he emphasized with sick repetition in the first 2024 presidential debate  —  he plans to ride back into the White House. For Trump’s allies in Congress, the choice to oppose a bill tailored to their wishes was no contradiction; it was pure political logic. Meanwhile, Democrats sincerely believe that Republicans’ opportunistic obstruction of a serious border-security package is one of their tickets to victory in November. “We had an epiphany,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer told the New York Times in February. “Do border. If we did it right and were tough about it, it’s a win for us.”

Months after the bill’s failure, Democrats continue to make immigration central to their 2024 campaign. In June, with an eye toward the November election, the Biden administration announced two executive actions on immigration, the first gutting basic asylum protections at the border and the second providing a potential path to citizenship. Between the aborted Senate deal and Biden’s executive actions, a reasonably complete picture of the Democrats’ approach to immigration has emerged. The juxtaposition of the two executive actions  —  a massive border security “win” to appeal to the right, a substantive but partial action on legalization to appease progressives —  is the latest in a classic pattern: given the choice to pander to reactionaries or shore up the party’s left wing, Democrats tend to prioritize the former. The result is a dangerous asymmetric polarization: Republicans radicalize on immigration, while Democratic elites chase after them. The “normal” position on immigration moves ever rightward.

This is the state of American immigration politics: a destructive competition over who can do border better. But, as the unholy linking of foreign military aid to domestic border defense attests, this gross spectacle distracts from a far wider web of issues. Who has a right to migrate to the United States and make their home here? Who gets to drop U.S.-made bombs, and who is expected to silently suffer them? Because a Democratic president is punishing refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border while also sponsoring the genocide of refugees in Gaza, these are not unrelated questions.

The Biden administration’s attempted agreement on immigration was, in part, a gambit to win support for Ukraine from Republicans on terms they might find congenial; yet as Biden’s executive action curbing asylum rights made clear, cracking down on immigration is an important Democratic objective in its own right. Until recently, unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border were at record highs, as masses of people were pushed from their homes and toward the United States by overlapping political, economic and ecological crises  —  crises whose causes are complex but often substantially American in origin. Many migrants quickly move on to cities farther from the border in search of family and social networks. Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida have exacerbated this trend, paying to bus or fly migrants north to Democratic cities in a elaborate stunts to expose liberal hypocrisy. The Democratic response has frequently been to turn MAGA-inflected border delirium into bipartisan common sense. New York Mayor Eric Adams  —  like Biden, an expert at squandering public goodwill  —  warned that migration “will destroy New York City.” His police commissioner Edward A. Caban declared, with no basis in reality, that “a migrant crime wave is washing over our city.”

Announced on June 4, the first of Biden’s two executive actions on immigration all but halts new asylum requests for those entering irregularly at the U.S.-Mexico border if “there has been a seven-consecutive-calendar-day average of 2,500 encounters or more” between migrants and U.S. border personnel  —  as there had been throughout Biden’s presidency. The action also makes it harder for migrants to win other forms of protection against deportation once that threshold is reached. Drawn from the foiled bipartisan Senate deal, the plan also recalls an order promulgated by Trump in 2018 (ultimately halted by the courts) that preemptively denied asylum to migrants crossing irregularly. And like Trump’s most draconian border crackdowns, Biden’s action looks for authority to Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the president to “impose  . . . any restrictions” on or “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens.” Given the current flow of migrants to the border, the 2,500-encounter threshold is likely to effectively shut down the ordinary asylum system for the foreseeable future. Even though rates of border crossings have dropped sharply since Biden’s action  —  likely already below the 2,500 daily-encounter trigger  —  they remain far above the 1,500-encounter threshold required to end the asylum suspension.

Not that long ago, Democrats were speaking the language of migrant rights. Negatively polarized against Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” and the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border, the party appeared, in the Trump years, to coalesce around a more liberal immigration politics after years of reflexive rightward movement. At the time, this could seem like a hopeful sign that Trump’s extremism had permanently broken the bipartisan anti-migrant consensus that first consolidated under President Bill Clinton. I for one argued that this might be the case. But this humanitarian spirit would prove an aberration: the party’s nativist impulses were simply too entrenched, whatever the pro-migrant position of the Democratic base.

