Kamala Harris Needs to Change the Narrative on Immigration

She should point out how immigrants will make America great again and draw a contrast with Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric

Vice President Kamala Harris (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Now that Kamala Harris has become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Republicans have dubbed her President Joe Biden’s “border czar” and are blaming her for the border “crisis.” (During his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists event a few days ago, former President Donald Trump attacked her as the “worst border czar in the history of the world.”)

But that is a mischaracterization of Harris’ portfolio and a vast exaggeration of the situation at the border that the Biden administration has taken aggressive steps—some defensible, some not—to address. That said, Harris needs to start articulating an immigration reform agenda that she can enact if she’s elected that would offer a sustainable fix rather than temporary band-aids.

False Portrayal

It’s easy to see why Americans are worried: They are constantly bombarded with alarming numbers of border crossers without any context. For example, one oft-heard number is that in 2023, Customs and Border Patrol “encountered” 2.4 million undocumented immigrants at the southern border, the largest number in history. (Trump, no lover of truth, put the number at 15 million at the NABJ event!) But “encountered” doesn’t mean that 2.4 million people flooded into the country. It means that CBP agents either apprehended those attempting to cross the border without permission or that these border crossers voluntarily presented themselves to an agent, often claiming asylum under existing U.S. law. The CBP removed 720,000 border crossers between May 2023 and April 2024—and not all were new. About one-third of these were repeaters—those who’d been apprehended and tried again after being removed.

Of course, an unknown number of migrants escape detection altogether while crossing, but far fewer than the wild figures right-wing media regularly use. That they don’t constitute any kind of an “invasion”—Trump’s dire imagery notwithstanding—is clear from the fact the undocumented population in the country has been virtually unchanged for a generation.

So how many undocumented are living in the U.S. right now?

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There is no perfect way to know but the Migration Policy Institute estimated the number in 2021 as 11.2 million. These figures, admittedly, don’t represent the recent surge in border crossers over the last couple of years. But even if you throw a million more—an impossibly high number—it would be merely at par with the peak in 2005 at about 12.2 million before falling to 10.2 million in 2019.

It’s not just misperceptions about the number of immigrants entering the country that is driving the backlash, but the chaotic way in which they are doing so. The Biden administration has responded to this concern with a mix of troubling and enlightened policies, some of which are working and some of which aren’t.

Biden’s Border Measures: A Mixed Bag

One troubling band-aid measure that President Biden applied to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants was reverting to policies used in the Trump administration to “shut the border” by using “expedited removal”—or expelling the undocumented without a court hearing to assess their claim of persecution. The decrease in border crossings due to this new measure has been swift—with encounters down almost 40% since the president acted—but temporary. Using his emergency powers to quickly remove border crossers creates a kind of revolving door with those kicked out trying to reenter. So this is not a meaningful solution. Biden has also made violators largely ineligible for asylum, except in the most compelling circumstances, which may please hardliners but is not the way to reform an outdated asylum system.

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But among the more enlightened things he’s done is implementing a new app for asylum seekers to set up appointments to make their claim before they arrive at our border, which works imperfectly but better than just showing up at official ports of entry or, worse, in areas between them. He’s also created a special program to grant humanitarian parole to those fleeing persecution from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—which allows them to legally live and work in the country for a certain duration so long as they have a U.S. sponsor and no criminal record. That was the right thing to do considering the repression and chaos in those nations.

Harris Has Nothing to Do With it

Harris’s role on immigration, which Trump has inflated for his own purposes, began in 2021 when Biden gave her the portfolio he’d been responsible for during his term as vice president, namely a diplomatic one that did not involve setting domestic border policy. Biden dispatched Harris to Central America to meet with leaders there to figure out the best way to ensure Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans remain in their own countries by encouraging more investment by the private sector and direct economic aid from the U.S. This Root Causes Strategy, as the administration dubbed its initiative, only works to the degree that those individual nations can provide security and opportunity for the long haul. Nonetheless, migration from El Salvador and Honduras has fallen, while Mexico’s has risen after years of decline.

