Beto O’Rourke spent Father’s Day six years ago in Tornillo, a tiny settlement about an hour southeast of El Paso. The federal government had set up a tent camp for migrant children who had been forcibly removed from their parents. This was at the high point of the backlash against the Trump administration’s family-separation policy. It also represented the high point of O’Rourke’s campaign against Senator Ted Cruz, who enthusiastically embraced Trump’s policies to the hilt, from family separation to the much-discussed, never fully constructed border “wall.”
O’Rourke had planned a last-minute “March to Tornillo”—live streamed, of course—and had somehow attracted a crowd of hundreds who’d traveled from across the state, were angry at the administration, and wanted to demand humane treatment for the migrants in the camp. “The story of America for two hundred and thirty years,” O’Rourke told the crowd, was that “we are there for the people of the world when they have nowhere else to go.” We had to fight to ensure that was still the case, he said. The migrants who showed up at the border were “in the most desperate of circumstances,” and the way we treated them reflected our worth as a nation.
O’Rourke was speaking for his party as a whole. American Democrats were in high dudgeon then. The liberal, no less than the conservative, holds strong moral precepts about how the world should be, but the liberal usually has to choke back those preferences for the sake of getting elected. In cases in which popular sentiment and moral vision are aligned, liberals get fired up. And in their detestation of Trump’s family-separation policy, they won the support of two-thirds of Americans. The percentage of Americans who wanted more immigration, not less, was rising toward a record high, and some 80 percent of those polled wanted a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents. Suddenly Democrats could campaign on a winning issue and feel good about themselves.
As is their wont, they got a little nutty with it. O’Rourke’s constant valorization of the migrant didn’t seem to hurt him in Texas that year—he won many Republican votes and came within three percentage points of beating Cruz while winning a majority of native Texans. (Voters who had migrated to the state, ironically, backed the Republican incumbent.) But as the 2020 presidential campaign rolled on, Democrats fighting for relevance took more extreme positions. Then-candidate Kamala Harris wrote in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported gutting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ending migrant detention, and providing gender-affirming surgeries to any detained immigrants who wanted them. Former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, also running, also briefly, ran on decriminalizing border crossings.
In the end, what often happens to liberals happened again. Democrats took office, ended some Trump immigration policies—and then remembered that moderate voters in this country often want, to reverse the formulation of UK prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Republican policies executed by Democrats. The Biden administration quickly adopted a defensive posture on the border and immigration and long held on to many of Trump’s other “innovations,” including restrictions on asylum. Largely, it seemed to hope the issue would go away.
The Democratic Party’s messaging on immigration in 2024 sounds very different. Take the statewide ad that O’Rourke’s successor as challenger to Cruz, Democratic congressman Colin Allred, began running in July, in English and Spanish. Allred steps out of a large pickup truck, ready to lead, confident and in control. The camera, shooting from a low angle, shows the would-be senator touring the border wall with sheriffs. “Ted Cruz is all hat and no cattle,” says a lawman. Allred, meanwhile, is “tough. He’s standing up to extremists in both parties.” Zoom in on a second lawman, who echoes: “Both parties.” A headline floats on-screen: “Colin Allred joins Republicans to condemn Biden’s handling of the border.”
Six years ago, Allred was running for a congressional seat in Dallas against Republican incumbent Pete Sessions. His language was more careful than O’Rourke’s, but he was still aligned with the party’s mood. He called Trump’s border wall “racist,” as well as “the wrong solution, a waste of money, ineffective, and . . . a signal that will hurt our international standing.” He condemned family separation, writing that immigration enforcement was a reflection of “who we are and the values we all share.” One of those values, he emphasized, was that the U.S. should always be open to refugees.
Now Allred is running on his support of the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024, a bipartisan measure that—if Trump had not ordered Republicans to block it—would have significantly limited the ability of asylum applicants to get relief in the United States. It included a three-year pause on accepting any asylum applications. In his ad, Allred walks alongside border fencing he once decried. He does often say that America remains “a nation of immigrants,” but he also emphasizes that we “are a nation of laws.” He hits the Biden administration for not cracking down on migrant flows fast enough.
Asked by a local news station in Tyler about the issue, Allred said, “This is personal for me,” before going in a different direction than O’Rourke presumably would have. “My grandfather was a customs officer in Brownsville,” he said, so it’s easy for him to imagine “the impact [migration] has on our border communities” and the wasted resources “that are going to be spent on dealing with these migrants.”
This may very well be smart politics at this moment. The public mood on immigration has shifted dramatically. A surge of migrants early in the Biden administration started the shift, and many towns along the Rio Grande do not have shelter space or resources to accommodate the new arrivals. Abbott’s program to bus migrants to blue cities has succeeded in getting Democrats, including New York City mayor Eric Adams, to sound like old-school conservatives and say they do not have the resources to feed and house and heal newcomers either. But the speed of the Democratic Party’s about-face on what it considered the nation’s signature moral issue six years ago is shocking to witness.
Allred is representative, not an outlier. Harris hopes to nullify Trump’s advantage on immigration by promising she’ll be tough. At the Democratic National Convention, she highlighted a Texas sheriff who talked up her intent to crack down on traffickers. Closer to the border, Democrat Michelle Vallejo has run a similar campaign in a congressional district that she lost in 2022. That year, she positioned herself as a progressive who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. This year, she’s sounding closer to Greg Abbott than to the Democrats of the past decade. “Our community is being overwhelmed by the chaos at the border, and it’s time to get serious,” she says in an ad.