Nativism in American politics long predates the Clinton administration. But it did not begin as a blanket rejection of immigration. Nativism’s historical precursor was instead a racially selective pro-migration program: the project of settler colonialism demanded that certain types of European migrants “advanc[e] compactly as we multiply” across the North American continent, as Thomas Jefferson wrote. Enslaved Africans, of course, were transported by force. It was the sort of demographic regime of ethnic cleansing and replacement that governs other settler-colonial projects  —  including the one still unfolding today in Palestine.

As Indigenous people were killed, dispossessed and displaced across an expanding United States, settlers came to identify as natives  —  and, in turn, as nativists. Calls inevitably arose to exclude would-be immigrants who didn’t fit the white-settler racial ideal. Since the early 19th century, the racist demand for immigration exclusion  —  anti-Irish, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-Jewish, anti-Italian, anti-Filipino, anti-Mexican, anti-Latino, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim  —  has been a key motif in American history.

Today’s nativist politics owes much to that lineage, but also to more contemporary inputs: overpopulation hysteria beginning in the late 1960s; the eruption of anxiety about border security since the 1970s, when a stagflated economy spawned the initial neoliberal counterrevolution; and, in the 1990s, the hardening of vehement anti–Mexican migrant sentiment into a bedrock of Republican and conservative-movement politics, which promptly began pulling Democrats to the right.

Starting in the early 2000s, against this rising tide, responsible liberals and conservatives sought a solution to please all sides: “comprehensive immigration reform.” Time and again, Democrats and self-styled Republican moderates proposed increased border security as a part of larger packages that would also legalize undocumented immigrants and supply American business with guest workers. These negotiations became major priorities for presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who each spent significant political capital trying to pass legislation. Yet they failed every time, stymied by conservative nativists who, riled by Fox News and talk radio, insisted on border security alone, with no accommodation for undocumented immigrants.

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In response, Democrats and Republicans serially capitulated to the right, strengthening enforcement with no pro-immigrant measures attached  —  all in order to prove their “seriousness.” Since 1992, the Border Patrol ranks have grown by nearly 400 percent, from 4,139 agents to roughly 20,000 today. The number of miles of border fencing  —  Trump’s “wall” in all but name  —  grew from just 14 in 1990 to 654 at the time of Trump’s inauguration. Democrats have likewise expanded and accelerated the federal deportation pipeline by linking it to the gargantuan U.S. criminal justice system. Both Clinton’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Secure Communities program, piloted under Bush but rolled out under Obama, made cops, courts, prisons and jails a powerful force in immigration incarceration and deportation. All in exchange for nothing.

When these escalating crackdowns on so-called “illegal immigration” inevitably fail to achieve their goals, they only reaffirm the nativist claim that the border is “insecure,” further raising the bar for tougher enforcement. In his 2000 book “Border Games,” Peter Andreas identified this perverse dynamic at the border itself: the wave of crackdowns in the 1990s on long-standing unauthorized crossing points created spectacles of an “illegal” invasion, which inflamed rather than tamed nativist sentiment, prompting ever more border militarization. Trump’s wall obsession was a logical outcome. The determination to “secure the border,” after all, is as quixotic a mission as “eliminating Hamas.” Both are maximalist, racist political fantasies that rationalize any and every cruelty enacted in the process. The border is too long, the terrain too complex, and the number of people desperate to enter the U.S. too consistently great for border security to be anything but a metaphor. But it is a metaphor that both parties treat as a plausible aspiration.

The dysfunctional U.S. asylum system is a crucial context for today’s anti-immigrant politics; it is also the scene of another cycle of backlash and escalation. Interminable backlogs push people away from official points of entry and toward dangerous desert crossings. The law denies migrants work permits for at least six months from the time they apply for asylum, leaving them destitute; it then takes years to receive an asylum hearing in understaffed immigration courts. Meanwhile, Republican governors send buses of migrants to cities where they may not know anyone, and the federal government does nothing to coordinate their settlement for fear of being implicated in the problem.

