In short, a President Biden would return immigration policy to the status quo before Trump. With this difference: Biden, unlike Obama, would be dealing with a Democratic Party whose left wing has been radicalized and includes prominent officials who support such extreme measures as decriminalizing border crossing and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Senator Harris herself has called for “restructuring” ICE (and for abolishing private health insurance, banning fracking, and imposing universal background checks for gun purchases through administrative fiat). The leftward drift of the Democrats makes immigration politics more fraught, and more polarizing. Having learned nothing from the Trump phenomenon, Biden and Harris are eager to reinstate the exact policies that gave birth to it.

The failure to control the border and to think politically, rather than economically, about immigration was part of a larger failure. Republican and Democratic elites neither recognized nor acknowledged that the globalized world of the 21st century, while beneficial to them, carried costs for large parts of the population far greater than they had assumed. It is therefore ironic that a pandemic originating in China, which America treated for too long as a “responsible stakeholder” rather than a revisionist great power, has overwhelmed practically every issue but the economy in the final month of the election.

If the Trump campaign fails to raise the question of immigration, the Democratic establishment that stands to gain from the public’s judgment of the president’s coronavirus response will happily ignore it. But they will not be able to avoid immigration forever. Or the furies it unleashes.