Of course, Trump’s attacks on Biden and Harris would ring truer if he hadn’t torpedoed a cross-partisan border enforcement bill that had been negotiated by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Senator Kristen Sinema of Arizona, an independent. The harsh border enforcement approach in the bill, a sop to GOP hawks, was ill advised and unlikely to work. But they still walked away from it because Trump wants to stoke anti-immigrant fear and loathing to rally his base and get elected, not actually solve the problem.

Needed: A Pro-Immigration Narrative

It is possible that perceptions of a crisis at the border will abate as the numbers of unauthorized border crossings fall. But don’t bet on it. Every wave of immigration to the U.S. has sparked a backlash. It’s no coincidence that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 after about 300,000 Chinese came to the U.S. during the California Gold Rush. Or that the first limits to immigration came in 1917, with further limits in 1924 after large influxes of immigrants came to the U.S. from Southern and Eastern Europe. Between 1900 and 1915, roughly one million immigrants came each year at a time when the total population was only 92 million people. In today’s terms with a current U.S. population of more than 335 million, we would have to take in an equivalent of some 3.6 million legal and illegal immigrants each year to match that rate. Even anti-immigrant groups concede that that number is at the high end of estimates of our current flow. The real number of immigrants admitted annually to the country is only about a million.

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America Can’t Do Without Immigrants

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Before 1924, we had open borders, with pretty much anyone who wished to make the United States their home able to do so if they could pay for a boat ticket (or, in the case of Chinese laborers, be provided one by employers eager for their labor). Now the very mention of open borders is anathema. But despite the dire predictions at the time, we absorbed these newcomers, many of whom were as different from the native-born population of the era in language, culture, and education as today’s border crossers are from our current population.

Today’s immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are contributing to the United States’ healthy economy. A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the current flow of immigrants will help expand the nation’s growth over the next decade, resulting in a $7 trillion addition to the GDP.

Their contributions impose costs on state and local governments, to be sure, that need to be offset. The Department of Health and Human Services recently found that refugees, asylees, and their immediate families paid $37.5 billion more in federal taxes between 2005-2019 than they received in direct benefits, but costs to state and local governments, associated primarily with education, showed a loss of $21.4 billion. These losses could be mitigated by more cost sharing by the federal government—for example by the federal government picking up a larger share of educating immigrant children just as it has traditionally done for school districts with big military bases or other large, non-taxable federal properties through the Impact Aid Act.

It would be far better if we had a system that accommodated our needs for population and labor through sensible immigration reform. Without it, our aging population faces an unhappy future with too few workers to pay for its Social Security and Medicare benefits—and health aides, nurses, and doctors to care for it. The current unregulated flow of immigrants might be unsettling to some Americans, but stopping it outright, even if possible, would make their lives much worse.

Even reliably pro-immigrant commentators like Nicholas Kristof recently suggested that overall immigration to the U.S. is too high. “[I]mmigration should be seen as a dial we adjust,” he wrote recently, noting that “poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages.” It’s an old and refuted trope and it is shocking—though not surprising—that even bleeding-heart progressives are falling for it.

Kamala’s Opportunity

Harris would do well to use her campaign to start countering that narrative and portray immigrants as a boon—a cultural and economic asset—to the country, even the poor and frightened masses flocking at the southern border. She can scale up some of Biden’s more successful policies to create a more orderly flow of asylum seekers from the south. She can also allow those asylum seekers who are released into American cities to begin working immediately instead of waiting 180 days for work permits. Given that many of those coming to America’s shores are doing so because there is a demand for their labor, she can also create more legal channels that match willing employers with willing foreign employees of different skill levels. In other words, create more work visa programs. And she ought to propose ways for revenue-sharing to offset local costs of absorbing immigrants.

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Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans Won’t Make America Safe Again

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As a daughter of immigrants, Kamala has an opportunity to use her campaign to draw a contrast with Trump’s dehumanizing depictions of the foreign born with a more positive framing that emphasizes their contributions. This change of narrative is a necessary first step for rational and humane immigration reforms that address the border situation once and for all without resorting to draconian strategies that few Americans except Trump relish.

© The UnPopulist 2024