Immigration Policy that is Law-based, Enforced and Humane
The Harris Argument
Key Points
- Immigration policy should be legal, enforced and humane
- Trump’s approach as president to use viciousness as a deterrent wasn’t legal, didn’t work and was inhumane. Illegal border crossings during his presidency rose to their highest levels since the Bush administration.
- Trump as a candidate persuaded Republicans to block a bipartisan bill which would have given the Biden administration the resources and authority to do what is needed to be done at the border. He wanted a political cudgel, not a solution.
- Despite Congress’s failure, the Biden-Harris administration has drastically reduced illegal border crossings to levels below what it was under Trump.
- Immigrants are not the people Trump describes in his attacks. The immigrants at our borders are escaping oppression and looking to build better lives for themselves and their families. Most Americans are people like that, or the descendants of people like that. Many of us would make the same choice for our families even if it meant crossing a border illegally.
- The flood at the border has been addressed for now, but we need a better solution that updates our immigration policies, addresses the status of the undocumented already in the country and gives the president the legal authority and the resources she needs to humanely manage the border.
What Donald Trump says about immigrants is appalling and what he does about immigration is appalling, ineffective, inhumane and bad for all of us. We need a change in direction on immigration but it is not the change Donald Trump offers. That would lead to a world of locked borders and mass deportation that crushes American businesses, hurts American workers, rips apart families and evicts people who have built productive lives in our country as law-abiding residents. We need an approach that is legal, enforced and humane. As president, Trump chose only enforcement.
Ironically, though Trump’s plans of mass deportation are a real threat if he is elected, he actually managed last time to both be extraordinarily inhumane and fail to decrease illegal immigration. Over two years into his administration, in May of 2019, Customs and Border Protection encounters at the southern border were at the highest level since George W. Bush was president — 132,856. It dropped from there, especially as the pandemic hit, but by time Trump left office it was running at monthly levels higher than any month of the Obama administration — at over 70,000 per month. The upward trajectory continued after he left office but, to be clear, Trump, despite adopting inhumane policies such as separating children from their families, actually failed to stem the tide at the border. Instead of taking a serious approach to a complicated problem his strategy was to impose pure viciousness to discourage immigrants, to put in place policies that are illegal and were rightly blocked by the courts, and wasted time, energy and taxpayer dollars on a foolish wall that never got built. It isn’t surprising it didn’t work.
Now, running for office again, Trump, who failed to seriously address the issue as president, doubles down with lies and viciousness to damn decent human beings. The immigrants who come to our borders are overwhelmingly not the criminals and insane that he describes. They are not drug smugglers (drugs are smuggled through legal border crossings). The people coming to our borders are escaping oppression and people who want to build better lives for themselves and their families in the land of opportunity. Most of us in this country are people like that, or the descendants of people like that. Many of us would make the same choice for our families even if it meant crossing a border illegally.
At this point in our country’s history we no longer let in the numbers of immigrants we did in the past, nor should we. Let’s be clear though, that is not the fault of those who want to come here. The people knocking at our door are like those who have come to our shores for generations. The words on the Statue of Liberty were not written about modern Latin American immigrants when they were penned: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” They were written about our ancestors.
Voters want better law enforcement at the border. A June Gallop poll found that 76% favor hiring more border agents. They also, however, want immigration policy to be humane. In the same poll, 70% favored “allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” A Gallop poll from a year earlier found that 64% were “very” or “somewhat sympathetic” to “people who travel to the border in an attempt to enter the U.S.” A Pew poll from August 2022 found that 71% thought “[t]aking in civilian refugees trying to escape violence and war” was an “important goal for U.S. immigration policy” — including 58% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats. The poll found that 67% support the goal to “[m]ake it easier to sponsor family members to immigrate to the U.S.” — including 51% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats.
By all means let’s control the border, but let’s do it humanely and not vilify aspiring Americans.
The border was flooded as the COVID crisis ended and, while the Biden administration could have done better, it was a very difficult situation and there were real limits to what could be done legally and with the resources available to process those arriving. The administration worked closely with conservative Republicans to craft legislation to grant both the legal authority needed, and the funding necessary, to manage the border. Trump got his Republican enablers in Congress to kill that plan — not because it wasn’t effective border policy but because it was. The last thing he wanted was for effective border policy to be enacted on the watch of his political opponents.
As a result of actions taken by the Biden Administration after the failure of the legislation, illegal crossings are down substantially — well below what they were at the end of the Trump administration. It is, however, a cobbled-together system. We need to update our immigration laws to adjust how we admit immigrants to current times. We need to make changes so that the president has the authority and resources in place to enforce our immigration laws. And we need those laws and the way we conduct enforcement, the way we process people who come to our border, to be humane. In short, we need immigration policy that is law-based, enforced and humane.
