Why Aren't We All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This (Screwed Up Immigration Under Biden)?

So, who was it?

Dear readers,

I wrote for The New York Times last week about how the Democratic Party needs a reset on immigration. The Biden administration’s loss of control over both the southern border and the asylum system caused the number of illegal immigrants in the country to soar by millions, ruining our party’s credibility on the issue. And so even as President Trump’s poll numbers on immigration have softened, poll respondents remain much more likely to say they trust Republicans to handle the issue than Democrats.

It wasn’t always like this. In June 2013, 48% of respondents told Gallup they thought Democrats were closer to their own views on immigration; 36% said Republicans shared their views.¹ Not coincidentally, Barack Obama took a lot of attacks from his left for being the “Deporter-in-Chief.” The implication is clear: When Democrats are seen as willing to enforce immigration law and deport illegal immigrants, voters will trust us to set immigration policy.

To start to win back voters’ trust, the party must acknowledge that the Biden administration’s policy of laxity was a failure, and commit credibly to better enforcement — not only by preventing illegal border crossings and closing the loopholes in the asylum system, but also by enforcing immigration law in the interior of the country, by deporting people who weren’t supposed to come here during Biden’s term. Democrats have lots of criticisms of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement approach — and polls show some of those criticisms are shared by voters — but when Democrats criticize the administration, they should talk about what they would do instead to prevent illegal immigration and reduce the population of illegal immigrants. If Democrats are only seen talking about how the government is doing too much enforcement, we’ll be seen as the anti-enforcement party, and that’s politically deadly.

We should also, by the way, bring back the term “illegal immigrant.” In general, I’m not big on fighting over language — I think Democrats’ main political problems stem from the unpopular content of the policies our candidates support, and that weird language choices are more a symptom than a cause of our estrangement from the median voter. But the refusal to use the word “illegal” has arisen out of a successful pressure campaign that has convinced many Democrats that there is nothing particularly wrong with being in the country without authorization. And that has made it hard for Democrats to say something they really need to say to regain trust on the issue: that being in the country illegally is reason enough to deport someone. Personally, I have tended to use the term “unauthorized immigrant,” because it’s just as accurate as “illegal,” it avoids disputes over whether “illegal” implies a criminal violation or can also apply to civil ones, and it’s not so euphemistic as “undocumented,” a term that makes it sound like someone just forgot to get a visa. But I think freeing Democrats to say “illegal immigrant” again will make it easier for us to get back into the habit of remembering that deportation is a necessary part of having an immigration policy, and not a dirty word.

Accountability for the prior administration’s policy failures is also very important, and Democrats should be clamoring for that now. One notable thing about my column bashing the Biden White House is that two top officials who worked on immigration policy in the Biden White House shared it approvingly: Neera Tanden, who served as Staff Secretary and then ran the Domestic Policy Council, which oversees immigration policy; and Stefanie Feldman, who worked at the DPC and then served as Staff Secretary. I wasn’t surprised by this: Both Tanden and Feldman have publicly criticized the administration they worked in over its handling of immigration. “Failure to confront the border crisis fully when illegal crossings spiked in 2021 and 2022 had dire political and humanitarian consequences,” Tanden wrote in the Wall Street Journal in July — and my piece approvingly cited Tanden’s policy proposal to restrict future asylum claims.²

It’s great that we agree on so much, but there’s a question I’d still like an answer to: Who’s to blame for the Biden administration handling this issue so badly? Tanden, Feldman, and Susan Rice (who ran the DPC while Feldman worked there) are all publicly known as relative immigration hawks from the Biden team. So who, specifically, stood in their way? Who decided Biden should issue those day-one executive orders that sent a message to migrants that they should run for our border while they had the chance? Whose idea was it to wait until 2024 to finally try to turn off the asylum taps? And how do we make sure that the next Democratic White House is staffed with people who won’t be inclined to make the same mistakes?

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CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski asked on Twitter if Tanden or Feldman might tell us whose fault this all was, and Feldman — who in May wrote a useful postmortem about the staffing problems that pushed the Biden administration too far to the left on issues including immigration, but without naming names — responded that it (still) isn’t necessary to name names.

“That doesn’t need to be aired publicly — I’m sure people will all weigh in with the next transition team,” she wrote.

Ehhh… I am not so sure about that. I realize that, as a journalist, I have a bias toward the public airing of dirty laundry. But the next time a Democratic White House is staffing up, centrists like me aren’t going to be the only ones trying to win the personnel game. I certainly hope that the next team will feel scarred by Biden’s mistakes and not want to repeat them. But the Dreaded Groups will still be there, trying to build a White House that prioritizes their pet goals over building a sustainable political movement, and in some cases that basically means a reflexive hostility to enforcing immigration law. So I’d like my allies not to be flying blind — we should know more about who authored the biggest political blunders in the Biden White House so we can try to make sure those people never work in this town again.

The people whose identities I am most interested in learning are not the lower-level staff with bad left-wing ideas, but the senior staff that Feldman describes in her postmortem as consisting “with two exceptions”³ of “people who did not love tough conversations or having to say no to members of the Cabinet or other senior White House staff.” Now, maybe this list consists largely of career Bidenworld figures whose days in Washington are done regardless — I don’t need new journalism to tell me that Ron Klain and Mike Donilon were ineffectual. But if some of these people are likely to be lining up for a major job the next time a Democrat is president — and if they’re the ones who decided in 2021 a crackdown on asylum abuse wasn’t worth the internal drama — I think it would be good for the world to know about how they, personally, screwed up.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. In a Wall Street Journal poll from late July, 45% of respondents said they trust Republicans more than Democrats on immigration policy, versus 28% of respondents who said they trust Democrats more than Republicans.

2. Incidentally, it’s a positive sign for where Democrats are heading on this issue that Tanden’s organization — the Center for American Progress, which is the beating heart of the Democratic policy establishment — is talking about the need to get tough on asylum.

3. I’m pretty sure I can already name one of the exceptions: Tanden, who nobody could possibly call conflict-averse.