Democrats Need to Re-Learn the Valid Reasons to Restrict Immigration

It's not just parochialism or bad economics, let alone bigotry — our fellow citizens have good reasons to oppose uncontrolled migration.

This morning, the New York Times published my roundtable conversation with Nicole Gelinas and Mara Gay about the latest New York City mayoral debate. You can check it out here.

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Dear readers,

Matt Yglesias wrote another piece earlier this week trying to understand exactly why the Biden administration went so wrong on immigration, and in it, he offers this helpfully reflective explanation for why Democrats struggle to offer coherent, effective immigration policy, while Republicans enjoy voters’ enduring trust to handle it. He writes:

The voters believe, accurately, that elite liberals — including fairly moderate ones like me — are uncomfortable with the idea of being mean to sympathetic immigration cases. And even if some of these voters are absolutely convinced that Trump is going too far on immigration, they’re also worried that putting soft-hearted Democrats in charge will lead to disaster. Which, after all, is what happened when Joe Biden was president.

It’s difficult to convincingly argue that your party will handle a problem when it’s made up of people who don’t think the problem is a problem. And most Democrats simply don’t recognize a large number of illegal immigrants as a problem, except to the extent that it is a political problem because other Americans consider it to be a problem. This includes Matt himself, who — despite his understanding that Democrats must urgently move in a pro-enforcement direction on immigration to win elections — says he feels “ick” about people who choose to work in immigration enforcement, because “making a career out of locking up and deporting people, most of whom aren’t hurting anyone, is weird.”

The default sympathy expressed here (and more broadly in the party) is a big problem for restoring trust in Democrats on the issue. In order to rectify this, Democrats need to re-think and re-direct this sympathy; they need to get back in touch with the reasons that both uncontrolled migration and excessive volumes of migration really are problems — not just political problems, but substantive ones. That is, they need to get back in touch with the feeling that illegal and irregular migration reflect a failure of our civic institutions, a misuse of the social safety net, and a breakdown of the rule of law, and that all of that is actually bad (after all, the importance of the rule of law is a core Democratic campaign message of late). In other words, some of that sympathy needs to be redirected toward American citizens who bear costs associated with illegal migration. If you get in touch with that feeling, you can get past the “ick” and properly understand the immigration enforcement apparatus as just another valid and appropriate part of our government that needs to function well, like the USPS or the FAA.

Let’s start with the characterization that illegal immigrants “aren’t hurting anyone.” I agree that illegal immigrants generally lack malice and are, in a majority of cases, sympathetic individuals — they’re going about their lives, very often doing productive work, and certainly not trying to harm our country. But their intent isn’t the only thing that matters. Illegal immigration, and other forms of irregular migration that happen with the authorization of the executive branch, really do hurt Americans by putting strain on public resources, imposing costs on taxpayers, and undermining social cohesion. And this has been particularly noticeable because of the huge surge in three categories of migration over the last few years: old-fashioned illegal immigration; migrants abusing our asylum system to gain years of legal access to the U.S., even without claims that are likely to be judged valid in the end; and the Biden administration’s large-scale use of the Temporary Protected Status designation to admit about a million mostly low-skill, mostly non-English-speaking migrants into our communities, especially from Haiti and Venezuela.

Consider the situation in Springfield, Ohio, which has in just a few years absorbed about 20,000 Haitian immigrants into a city of 60,000, mostly authorized through TPS. Famously, in the 2024 presidential campaign, then-candidate Trump attacked Haitians in Springfield with the baseless claim that they were eating people’s cats and dogs. The main thing Democrats had to say about the Haitians in Springfield was that they weren’t eating cats and dogs, and that they weren’t illegal immigrants — they were here legally under TPS.¹ But this response did nothing to actually address the concerns of American citizens in Springfield, who were seeing their school system transform to address a six-fold increase in the number of students who weren’t proficient in English, requiring a rapid hiring of numerous ESL and interpretation staff. When your tax dollars are diverted from educating your own children to addressing the needs of non-citizens, you are harmed — these voters had a valid grievance and Democrats had nothing to say about it. Republicans, meanwhile, offered a policy change that would address it: Trump has revoked the TPS grant for Haiti and is more broadly trying to get millions of migrants who arrived during the Biden administration to leave the country.

I have also seen the negative effects of irregular migration directly as a resident of New York City. Federal policies allowing migrants to claim asylum and hold a work permit while waiting (often, for years) for adjudication have combined with local policies entitling anyone who shows up here (regardless of immigration status) to city-funded shelter to lead to a huge fiscal burden on New York. The city has spent billions of dollars to house migrants who have arrived recently. More specifically, local taxpayers have paid to rent over 10,000 hotel rooms for multiple years, while other American taxpayers traveling to New York paid more to do so because so many hotel rooms got taken out of supply. In some neighborhoods, the new migrant shelters were significant sources of disorder. And far from being solely a concern to native-born New Yorkers, this process was observed with a mix of incredulity and outrage by naturalized citizens, who observed that nobody rented them a hotel room for months on end when they arrived in New York, even though their own tax dollars were now being used to do that for others. Some of Trump’s strongest gains in New York in the 2024 election were in working-class immigrant neighborhoods like Corona, Queens, which he narrowly won, relying on a surge of votes from Hispanic American citizens who, unlike the new migrants, can vote.

Democrats broadly understand that democratic legitimacy requires enacting policies that actually benefit the electorate. We advocate for effective K-12 education, health care that is affordable for all Americans, a tax code that balances fairness and growth, and so on. But immigration is a blind spot where Democrats focus first on the needs of the migrants rather than the needs of Americans. Prioritizing Americans would mean choosing immigrants on the basis of who can bring the most to the U.S., not on the basis of which potential immigrants most want to come here or stand to benefit most by immigrating. When we approach immigration that way, we not only fail to represent the interests of the electorate; we undermine the support for the rest of our governing agenda, as voters watch spending on the public programs we advocate for get diverted to the benefit of non-citizens. We have to be willing to firmly say ‘no’ and deny access to our country, even to people who stand to gain a lot by coming here — and part of saying “no” requires having an effective government apparatus that deports people who are here without authorization. That’s not icky at all; it’s the government serving the interests of its citizens, like it’s supposed to.

I realize this isn’t the way most liberals have come to feel in their hearts. But it would behoove them to start trying to feel it, because voters have repeatedly shown it’s what they expect from policymakers.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Incidentally, the they’re-not-illegal talking point does nothing to address the fact that nobody voted for the tripling of the number of TPS-protected migrants in the U.S. that occurred on Biden’s watch. Yes, a president has sweeping delegated authority to grant TPS designations, just like a president has sweeping delegated authority to impose tariffs. That doesn’t mean that a president’s choice to vastly increase his use of that authority reflects the democratic will, or that it will go unpunished by voters when the migration causes problems in their cities and towns. The illegal-legal distinction is very important in the courts, but it’s not important politically — whether you’re talking about asylum applicants or TPS protectees or migrants with no legal status at all, you’re still talking about migrants who greatly increased in number and whose presence was not commonly understood to be permitted by our immigration policy. Democrats need an answer for voters’ concerns that we’ve gotten too many migrants in all of the categories. “It’s the law” doesn’t cut it — the law (and the administration’s use of the law) need to conform to public desires about the level and type of migration, and be apparently designed to serve the interests of American citizens, rather than being primarily focused on which foreign countries have the largest number of people who would benefit from moving to the United States.