Democrats can no longer ignore what Americans want on immigration | Opinion
If there’s one policy on which Donald Trump has a mandate coming into office, it is immigration. He has promised to close the borders to illegal immigration, throttle back legal immigration and deport a million or more undocumented immigrants a year from the United States.
Democrats may be aghast, but they shouldn’t be surprised. This is who Trump has been since he rode down the golden escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015.
What Democrats cannot do is defend the status quo.
Two-thirds of Americans think the border situation with Mexico is either a crisis or a serious problem, according to Gallup.
A strong majority of Americans want immigration cut back, according to the same polling firm. A majority of Hispanics agree.
While slightly fewer Americans support deportations, the plurality of voters do, as well as an overwhelming majority of Trump voters, according to a CNN analysis of polling data that includes Gallup.
The question is what Democrats can advocate that can win majority support and ultimately shape what the Trump administration and the Republican Congress do moving forward. Simply saying no would paint them into exactly the unpopular ideological niche to which Trump wants to exile them.
One approach would be peeling off slices of the undocumented immigrant population who should be allowed to stay. Obama’s approach of protecting kids who came to America as children through his unilateral created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA has proved durable.
Perhaps Trump can be convinced that undocumented immigrants who can prove a decade of taxpaying contributions to American life deserve to stay. Before Joe Biden lost control of the U.S. Mexico border, allowing a surge of undocumented immigration into the country, about two-thirds of undocumented immigrants had been living here for 10 years or more. That number is now lower but still significant.
Another approach uses U.S. citizen minors born to undocumented parents as a reason for parents to be allowed to stay. Before the Biden immigration surge, about one-third of immigrant families with undocumented members also had members who were citizens or had green cards.
Those two groups overlap significantly, creating a group of perhaps millions who could make a strong case to stay and the polling analyzed by CNN showed American voters have sympathy for migrants in those categories.
But Democrats should not forget that we’re at a peak of immigration — nearly 50 million Americans are foreign born, the largest group in U.S. history. A pause is inevitable. After every wave of mass immigration in U.S. history voters have insisted on a pause for assimilation.
I don’t agree with Trump on immigration. I see cheap labor in tough jobs, college campuses teeming with foreign students, an immigrant-heavy tech sector producing an explosion of innovation and economic activity all as pluses for America.
Even the Trumpy Manhattan Institute sees that as the percentage of immigrants living in the United States has reached a 50-year peak, America remains a potent engine of assimilation with immigrants showing increasing signs of English proficiency and broad American values.
For sure, I see the tough side of immigration, too. It is not fun for Americans to compete with millions of foreigners who are willing to do your job more cheaply than you are. But that has always been the way in America, and in the long run, it has only led to greater prosperity for all.
In any case, America has signaled it is ready for a pause. Democrats would be wise to accept it, focusing instead on how we can keep the pause from disrupting the lives of too many immigrants already here who have shown they will make great Americans if we let them.
This story was originally published January 10, 2025 at 11:33 AM with the headline "Democrats can no longer ignore what Americans want on immigration | Opinion."