In Vallejo’s district and beyond, Democrats’ messaging argues that Republicans are unwilling to be as tough as they need to be on asylum applicants and migrants. With the Democratic Party in full retreat, the Republican Party is free to offer more potent strains of xenophobia. Trump selected for his running mate J. D. Vance, a man possessed of a form of nativism that is antebellum, if not antediluvian, in nature.
Vance’s brand is of a True American, an Appalachian of Scots-Irish stock—the kind of person paleoconservative thinkers call an original American—who owns the country more than anyone else and resents the interlopers who arrived after 1820 or so. Recently, a clip surfaced of Vance talking to a podcaster before his run for Senate in which he described the calamities brought on by the earliest patterns of immigration. You had “this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration,” Vance said, and that had “its problems, its consequences,” which included “higher crime rates,” “ethnic enclaves,” and “interethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”
This week, Vance has spread lies about Haitian migrants in an Ohio town. Right-wing social media lit up with the allegation that these immigrants were devouring citizens’ cats—possibly conflating the existence of the Haitians with a police report that a non-Haitian woman a couple hundred miles away had tried to eat a cat. Vance put this baseless rumor into the congressional record: Ted Cruz tweeted a picture of two kittens, with the text “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” Trump made this lie a major theme of the debate on Tuesday night. The discourse just keeps drifting to the right.
All politics is local, some old guy said. Bzzt, wrong! We live in the future, and here all politics is national. From school board elections to congressional races, candidates mostly get asked about whatever the talking heads are screeching about on cable news. Too bad: Politics was a lot more fun, not to mention functional, when the big questions were about pork-barrel spending and other local interests, from new canals to military-base closures and the Waxahachie Superconducting Super Collider.
But there are different kinds of national issues. There are pocketbook ones—income tax rates, the mortgage-interest deduction, inflation. And there are what we call social issues—abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage—which affect some voters directly but are also passionately argued about by many others as proxies for a larger debate about how society, or the nation, should be. Immigration is a peculiar issue, in that for most Americans, it is happening to someone else. It’s a “you problem,” not a “me problem.”
By definition, deportations happen to a category of people that does not include “voters.” Americans may be passionate about border security and immigration, but most voters—even in Texas, let alone Wisconsin or Pennsylvania—don’t have a very good sense of how the system works and what the major problems are. (Even Trump, who should know quite a bit by now, sometimes seems to confuse the concept of “asylum seeker” with a person you might find in an “insane asylum.”)
That helps explain why the polling on the issue teeters wildly. Voters are prone to say they want undocumented immigrants to be given a pathway to citizenship and also that they want them all deported. In a less contradictory vein, they want the border secure and also want migrants treated kindly. They’ll tell pollsters almost anything because they aren’t really thinking about immigration in a concrete way. Not that long ago, a real estate developer in Texas asked me why America couldn’t put a halt on the importation of “low-skill” immigrants and bring over doctors and programmers instead—as if most every building he’d had constructed, and many of the businesses that filled them, hadn’t relied on low-cost migrant labor. If he didn’t know that to be the case, what hope for the rest of us?
Gallup polling going back sixty years shows voter preferences on legal immigration fluctuating wildly. In these polls, Americans are given three options: more immigration, less immigration, or the same amount. A plurality—often a majority—of Americans wanted fewer immigrants for nearly the entire period. But from 1993 to 2020, the percentage of Americans who preferred more immigrants rose from just 6 percent to 34 percent—spiking dramatically as Americans were polarized around Trump’s harsh immigration program. In 2020, briefly, a greater percentage of Americans wanted more immigration than less immigration. In this window, Democrats and moderates learned to love the tired and the poor.
And then, under President Joe Biden, public sentiment went into reverse. Last year in June, 41 percent of Americans who were polled wanted fewer immigrants, while 26 percent wanted more. In June of this year, the gap had widened to 55 percent and 16 percent. The last time we saw Americans as hostile to (legal) immigration was just after 9/11.
Maybe this is a reflection of a public that has had an organic about-face on an issue to which it has given due consideration. Or maybe this is an issue on which Americans are taking cues from politicians. The party of the left has retreated, and the party of the right is more right-wing than before. What is the public supposed to think?
The irony is that America’s relationship with immigrants is everyone’s problem. It is both a pocketbook issue and an issue—perhaps the issue—most determinative of national character, the kind of country we are. Americans are smart enough to hear the true case made that the nation’s chief asset in this century is that, amid falling birth rates, we have the ability to draw the world’s hardest workers in great numbers—well apart from whatever moral obligation we have, as the richest and most secure country in the world, to help those who are suffering.
Vance’s podcast commentary about the menace of early Irish reminded me that on July 4, 1858, Abraham Lincoln, roughly two and a half years shy of becoming the first Republican president, spoke about the same migrants—“German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian.” They had come to America but could not trace lineages to the founding fathers, or even to recent generations of citizens, and so might wonder if this country really belonged to them.
The difference between an Irish laborer and the average American in the 1850s was much greater than the difference today between a Guatemalan who grew up on Marvel movies and a lifelong resident of San Antonio. And the budding Republican Party of Lincoln’s day depended on winning over the nativist supporters of the Know Nothing Party in the North to have a chance at wielding political power. Lincoln could have placated those voters, but he spoke out instead, in the strongest possible terms. The Southie dockworker with the Irish brogue was no different in worth from the old-line WASP in Boston, Lincoln said, because of the “electric cord” in the Declaration of Independence, the promise that “all men are created equal.” Newcomers to America had “a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”
That kind of talk might sound excessively earnest and dated to modern ears. Should Allred jump on a skateboard and, as O’Rourke might have, declare boldly that the Nicaraguan is our brother? No, probably not. Americans aren’t in a mood to hear it. But who will?