Domestic immigration politics has always depended on the conflicts and accords of American empire. In the early 20th century, the United States opted not to formally restrict Japanese immigration  —  as they had Chinese immigration in 1882  —  for fear of provoking a rising imperial power. (This “gentlemen’s agreement,” in which Japan informally pledged to stop laborers from emigrating, lasted until the 1920s, when their nationals, too, were formally banned.) The Philippines won independence from the United States in 1946 in part because congressional nativists wanted an end to the migration rights Filipinos had enjoyed as U.S. nationals. The 1965 repeal of explicitly racist immigration quotas in place since the 1920s was spurred in part by cold war rivalry. After the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, more than 1 million refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia came to the United States as Southeast Asia was wrecked by imperial violence. Reagan welcomed refugees fleeing Khomeini’s Iran and socialist Nicaragua and persecuted those fleeing U.S.-backed right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. Most recently, the United States took in more than 500,000 Ukrainians in two years. (In contrast to the uproar over Latin American migrants, no one really noticed.)

That colonial and neocolonial subjects of Western liberal empires often end up as citizens in the metropole is an ironic contradiction. (Thus, for example, the Biden campaign’s incomprehension that there are enough Arabs in Michigan furious enough about Gaza that they might have cost him the election.) Everywhere this postcolonial boomerang leads to fantastic flights of projection: the specter of a Mexican “Reconquista” of the American Southwest or a France menaced by a “great replacement” at the hands of Muslims. It’s revealing that anti-migrant rhetoric so often portrays migrants as colonialists, which of course has everything backward: Trump’s infamous call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on” was a calculated way to mystify what the hell was actually going on. In the United States today, nativism is inseparable from this deeper dread over decaying imperial power and white Western decline. Trump, as usual, makes this tendency explicit, constantly invoking both the United States’ place in the world and its demographic makeup. “On January 6, we had a great border, nobody coming through, very few,” Trump said during the presidential debate. “On January 6, we were respected all over the world. All over the world, we were respected. And then he comes in and we’re now laughed at.”

This perceived threat of racial-imperial collapse has also been inflated by the very real economic dislocations of globalization. NAFTA stoked fears of what Ross Perot warned would be the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs siphoned into Mexico. It was during this intense debate over free trade that resurgent nativist organizing secured passage of California’s radically anti-migrant Proposition 187, which the Republican Gov. Pete Wilson made the centerpiece of his successful 1994 reelection campaign. That same year, the Clinton administration rolled out its marquee border-militarization campaigns, Operation Hold the Line in El Paso and Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego. The border became the site of mass anxieties over the mobility of both people and capital; the bipartisan elite did all it could to keep the voting public fixated only on the former.

The Sept. 11 attacks only amplified these trends. To wage the war on terror, the U.S. government built a new national security state, for which border security became a renewed and lavishly funded obsession. In 2004, the newly created U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, part of the likewise novel Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced that “preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons” was its “priority mission”: “We cannot reduce or eliminate illegal entry by potential terrorists without also dramatically reducing illegal migration.” The conflation of border insecurity and terrorism has remained mostly unchallenged throughout the war on terror and its afterlife.

Nevertheless, the Sept. 11 attacks did not at first provoke a rise in xenophobic public opinion. A Pew survey in December 2001 showed that Republican favorability toward Muslim Americans rose from 35 to 64 percent in the months after the attacks. Bush had declared that “Islam is peace” and promoted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in part on liberal paternalistic grounds: it was the United States’ imperial burden to rescue Muslims everywhere suffering under backward regimes. Remarkably, many Americans believed it. Only later would the wars’ collapsing legitimacy trigger a hard turn toward racist exclusion.

Bush’s wars were sold as an unstable compound of emancipatory nation building and merciless patriotic retribution, liberal universalism and vengeful jingoism. The United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq both to promote democracy and to “put a boot in [their] ass,” as Toby Keith sang in 2002. The refusal of Iraqis and Afghans to greet their occupiers as liberators, and the United States’ failure to establish thriving liberal market democracies in those countries, brought Bush’s freedom agenda crashing down to earth. By the mid-2000s, public support for the war on terror had collapsed, while hostility toward Muslims and Mexicans soared. With the rise of a powerful right-wing anti-immigrant movement, the racist revenge fantasies of the war on terror coursed through the body politic more strongly than ever, now untempered by any liberal apologia.

