Since Kamala Harris's defeat to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, there have been countless autopsies made of the Harris campaign. While a select few argue that Harris ran a strong campaign and the election came down to factors beyond the control of her or her team, most commentators believe that the Harris campaign made some mistakes. That's about as far as their agreements go, however. Their diagnoses for what went wrong run all across the spectrum, ranging from reasonable to completely detached from reality.
One of the most popular diagnoses being shared by analysts is that the Democrats simply didn't take border security seriously enough.The narrative goes that while President Biden, Democratic Party operatives, and affluent liberals cheered on high immigration rates and neglected the border, a resulting 'crisis' of immigration created anxieties among everyday Americans that these same 'out of touch' liberals ignored. This alleged crisis built until the 2024 election, when voters cast a definitive vote for the man promising to do more to fix it- Donald Trump.
Simply put, this narrative belongs in the 'completely detached from reality' pile of post-election takes. Pundits are getting so many things wrong by parroting this line, from Biden's immigration policy to their analysis of Harris's campaigning on the issue to what the 'crisis' is in the first place, that it's hard to imagine a worse talking point. Let's take a look at why, step by step.
Was Biden an 'Open Borders' President?
Simply put: no. But since we're here, let's get into a little more detail!
Of course, we can't talk about Biden's immigration policy without making passing reference to Trump before him. According to a thorough study done by the Migration Policy Institute, Trump "successfully narrowed grants of humanitarian protection, increased enforcement, and made legal immigration more difficult" as president. In other words, he made immigration harder across the board. This, of course, became a rallying cry for Democrats going into the 2020 election. While Biden was relatively conservative compared to many of his rivals in the 2020 Democratic primary, he still promised a much more humane immigration policy than Trump.
As president, his record on immigration policy has been mixed. On the one hand, he did genuinely undo some Trumpian policies. For example, Trump had instituted a policy forcing asylum seekers coming to the US to wait in Mexico, exposing them to kidnaps, assaults, rapes, and murders as they waited in makeshift encampments near the US-Mexican border. Biden undid that policy. On the other hand, after Trump invoked Title 42 during his presidency to allow for expedited deportations of immigrants without due process, Biden kept this Title 42 evocation in place as president.
While it'd be hard to fully quantify in exact numbers how many Trumpian immigration policies Biden kept versus how many he got rid of, it's safe to say he did a fair amount of both. An example (also from the previously linked BBC article) that further encapsulates this is Biden's response to Trump's policies that separated migrant children from their families, perhaps the biggest specific immigration policy of his that provoked outrage across the country. Whereas Trump separated about 3,900 migrant children from their parents, Biden worked to undo some of these separations- but not all of them. As of April 2024, there were still about 1,400 children waiting to be reunited with their parents.
All in all, Biden undid some of Trump's immigration policies, but not all of them. Considering the US didn't have anything resembling an open border before Trump's election, and that Biden kept some of Trump's policies that made immigration of all kinds much harder, calling Biden anything like an 'open border president' just does not hold up at all.
Where Did the Narrative Come From?
This is a more complex question to answer than the last one. There were genuinely more immigrants who attempted to come to the United States during Biden's term than during Trump's. As that was happening, the United States experienced a lot of unrelated difficulties, particularly inflation caused by corporate greed. All this happened while the federal government allowed many popular covid-era public assistance programs to expire, such as the expanded child tax credit. As more and more Americans felt the pinch of rising prices and fading public programs, as well as seeing things like rising rates of fentanyl use and minor increases in certain types of crime, rightwing media came up with a narrative: all of these hardships the US faced could be traced back to Biden's 'open border' policies. And mainstream media increasingly followed suit in order to capitalize on this mounting border hysteria.
Now, it's worth pointing out here that while conservative media has proliferated in recent years, it hasn't done so organically. What some people discuss as a 'grassroots' explosion of conservative media has actually been funded by mega-donors. For example, billionaire Texan oil brothers Farris and Dan Wilks fund PragerU and The Daily Wire. Dark money groups also funnel money to rightwing media personalities like Charlie Kirk. Basically, the ultra-wealthy like it when there are widely viewed media figures and organizations getting the public mad at scapegoats, such as immigrants, rather than these ultra-wealthy people who continue to lobby politicians to let them get even richer and the rest of us get poorer. Because immigrants don't have nearly the same resources to defend their humanity as these big media outlets do to attack them, it's easy to make them the villains.
While rightwing media enjoyed a huge funding push to push their content onto everyone's social media feeds, the Democrats simply didn't have a good counter-narrative to respond with. Which takes us to the next question...
Was Harris Too Soft on Immigration in Her Campaign?
