Josh Barro has a worthwhile opinion piece in today's NY Times. He really sets out to make a couple of simple points about Democrats and immigration police. The first point is that Joe Biden, by leaving the border open for 3 1/2 years, really blew it. Not only did he leave the border open as millions of people came in, he also claimed for years that there was nothing he could do to stop it.
For too long, Mr. Biden and his team asserted they couldn’t stop the surge without new legislation. That proved false: In 2024, having failed to get an immigration bill through Congress, Mr. Biden finally took executive actions to curb abuse of the asylum system and slow the flow of migrants across the southern border. When Donald Trump took office, illegal border crossings slowed to a trickle. In other words, the problem had been fixable all along; Mr. Biden simply did not fix it until much too late.
As President Trump would later say, we didn't need a new law, just a new president. Barro's second point is that Democrats really haven't made any effort to explain this failure or to promise people something similar won't happen again.
Admitting all these new migrants was never an agreed-upon public policy — no voters endorsed this, no law passed by Congress contemplated it and to the extent the migrants are seeking asylum, their legal claims are too often bogus.
But it happened, and Democrats need to explain to voters why they should not expect it to happen again if they regain power.
Having made these two points, he then moves on to the main thrust of his piece, which is that there are alternative approaches Democrats could adopt. As we all know, there are really two ways the system of immigration gets gamed by illegal migrants. One is to simply sneak across the border illegally and disappear. The other is to claim asylum, knowing it will take years to adjudicate that claim. Then, while waiting for a decision from a judge, the migrants just move into the country and never leave, not even if the judge's ruling is unfavorable which it is in most cases. It's possible to imagine a system which tries to minimize both of these problems. For instance:
The Center for American Progress has a smart set of proposals to prevent a recurrence of the abuses of the asylum system that prevailed during the Biden administration. The institution’s Neera Tanden and Debu Gandhi propose to prohibit almost all asylum claims from migrants who crossed the southern border illegally, while those who make claims at the border would be held in custody instead of being allowed into the country on a parole basis. Their claims would be adjudicated within 30 days, with rapid removal for those whose claims are rejected. The proposal would also raise the standard of proof for asylum claims and maintain a list of democratic countries whose citizens are presumptively ineligible for asylum.
I'm not suggesting that CAP's offering is the best possible plan for the border but it's certainly miles better than anything Democrats were proposing during the Biden administration. The problem, as Barro admits, is that too many Democrats don't want to see anyone get deported.
The mental block that Democrats have here relates to an instinct about deportations: a feeling that it’s presumptively improper to remove an unauthorized immigrant who has settled in our country if that migrant hasn’t committed a crime unrelated to immigration. These people have been here a long time, the idea goes. They’re not causing trouble.
But if we build a system where people very often get to stay here simply because they made it in — the system that prevailed during most of Mr. Biden’s term — then we don’t really have an immigration policy, and voters won’t have any reason to believe us when we say our new policy will produce different results about who comes here.
He's right of course. If you have a system that tacitly accepts cheating and lying then a lot of people will cheat and lie and you get exactly what we had under Biden's term. A much tougher system, on the other hand, discourages people from cheating and lying because it's too much energy to spend on something that is likely to fail.
Can Democrats learn from past failures or will they just return to form the moment they win an election? That's Barro's final insight. Given a choice between harsh enforcement (under Trump) and little enforcement (under Biden), Democrats are going to keep losing.
My own guess about this is that Democrats can't accept telling illegal migrant no and will continue defaulting to little or no enforcement. You see this same battle play out in blue cities up and down the west coast. Voters vote in far left candidates and the results are awful. But it takes years of bad results before a few of them finally admit they might have gone too far. And the moment some order is restored, they go right back to voting in far left candidates. We're seeing it play out in the NYC mayoral race at this moment.
Democrats don't vote for what makes sense for their city, state or country, they vote for what makes them feel good about themselves. So I'm expecting some moderate sounding talk leading up to the 2028 election, but it won't lead to anything if they get elected except a gradual undoing of President Trump's tight control of the border.
