This Is a Historic Opportunity for Democrats to Get Immigration Right

As the public turns against Trump and the Republicans on immigration, the Democrats can seize the moment with a new, positive vision. Here’s what that might look like.

A year of disruptive and sometimes deadly deployments of ICE and other federal agents to cities around the country, paired with relatively indiscriminate and clearly racist detentions of people with and without legal status (even including U.S. citizens), has managed to turn public opinion on its head: Once the strongest issue for Donald Trump and the Republicans writ large, immigration is politically up for grabs. Voters now loathe ICE and have a newfound appreciation for immigration.

The Democrats have attempted to capitalize on this shift in public opinion by holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security over demands for some basic constraints on ICE and Customs and Border Protection. But some political operators see a greater opportunity here for the party to stake out a position on immigration that’s entirely distinct from MAGA’s poisonous vision. In truth, the moment for that was years ago, but the next best time is now. The problem is, these folks are still—even after everything that’s happened this past year—overcorrecting for Donald Trump’s electoral success.

The new would-be populist Democratic think tank Searchlight—founded by Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman—recently released an immigration policy brief that is not a departure so much as a return to what hasn’t worked. Titled “No More Back Doors” and written by Blas Nuñez-Neto, a former assistant secretary of homeland security under President Biden, the paper urges Democrats to seize the moment by “recapturing the public’s trust on immigration.” It gestures at centrist orthodoxy like limited paths to citizenship for Dreamers and other limited groups, while ticking off right-wing wish-list items like building more border wall, deploying surveillance technology, sending migrants to third countries, and “no interior release for those waiting—even for families.”

Searchlight’s basic premise is that a posture of heavy enforcement is the new normal and Democrats should do the sane version of it. If the Democrats follow these recommendations, they will have failed yet again to understand that public opinion on this issue is mutable. They will also squander what is—and here I agree with Searchlight—a golden opportunity to stake out a new path. I just happen to believe in a path that’s both humane and popular.

A month before the 2024 election, I wrote at TNR that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and other party leaders were making a significant political error in responding to the Trump campaign’s anti-immigrant depravations by insisting that they would be just as effective at restricting immigration flows. She lost, of course, but to this day it’s........

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