So, what was Harris's general position on immigration in the election? Well, let's just look directly at what her campaign website said:
"Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe in tough, smart solutions to secure the border, keep communities safe, and reform our broken immigration system. As Attorney General of California, Vice President Harris went after international drug gangs, human traffickers and cartels that smuggled guns, drugs, and human beings across the U.S.-Mexico border. As Vice President, she supported the bipartisan border security bill, the strongest reform in decades. The legislation would have deployed more detection technology to intercept fentanyl and other drugs and added 1,500 border security agents to protect our border. After Donald Trump killed the border deal for his political gain, she and President Biden took action on their own — and now border crossings are at the lowest level in 4 years, their administration is seizing record amounts of fentanyl, and secured funding for the most significant increase in border agents in ten years. As President, she will bring back the bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law. At the same time, she knows that our immigration system is broken and needs comprehensive reform that includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship."
Yeah, not exactly a whole lot about helping immigrants of any kind there. Only a passing reference to an "earned pathway to citizenship" at the very end.
And what about that "border deal" her website talks about? Well, early in 2024, the Democrats saw that the border was becoming an increasingly talked about issue thanks to how much rightwing media kept harping on immigration and blaming immigrants for people's problems. Rather than trying to push back on the narrative, they simply decided to try to shift right on immigration. So they proposed a Trumpian immigration bill. It went nowhere, so they tried it again in May. It still went nowhere, as Trump told Republicans not to vote for it. But, as we saw in the previous blurb from Harris's campaign website, the Democrats ran with it as a campaign strategy. The Democratic Party strategy of the late 2010s of advocating for more humane immigration policy died.
Beyond Harris's website, Harris made multiple attempts to appear tough on immigration in interviews. She vowed to continue Biden's crackdown on asylum seekers and hire more Border Patrol agents. She also did a complete pivot when it came to Trump's border wall, now talking about how she would continue funding for it. When directly asked at a CNN Town Hall about whether or not she now supports the border wall after criticizing it so harshly in the past, she avoided directly answering the question at all costs (seriously, watch that video, you will cringe at how hard she avoids answering directly). All of this, of course, was also paired with constant references to the previously mentioned border bill.
This is just a small sample of how much Kamala Harris, and Democratic politicians in general, have shifted on immigration. As I said at the beginning of this post, calling Kamala's campaign 'soft' on immigration is simply delusional. There's no other way to put it.
What Does Public Opinion Look Like on Immigration, Anyway?
So, we've looked at how Harris was in no way an 'open borders' candidate. But did her and her team have to take that approach?
The Democrats faced a tough question going into this election. Thanks to the proliferation of this 'open border' narrative, many people going into the election worried about immigration much more than they have in any other point in recent history. A Gallup poll in June of this year showed a marked increase in worries. For example, when asked if immigration to the US should be increased, decreased, or kept roughly the same, the answers were 16%, 55%, and 25%, respectively, with the rest having no opinion. In other words, 55% of people in the US wanted a decrease of immigrants coming to the US, which outweighed all the other three answers combined. When asked about significantly expanding construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, 53% supported or strongly supported the idea, while 46% opposed or strongly opposed it.
Yet, the same Gallup poll showed that 64% of people in the US believe immigration is a good thing for the country, as opposed to 32% who thought it was a bad thing. Asked if they supported undocumented immigrants earning citizenship of some kind "if they meet certain requirements over a period of time", 70% of people supported or strongly supported the idea versus 30% who opposed or strongly opposed it. For those undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children, the numbers change to 81% supporting or strongly supporting them having a pathway to citizenship, whereas 19% opposed or strongly opposed.
In other words, yes, people are more worried about the border than they have been for a long time (again, thanks to a well-funded rightwing propaganda campaign). But that doesn't tell the whole story. There is still an openness to pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and people still generally view immigration as a good thing. That's pretty remarkable considering how much money has been spent to try to convince the public otherwise. And this poll was taken after the Democrats started shifting their immigration stance- in other words, during a time when there weren't many people in the public discourse (especially not in the halls of power) speaking up on behalf of immigrants.
Simply put, it didn't have to be like this.
Closing Thoughts
I've been following politics almost my entire adult life. Immigration is one of the issues I've been following most closely. The way people think and talk about it, and the way politicians discuss it and try to change the laws around it, has shifted a lot over the last decade and a half or so. For a while, attitudes in the US became more open to immigration reform. Now, however, thanks to the manufactured "crisis" at the border, things are at a standstill.
Yet nothing is forever, including panics over a political issue. Especially when the reality of public opinion is a lot more complex than what pundits and politicians will have you believe.
I don't know what the future holds. There's no way any of us could've predicted five years ago where things would be now, and that'll probably be true for any definitive predictions we try to make now about the future. I don't know what will happen around the topic of immigration, including what policies will be put in place that will have effects on millions of human beings in this country, whether immigrants or the loved ones of immigrants. But I hope this piece can at least do a little bit to make the conversation around the issue a little more honest and clear-sighted.
Thanks for reading.