This helps explain why, in his second term, Bush’s call for comprehensive immigration reform was met with a fiery right-wing reaction. The news media was enraptured by the Minutemen border vigilantes, while the House of Representatives approved a draconian anti-immigrant bill that would have criminalized the mere status of being undocumented. The Sensenbrenner bill never passed the Senate, and instead sparked the millions-strong pro-immigrant street protests of 2006, culminating in massive May Day immigrant-worker marches. As comprehensive reform continued to flounder in Congress, a bipartisan coalition handily passed a bill, duly signed by Bush, that led to the construction of hundreds of miles of border fencing; meanwhile, ICE orchestrated giant workplace raids. In an interview years later, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff confirmed that the raids were intended “to establish credibility with respect to enforcement, which would then enable reforms in a more comprehensive way.”

The 2008 financial crisis brought insurgent conservative xenophobia to a fever pitch. The Tea Party, founded amid the Great Recession as a right-wing fiscal-populist movement, soon became overwhelmingly fixated on opposition to “illegal” immigrants. Among their priorities was Arizona’s infamous SB 1070, the “show me your papers” law, championed by Phoenix’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose deputies scoured the city on the hunt for “illegals.” President Obama, who like Bush called for comprehensive immigration reform, bowed to the right by overseeing record numbers of deportations. (He eventually backtracked under relentless activist pressure, led by undocumented youth, who won measures like DACA, a rare major victory for immigrant rights.) Meanwhile, Trump launched his political career with an absurd campaign to prove that Obama himself was an “illegal” of sorts, and hysteria exploded over an imagined epidemic of immigrant crime  —  embodied by Kathryn Steinle, a young white woman shot dead in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant with schizophrenia. Trump referred to Steinle as “beautiful Kate in San Francisco.”

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With unprecedented vulgarity, savvy, and scale, Trump represented not just nativism, but its potent fusion with existing anxieties of imperial decline and lost economic might. “I’ve always said —  shouldn’t be there,” Trump once said of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. “But if we’re going to get out, take the oil.” The same blend of racism and economism inflected his entire agenda: keep the jobs in and the migrants out. He attacked “a leadership class that worships globalism” and profits from deindustrialization, which leaves “millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” Launching his first campaign at Trump Tower, he warned that “Mexico [was] not sending their best” across the border, but instead “rapists” who were “bringing drugs” and “crime.”

In repugnant, reactionary form, these sentiments voice a real, popular critique of American empire. After rampant pillaging of national wealth by the 1 percent and two failed foreign invasions, many Americans have loudly declared themselves the victims of another kind of foreign invasion  —  of immigrants who take jobs at home while globalist CEOs move jobs abroad, all through the same, seemingly porous border. The contradictions of turbocharged capitalist globalization, post–Sept. 11 imperial quagmires, and financial crisis have rallied a critical mass of disaffected voters around the Trumpian vision of a Fortress America governed by an entertaining CEO.

Most media coverage of this year’s Senate bill described it as a border crackdown paired with military aid to Ukraine. Often downplayed was that, alongside $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, the bill would also have provided $14 billion in military aid for Israel. Uncritical support for Israel  —  the bipartisan tentpole of U.S. foreign policy  —  is barely newsworthy, but the spectacle of so many Republicans souring on NATO and even favoring Russia over Ukraine was startling enough to make headlines.

For Democratic leaders, American primacy rests on a set of bedrock alliances  —  with NATO, Ukraine, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and others  —  that contain and counter rival forces led by Russia, China and Iran. Democrats support a liberal order on the premise that investments of capital and military aid are necessary to sustain a multilateral global system that ultimately underwrites American hegemony. For a growing number of Republicans, however, this primacy is the product of raw American power and military might  —  and little else. Republicans under Trump are closer to mercantilist-militarists who will gladly bomb other countries when necessary, but regard globalization, multilateralism and boots-on-the-ground intervention as a waste of resources; their American ideal is enclosed and essentially autarkic. As the forever wars continue to wend their way back home, support our troops turns to back the blue and build the wall.

