This article appears in the December 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
When Joe Biden took office in 2021, the United States was in an unusually pro-immigration mood, perhaps because of the sympathy for immigrants generated by Donald Trump’s policy of family separations and other harsh measures. Since 1965, Gallup has asked whether immigration should be “kept at its present level, increased or decreased.” The only years when Gallup has ever found more Americans favoring an increase rather than a reduction were 2020 and 2021. Gallup has also historically asked whether immigration is a “good” or a “bad” thing. At the start of the 2020s, three-quarters of Americans said it was a good thing.
Biden’s initial policies reflected that singular moment and his own determination to adopt a more humane approach to migrants, in stark contrast with his predecessor’s cruelty. But by the beginning of 2024, the public mood and the politics of immigration had taken a radical turn. Americans favored a reduction over an increase in immigration by a more than 3-to-1 margin, and only 32 percent of Americans expressed any confidence in Biden’s immigration policies.
Confronted with mass disapproval in an election year, the president reversed course and sought to shut down the border. But it was too late to change the public’s verdict on his immigration policies. Biden’s reversal, and the little that Kamala Harris had to say about immigration in her campaign, also seemingly validated Trump’s view that a humane, welcoming immigration policy is a mistake.
One of the tragic aspects of Biden’s presidency is the setback it has now dealt to immigration. The United States has enjoyed an enormous economic and social benefit from immigration since 1965, when Congress ended the national-origins quotas dating from the 1920s that limited entry largely to Northern and Western Europeans. The post-1965 immigrants—some 72 million of them, just under half from Latin America and just over a quarter from East and South Asia—have added immensely to American culture and American wealth.
Many people may believe that the new immigrants have not been as high-achieving or as interested in assimilation as the European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But that perception is wrong, as the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan demonstrate in their 2022 book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success. The new immigrants have done just as well as their earlier counterparts and assimilated at a similar rate. In fact, Abramitzky and Boustan’s data on immigrants who entered the country in 1980 show that their sons and daughters—and this includes the second generation of immigrants from most Latin American and African countries—have outpaced other Americans in social mobility.
If we do enter a new era of immigration restriction, it will not make America great again.
The myths about immigrants promoted by Trump and other nativists have had the facts exactly backward. Instead of bringing crime and disorder, the recent immigrants have had lower crime rates than the native-born, and helped revive declining communities. Contrary to the idea that they bring disease, they are healthier than other Americans. The trends in health and longevity in the United States would all be worse if not for what social scientists call the “immigrant health advantage.” As of 2017, life expectancy among the foreign-born—81.4 years for men and 85.7 for women—was seven years greater than for U.S.-born men and six years greater than for U.S.-born women. Although comparable data on qualities like initiative and persistence are not available, it shouldn’t be surprising that immigrants and their children show up so conspicuously in the history of American inventors and entrepreneurs, the ranks of Nobel Prize winners, and top leadership positions in the tech industry.
But the supporters of immigration need to recognize that they have been asking a great deal of their fellow citizens. The United States has by far the most international migrants of any country in the world, more than the next four countries combined. While the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, it has 20 percent of global migrants. Nearly everywhere in the world, people fear outsiders, especially racial and religious outsiders; it is not unusual for them to see no benefit to themselves from immigration, even if that’s incorrect. They may conceive of their nation’s economy in static terms as producing a fixed number of jobs, which immigrants will only steal away. They may worry, not unreasonably, that their taxes will go up and housing will be in short supply when large numbers of immigrants arrive in their area from poverty-stricken countries.
If you believe immigration is a good thing, you must take into consideration the many people who have reasonable worries that it’s a bad thing for them. Americans have historically been, if anything, amazingly open and generous in their views of immigration. Accusing your fellow citizens of racism when they have doubts about welcoming foreigners may not be the best way to win them over. If you are a public official, you must be determined to give people as little basis for their fears as possible, and you must be able to tell a convincing story about how all Americans can benefit from the infusion of energy that immigrants bring. Most of all, you must show them that immigration is orderly and under control. You cannot take any of this for granted and simply make policy through below-the-radar executive actions.
Liberals and progressives need to be especially sensitive to these political imperatives. Internationally, rising levels of immigration are associated with support for anti-immigrant, right-wing parties. The United States has now reached about the same proportion of immigrants in its population—14.3 percent in 2023—that it had in the early 20th century, before the passage of immigration restrictions that lasted until 1965. The sharp increase in the immigrant population has been testing the limits of public tolerance. Yet still, as I’ve mentioned, when Biden came into office, there was a great deal of goodwill toward immigrants. If Biden had acted preemptively to avoid a crisis on the border, he might have maintained that goodwill. But he didn’t, and that failure holds lessons about how we ought to think about immigration now.