None of this, however, has diminished Republicans’ support for Israel, since for them, as for most American supporters of Israel, the war on Gaza is itself a form of border security. Israel is less a regional ally than an extension of the United States, part of the minority of nations with a capacity for self-governance, against the many others that must be governed. “The civilized world,” Benjamin Netanyahu told Americans in October 2023, must unite to “fight the barbarians.” Those with the power to exclude the racially undesirable are the same people who can legitimately use violence; the legitimate targets of that violence are also subject to exclusion at the border, whether it lies at Laredo or Erez.

After the border deal fell apart in February, the Senate moved forward with a separate vote on the bill’s foreign and military aid. In a blistering floor speech, the Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., denounced the assault on Gaza, describing Israel’s withholding of food as a “war crime” and its leaders as “war criminals.” He then voted yes, alongside every other member of the Democratic caucus, save for Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch and Jeff Merkley. Pressed by a reporter, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., voiced her opposition to the Israeli military’s threatened invasion of Rafah, by then the most crowded place on Earth  —  yet she too supported the deal and voted for military aid for Israel. “Right now,” she said, “the security package is about getting money to Ukraine.” That Palestinians would suffer and die  —  this was worth the deal, which ultimately came together in April, without any immigration component.

On the ground, however, Biden’s backing of Israel has jeopardized every part of the Democratic agenda. The Democrats have hemorrhaged support from much of their base  —  young, progressive, Black, Arab, Muslim, Latino  —  because they insist on funding and equipping Israel’s genocide, as made clear by the hundreds of thousands of voters marking their ballots “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries. At the debate in June, Biden insisted that “the only thing I’ve denied Israel was 2,000-pound bombs. They don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill a lot of innocent people.” He then continued: “We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them.  . . . We are the biggest producer of support for Israel of anyone in the world.”

Where Biden’s reflexive support for Israel has reinforced the racialized, militarist border logic of modern U.S. foreign policy, his economic agenda did at least begin to break with the neoliberal model that has helped drive nativist resentment. For all the shortcomings of laws like the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s was the first Democratic administration since the neoliberal turn to recognize that free-market fanaticism had critically undermined the material foundation of Democratic political allegiances and identities. The IRA and other policies have channeled federal subsidies to green industries and modestly encouraged unionization, while Biden himself walked a picket line with members of the United Auto Workers, who have led a national upsurge in labor militancy. Democrats finally seemed to recognize the need to wrest the promise of reindustrialization from the nationalist right and defuse nativist reaction.

But it’s clear that Bidenomics is not enough. Social democratic reform in the United States cannot succeed politically without anti-imperialist reform abroad and at the border. Nor can domestic reforms mobilize on a mass scale without stronger mediating institutions  —  namely unions  —  to interpret and promote them. The genocide in Gaza is tearing the Democratic coalition apart even as bipartisan nativism stitches together a broad coalition on the right. For all Biden’s and the Democrats’ hand-wringing over the existential threat posed by Trump, the preservation of American empire has outranked saving the remnants of our democracy. Immigrants and refugees will be the first to pay the price.

Up to the moment Biden finally dropped out of the presidential race, it seemed as though his political ego likewise outranked Democratic political prospects and the terrifying implications of a second Trump presidency. Now the candidate has changed, but on immigration, Democratic strategy so far remains the same. “Donald Trump has been talking a big game about securing our border,” Kamala Harris declaimed at one of her first campaign rallies since becoming the nominee, “but . . . he does not walk it like he talks it. Our administration worked on the most significant border security bill in decades.” For now, a collective sigh of Democratic relief at Biden’s departure still fills Harris’ electoral sails; but the honeymoon will be short if she continues to follow Biden in getting “tough” on the border and slandering student protesters as antisemitic. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign has decided to attack Harris as Biden’s failed “border czar.” Harris must decide whether to respond on Trump’s terms or establish new terms of her own. On immigration as on Gaza, she must choose between conventional pundit wisdom and Democratic public opinion.

If Trump is reelected, his second term will be even more horrific than the first. With Supreme Court justices already doing his bidding, Trump will have no real guardrails. His cadre will be equipped to enact their most reactionary designs, nowhere more so than on immigration policy. Stephen Miller has been busy drawing up plans for actual mass deportations. His nightmarish blueprint can hardly be overstated: rounding up millions of immigrants each year and detaining them in massive, purpose-built prisons in Texas; deputizing cops and National Guard troops from red states to enlarge the deportation force; invoking the Insurrection Act to allow the military to detain migrants; barring pro-Palestine international student activists from the country, expelling tens of thousands of Afghan refugees and once again targeting Muslim-majority countries for travel bans. On the campaign trail, Trump’s rhetoric has grown more nakedly fascistic than ever. Migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; more recently, he has called them “not people, in my opinion,” but “animals.”¹ When a 20-year-old would-be assassin came within inches of killing the former president, Trump had just turned his head toward a giant chart on “illegal” border crossings. A week later at the Republican National Convention, Trump, his ear iconically bandaged, declared, “that was the chart that saved my life . . . one of the greatest charts I’ve ever seen. . . . Without that chart, I would not be here today.”

The U.S. electorate is fractured over immigration, but in an uneven way. While nativist policies are a fixation for Republican voters, pro-migrant politics receives far less attention from the left. This is not a knock on immigrant-rights organizers: The issue is simply not that consequential for most left-leaning Americans. A major national poll in late 2023 found that even Latinos, for whom immigration is often an important concern, tended to rank it behind inflation, jobs and health care. Despite eruptions of protest against the most egregious anti-immigrant politics, the imagined “sleeping giant” of Latino voters who would one day demand immigration reform and punish its enemies never materialized. Unlike many white MAGA supporters, most Latinos have never been single-issue immigration voters.

Democratic leaders have also done little to encourage mass enthusiasm for immigrant rights. Today one hears less romantic rhetoric about the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants” or about the global pull of American universities and fewer blunt discussions of immigrants as cheap and exploitable labor for American industry; that old liberal case for immigration now rings hollow in the ruins of neoliberalism. Yet these arguments still inform the status quo politics of immigration reform. Democratic politicians’ long-standing willingness to exchange more “good immigrants” (expanded legal immigration) for crackdowns on “bad immigrants” (deportations and border enforcement against “illegal” immigrants) was evident in this year’s doomed Senate bill and in Biden’s executive actions.

The commentator Matthew Yglesias is a symptomatic case of today’s liberal confusion on the subject. A veteran blogger who has drifted right since the Bush years, Yglesias considers immigration so critical to a second “American century” that the solution is “One Billion Americans,” the title of his 2020 book. And yet Yglesias proposed limiting mass immigration into the United States to “Canada, Australia, the Anglophone Caribbean, America’s NATO allies, or some other subset of countries that seems popular”  —  whatever it takes to assuage nativists. In February, assessing Biden’s border policy, Yglesias wrote that he had resigned himself to a narrowly “patriotic, interest-based case for immigration” because “most Americans are clannish and nationalistic and don’t care about the humane treatment of people from elsewhere.” A principled stand for immigrant rights or expanded immigration, he argued, was akin to “cut[ting] Social Security benefits and giv[ing] the money to poor people in Africa”: ethically meritorious but politically impossible. Yglesias dispassionately discards liberal arguments for desired liberal policy outcomes and pragmatically adopts a racist form of persuasion in their place.