KARLA ANN COTÉ SIPA USA VIA AP
The transportation of migrants into Democratic cities broadened concerns about the surge and split the Democratic Party.
AFTER TAKING OFFICE, BIDEN REVERSED many of the policies that Trump had used to deter migrants and provided new ways for migrants to get temporary authorization to stay in the United States. With the end of the COVID pandemic and the eventual lifting of Title 42 restrictions that imposed a blanket ban on asylum seekers, there was a surge of migrants on the southwestern border, after relatively few crossings in 2020.
Demographers often analyze migration in terms of “push” and “pull” factors. No doubt desperate conditions in many countries such as Venezuela and Ukraine pushed migrants to flee. The prospect of jobs in the United States, where an economy recovering faster than others had millions of job openings, also pulled them in America’s direction.
But Biden’s immigration policies also pulled them to the United States in such large numbers that border regions seemed in chaos and the asylum system was overwhelmed. Not only did migrant apprehensions on the border rise to record levels, exceeding two million in both 2022 and 2023, more than twice as many as under Trump. A majority of those apprehensions, far more than in previous years, resulted in migrants staying in the United States rather than being expelled. As the number of migrants seeking asylum overwhelmed detention centers, they were released into the interior with instructions to show up at an uncertain date, perhaps years later, in immigration court. Many people in distant countries learned about these conditions through online and personal networks and made a rational decision to risk a dangerous journey to reach and cross the U.S. border, knowing that they would likely be able to stay.
The Biden administration is right that congressional Republicans prevented the president from getting the authority and resources to address the crisis. In 2022, moreover, two Republican governors, Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, made sure that the migrants didn’t all just stay in their states, and began shipping them to Democratic cities. Eventually, tens of thousands of them arrived in New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver, and elsewhere, raising pressures on housing and other services as well as local budgets. The governors’ strategy worked. It broadened concerns about the migrant surge and succeeded in splitting the Democratic Party.
The basic problems with the asylum system had already become evident during Trump’s presidency. Increasingly, people from Latin America and around the world were not surreptitiously stealing across the border in violation of U.S. law, but presenting themselves at the border to immigration authorities and seeking asylum under U.S. and international law. U.S. law granted them a right to a hearing, but the immigration courts did not have the capacity to conduct those hearings immediately. Trump dealt with the problem in his first term by requiring migrants to “remain in Mexico” until their cases could be heard.
Biden was slow to recognize that his initial policies would contribute to a crisis. Perhaps he didn’t want to contend with the immigration advocates in his own party who would accuse him of being just like Trump if he limited access to asylum. But the rumblings from overwhelmed blue cities could not be ignored.
Finally, at the end of 2023, the Biden administration secured Mexico’s agreement to limit the number of migrants arriving at the U.S. border. In January 2024, Biden said that if Congress gave him the authority to shut down the border, “I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.” He endorsed a bill being negotiated by congressional Democrats and Republicans that would have been a major enforcement-oriented shift in immigration law—until Trump, preferring to keep the issue boiling, shot the legislation down.
In June, after long insisting that he needed authority from Congress, Biden discovered, lo and behold, that he could do on his own what was necessary to stop the flood of migrants. He issued an executive order denying migrants asylum if they arrived illegally and established new border procedures making it less likely migrants would qualify for asylum. By September, border apprehensions fell to the lowest levels in years, but the election was now only weeks away.
BIDEN HAD PUT THE PUBLIC’S TOLERANCE for immigrants to a stress test it should never have had to face. Since the 1980 Refugee Act, the United States has had a well-structured program for refugee resettlement that long enjoyed strong bipartisan support. After Trump sharply cut the program, Biden appropriately revived it, but he did far more than that. He enlarged another legal pathway, immigration parole, for people whom the limited refugee program couldn’t accommodate. In 2022, the administration began extending parole on a nationality basis to up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua. If they passed background checks and had a financial sponsor, they could take flights to the United States and receive legal permission to stay for up to two years.
In addition, border authorities began granting short-term parole to migrants encountered illegally crossing the border. Between 2008 and 2020, Border Patrol had extended parole only to about 770 migrants, but from January 2021 until June 2023, 718,000 migrants apprehended between ports of entry received parole. Parole was only one of several forms of temporary protection. As of last January, there were about 2.3 million immigrants in the country who had been given temporary protections of one kind or another. The Migration Policy Institute called them a “ballooning population in limbo.”
Millions of immigrants now occupy a “twilight” status, living in the United States but with no guarantee that they can remain. “When Mr. Biden was elected,” Michael D. Shear and Hamed Aleaziz of The New York Times pointed out in November, “more than three million migrants tracked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been released into cities across the United States while their cases were considered by a backed-up court system. Four years later, officials say that number has more than doubled to 7.6 million people.” Biden also raised the number of immigrants receiving permanent legal residency back up past one million a year.