Yglesias relies on the so-called popularist fetish for current public opinion to justify his position (and to flatter his own, no doubt non-clannish seriousness). But he neglects historical trends that are far more complex than his desultory interpretation suggests. Overall support for restricting legal immigration fell from the peak of the mid-1990s bipartisan nativist consensus through Trump’s final year in office; that year, however, support for increasing legal immigration surpassed support for restriction for the first time on record. While it’s true that under Biden restrictionism is again on the rise, over the past decade the American public has generally possessed a deeper and wider well of pro-migrant sentiment than ever before, as seen in the protests against the Muslim ban and family separation in the early Trump years. Public opinion is neither timeless nor transcendent, but instead historical and contextual. It is not given but made  —  including by political tastemakers like Yglesias, who cite a static, reified “public opinion” as the basis for their own nativism-normalizing punditry. The politics of immigration could be made otherwise. Bernie Sanders’s decisive wins among working-class Latinos in the 2020 Nevada caucus and California primary point toward a social democratic politics that promotes migrant rights not as either an abstract liberal value or a narrow sectional interest, but as a core part of a larger working-class struggle.

Instead, the popularist narrative has increasingly taken hold in the Democratic mainstream. In February, after the Democrat Tom Suozzi beat his Republican opponent in a special election to replace the disgraced Long Island congressman George Santos in the House, the media seized on Suozzi’s border security platform as the key to his success. That Suozzi had previously held the same seat for three terms, that he ran a well-organized and well-funded campaign, that the local Republican Party was fatally weakened by Santos’s shenanigans  —  none of this seemed notable. Instead Democratic leaders and the New York Times eagerly concluded, without evidence, that Suozzi’s anti-migrant politics had won the day.

Promoting the border deal in February, Biden went so far as to ask Trump to join him in some sort of national-unity push to secure the border. “Instead of playing policy with the issue,” Biden said on a visit to Brownsville, Texas, “join me, or I’ll join you, in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill. We can do it together. You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border-security bill this country’s ever seen.” In his State of the Union address, Biden further mimicked Republican rhetoric, using the word illegal to describe a Venezuelan man charged with killing a student in Georgia  —  a case that attracted rabid right-wing attention. (“I shouldn’t have used illegal,” Biden admitted a few days later. “It’s undocumented.”) More recently, in the June debate with Trump, Biden answered a straightforward question on abortion by referencing an American woman who was murdered by an undocumented immigrant. It was a baffling and self-wounding non sequitur  —  and an accidentally perfect reflection of the party’s pathological insecurity about immigrants and immigration.

Biden’s executive action on asylum seekers was described by the New York Times  —  hardly a hostile publication  —  as “the most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any other modern Democrat,” one that “echoes an effort in 2018 by President Donald J. Trump to cut off migration that was blocked in federal court.” Driven by the same wish fulfillment voiced by Schumer and media observers of Suozzi’s victory, Biden’s June 4 action on asylum sought yet again to rob the Republican Party of its reactionary authority on immigration  —  and, by doing so, to protect immigration as a liberal ideal. “To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants,” Biden said, “we must first secure the border and secure it now.”

As it turned out, the action seemed to please no one. The Republican Speaker of the House and MAGA hard-liner Mike Johnson panned it as “window dressing” and “too little, too late.” From the left, immigrant-rights groups were outraged, as was the ACLU, which quickly challenged the order in court. Even numerous elected Democrats pushed back. The Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., called it a “deeply disappointing” and “dangerous step”; the Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said that Biden had “undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.” The Biden administration clearly anticipated such a response. Two weeks later, on June 18, the president took action to shield undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation and provide them with a path to citizenship. Johnson and other congressional Republicans predictably pounced on the policy as an “amnesty plan” for “illegal” immigrants. By now it should be obvious that nothing Biden could say or do on immigration would be sufficient to win over nativist firebrands on the right.

In his shambling, roundabout way, Biden has returned to the well-worn framework of comprehensive immigration reform, pairing enforcement crackdowns with legalization measures to try to rally a diverse majority behind him. That he could do so only through executive actions, though, suggests why the strategy is doomed to fail. The majority of Republican legislators have never supported comprehensive-reform legislation and neither have Republican voters: they won’t be won over to Biden’s executive-action version today. If it survives expected right-wing legal challenges, the parole measure granted to spouses of U.S. citizens could be transformative for a real but small fraction of undocumented Americans, as the Temporary Protected Status protections extended for undocumented migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, and other countries have been. And Biden’s marquee policy, the gutting of asylum protections, will simply reaffirm Republican talking points on border insecurity, making the case for his opponents’ agenda  —  all while life grows ever more hellish for untold numbers of migrants.

One other key facet of Biden’s immigration record has been almost totally ignored in the media. In January 2023, the administration quietly piloted a new policy that has since protected more than a thousand undocumented workers from deportation after they spoke out against workplace abuses: Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement, or DALE. The policy posed strengthening worker solidarity as the solution to economic crises facing immigrant and nativeborn workers alike  —  a path illuminated by Sanders’s wins in California and Nevada. Yet while Biden has traveled the country talking up his get-tough border policy, DALE was implemented almost in secret, without fanfare; there wasn’t even a press conference.

Thus the same president has implemented an innovative policy fusing labor and immigrant struggles, which no one heard about; a widely touted executive action destroying asylum rights that tries to outflank Republicans from the right; and a progressive executive action that seeks to mitigate the political damage of the previous one, and make a play for Latino voters who are increasingly drawn to Trump for reasons that often have little to do with immigration. Biden criticized Trump’s obstruction of the Senate deal as “an extremely cynical political move and a complete disservice to the American people who are looking for us  . . . not to weaponize the border, but to fix it.” But Biden and the Democrats have clearly made peace with a cynical calculus: sacrifice the immigrants who aren’t here yet to win over the center and reward those who are to solidify your base. Democratic leaders aren’t merely responding to nativist public opinion; alongside Republicans, they are more than ever its coauthors and instigators.

For far too long, the politics of immigration has been decoupled from the material reality of human movement across national borders. There is an immigration crisis, just not the kind that the phrase tends to evoke. Migrants themselves are not the crisis, but they are in crisis, and their predicament and movement are the result of crisis. Republican instrumentalization of vulnerable migrants is revolting, but also exposes liberals’ failure to embrace a full-throated pro-migrant politics, even after years of periodic sanctimony. Democratic leaders might claim it’s hard if not impossible to defeat nativism with a pro-migrant agenda. Winning durable majorities with a pro-migrant agenda will no doubt be daunting. But the Democratic Party has never really tried, and it is no less clear that countering nativist politics with more nativism is a surefire loser. Those Americans who want a sweeping border and immigration crackdown will always look to Republicans to carry it out.

Much more than domestic political scorecards are at stake. The immigration crisis is global, combining at least three forms of domination: the denial of people’s right to remain in their homes, the denial of their right to move, and the imposition of punitive social and economic discipline, particularly in the workplace. The political crisis over immigration obscures, as it is designed to, the deeper crises pushing people from their homes across the hemisphere and the world; yet it also obscures the causes of intensifying feelings of insecurity within the United States. Nativism’s trick is to cast racialized foreign others as concrete explanations for problems with otherwise abstract causes. At root, it is sheer scapegoating. In December, Colombian President Gustavo Petro connected the dots: “The unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.  . . . What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.” We must either embrace radical new forms of solidarity or normalize the mass death of surplus populations.

These deeper conflicts are basic to American politics: the ordinary citizens of a liberal democracy that dominates the world are also, often, dominated. We supposedly govern the world, but discover with horror that we do not govern ourselves. The contradiction is typically resolved through imperial expansion abroad, escalating oppression of racialized others at home, or a poisonous combination of both. How we approach and overcome this conflict is the crux of political struggle in the United States today.

At the national legislative level, Biden’s dismal, futile triangulation on immigration can suggest that this struggle is merely grinding through the same old cycles. Yet beneath the official surface, something has begun to change. Israel’s horrific war on Gaza has reoriented what was often a domestic social democratic struggle toward internationalist horizons. The implications of this momentous shift aren’t yet clear, but they point toward a politics that can imagine justice not only at the border but beyond it, a politics that demands a new economic and ecological order that equally protects people’s right to move  —  for safety, for opportunity and to return  —  and also to stay put, free from immiserating poverty, rising waters or falling bombs.

1. “I know nothing about Hitler,” Trump said by way of a disclaimer in an interview with the right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I have no idea what Hitler said other than [what] I’ve seen on the news. And that’s a very, entirely different thing than what I’m saying.” ↩︎