The myths about immigrants promoted by Trump and other nativists have had the facts exactly backward.
The public wasn’t wrong in 2020 to think that immigration is a “good thing.” The influx of immigrants has been positive for the economy. Just as in the past, the recent immigrants have helped fill unmet demands for labor, fueled growth in declining cities (like that target of Trump’s animus, Springfield, Ohio), and even improved the nation’s fiscal outlook. A report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, projected that “as a result of the immigration surge,” GDP over the 2024–2034 period would rise by $8.9 trillion, federal tax revenues would increase by $1.2 trillion, and the federal deficit would fall by $900 billion. Even with the influx of immigrants, unemployment didn’t just stay low under Biden. It stayed lower for longer than during any other administration since the 1960s.
But the persistent chaos at the border and the sheer scale of immigrants admitted on a temporary basis created two political problems. The first was an election problem for Democrats in 2024. Biden had never made a case as to why the country ought to extend temporary authorization to migrants on such a broad basis. The arrival of immigrants without networks of support created major fiscal and housing problems around the country, led a majority of voters to believe that immigration was out of control, and lent credibility to Trump’s anti-immigrant tirades. Immigration became one of the top issues in the election and contributed to Kamala Harris’s defeat.
And that defeat has now created a second problem. The fate of those temporarily authorized immigrants, along with the undocumented, will be up to Donald Trump.
THIS PAST YEAR HAS MARKED the hundredth anniversary of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, though I am not aware of any public events either condemning or celebrating it. The act drastically reduced overall immigration, blocked most Southern and Eastern Europeans, and barred Asians entirely until Congress reopened the doors in 1965. But while the centenary of the Johnson-Reed Act passed largely unnoticed, the voters this year did commemorate it, albeit in the worst possible way. They elected a president who waged a relentlessly anti-immigrant campaign and promised the largest mass deportations in American history.
How far Trump will go in carrying out those mass deportations is impossible to say now. He has ample legal authority to go after immigrants who are in the country without legal authorization, and he can end temporary authorization for those who are here on that basis. Deporting the temporary population alone would affect millions of families.
During Trump’s first term, immigration was a top issue for him, but he achieved remarkably little. When he became president in 2017, according to analyses based on census data, the unauthorized population stood at 10.5 million; when he left office, the unauthorized population was … still 10.5 million. Even during his first two years, when Republicans controlled Congress, the supposed master of the “art of the deal” was unable to work out a deal on immigration legislation that might have enabled a tighter border. Within the White House, Stephen Miller sabotaged the kind of compromises that could have gotten Trump billions of dollars to build his wall on the Mexican border in exchange for a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers. There were nearly one million border crossings in fiscal year 2019. It took the COVID crisis to provide a public-health pretext to effectively shut the border.
ALEX BRANDON/AP PHOTO
Donald Trump has learned that he can vilify immigrants yet still win adherents in immigrant communities.
But as in so many other areas, Trump’s first term may not be indicative of his second. He will not have to deal with some of the officials who previously blocked him from getting his way on asylum. He can use his executive authority and possibly invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to fulfill his promise of mass deportations.
Trump, however, has to worry about the likely inflationary effects of deporting workers who are vital to key industries. As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, immigrants make up about three-fourths of agricultural workers, and half of them are undocumented. More than one-fifth of construction workers are also undocumented. As a result of today’s low unemployment rate, there aren’t enough able-bodied, native-born Americans sitting around ready to fill those jobs. Mass deportations could drive up grocery bills and limit the nation’s capacity to build new housing.
I am not saying Trump won’t deport the Haitians in Springfield. He will need some conspicuous victims. But he will have to think twice about deporting immigrants on the scale that he and Miller have been suggesting.
Whatever happens with deportations, the 2024 election may hold even more far-reaching implications for immigration. Trump’s Republican Party is an immigration restrictionist party. It has even learned that its presidential candidate can vilify immigrants and still make gains among Hispanic voters. There may not be much to hold Republicans back from undoing the foundations of contemporary immigration policy and bringing to an end the era of mass migration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa that began with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
But if we do enter a new era of immigration restriction, it will not make America great again. On the contrary, it will make America smaller and poorer. As the Federal Reserve study of the recent immigration surge points out, “The nation is in a sort of demographic autumn, and winter is coming. The retirement of the baby boomers and overall aging of the workforce, as well as low and falling birth rates mean population growth will become entirely dependent on immigration by 2040, as deaths of U.S.-born will outpace births.”
Long before that point, there would be enormous economic pressure to reopen the country to immigration. So I don’t think the United States would stick with immigration restriction indefinitely, but it could be on the horizon for years to come—unless Trump, having won more support from Hispanic voters in 2024, decides that immigration is not such a terrible thing after all. With Trump, you never know.
