Adrian Carrasquillo - With Republicans Winning on Immigration, Demoralized Democrats See Inflection Point

 https://themessenger.com/politics/with-republicans-winning-on-immigration-demoralized-democrats-see-inflection-point

With Republicans Winning on Immigration, Demoralized Democrats See Inflection Point

Adrift Democrats must stop playing defense on the border narrative and stand for something, party leaders say

Published 10/18/23 05:00 AM ET|Updated 4 hr ago

Adrian Carrasquillo

It’s not exactly news that Ronald Reagan’s views on immigration and policy that led to amnesty for three million immigrants in 1986 are no longer welcome in the modern Republican Party after the rise of former president Donald Trump.

But what has gone less noticed is the way the Democratic Party has drastically transformed its rhetoric and policy pronouncements around immigration over the last decade. It's why in prominent circles of the party's left flank, there is the dejected view that on narrative and now immigration policy, Republicans have won.

The issue came into sharp focus after President Joe Biden announced earlier this month that he was paving the way for a new 20-mile section of border wall to be built in South Texas by waiving more than two dozen federal environmental laws by executive action. While the administration stressed that the money for the wall was already appropriated by the Trump administration, who saw the unfinished wall as something of a crown jewel of its restrictionist immigration theory, many on the left responded angrily at what it viewed as a betrayal.

In an MSNBC column entitled "There's no excusing Joe Biden deciding to add to Donald Trump's border wall," columnist Julio Ricardo Varela quoted Biden telling Black and Latino journalists as a candidate in the summer of 2020 that "there will not be another foot of wall constructed." Varela went on to declare "such a heel turn from Biden on the construction of a border wall could make some Latino voters question their support for his re-election," at a time when the Biden campaign is laser-focused on winning back Hispanic voters who have drifted from the party.

In a piece titled "The Triumph of Trump’s Anti-Migrant Cruelty," in the liberal The New Republic, Felipe De La Hoz declared the news marked the "official death of the pro-immigrant consensus that solidified in mainstream Democratic circles (and blue cities especially) during the Trump administration—and it made clear that although Trump lost in 2020, his immigration policies have won out."

While one of Biden's first actions as president was to release a proclamation stating that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution,” a number of Democrats in blue states are also now espousing views that are typically more at home in the Republican Party.

An advisor for New York City Mayor Eric Adams said this month that the federal government, Congress, and the president have to do their job, which is to "close the borders." That day, New York Governor Kathy Hochul added that Congress must "have a limit on who can come across the border. It is too open right now. People coming from all over the world are finding their way through.”

The border is in crisis narrative now seemingly accepted by senior Democrats represents a stark shift from 2015, when in the midst of a heated primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders espoused immigration platforms that would now seem to be written in another country, and certainly during a different political time.

Clinton constantly said she would be open to going farther than Barack Obama did on immigration, who himself forged ahead on DACA and DAPA programs that were later caught in legal limbo. As both campaigns jockeyed to be seen as most progressive on immigration, Sanders announced in the fall of 2015 a plan to bring back deported immigrants, a plan that if announced by a Democrat now would not just lead Fox News and rightwing media, but also be seen dramatically at odds with current party orthodoxy.

Democrats who spoke with The Messenger say the party is now adrift on the issue of immigration and at the whim of a Republican Party that is winning the political and narrative fight on the border. The party, they say, must fight back or risk the issue being further weaponized to their detriment in 2024.

"Democrats have always taken their cue from non-Hispanics — they've never taken their cue on immigration from Hispanics," former congressman Luis Gutierrez, a longtime champion on immigration reform, said.

There was a glimmer during Obama's presidency, he said, "but when it got tough they turned their back."

Gutierrez argued that while Democrats charged forward on politically painful issues like the assault weapons ban and Obamacare despite the costs to members who lost their seats, the thought process from the Democratic caucus on immigration was always a calculation of whether it would lose the party the majority in Congress.

"We have never fully marched forward when it comes to immigration reform and today I believe it is more pervasive than ever before," he said, before turning to the current moment. "Among the Democratic elite, starting with the Biden administration on down, they fear immigration."

A senior Democratic lawmaker told The Messenger that the pendulum swings back and forth on immigration policy, noting that in the 1990's Democrats passed more restrictive immigration laws and a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed them. Later, Dreamer activists and the larger immigration movement pushed the Obama administration on overhauling the system through legislation, which came close multiple times but never passed, leading to executive actions that were challenged, with DACA still hanging in the balance today.

"In the meantime you have a Republican Party who have become a lot more hostile towards immigrants and asylum seekers," the source said, calling some of their Republican colleagues "a**holes generally" because "a lot are prejudiced" against Latin American immigrants.

"So when the Biden administration decided to keep some of Trump's policies in place and play all defense and hide and seek on the immigration issue, it emboldened Republicans to go even further to the right — and that's what you see today."

Biden introduced a comprehensive immigration reform package at the outset of his presidency and was saddled with an asylum system Democrats described as broken and gutted and fueled by Trump and his advisor Stephen Miller's hardline stances on immigration, which they say made it harder to govern effectively.

Democrats have in recent years passed the Dream Act and the Farmworker Modernization Act in the House, bills that did not get traction in the Senate.

"Many Republican colleagues have moved so far right, they literally want to end immigration as we know it," Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar, a national co-chair for Biden's campaign, told The Messenger. "HR-2 would jail every asylum seeker and deport children, among other draconian things."

Escobar said she "bristles" when people say Biden has done the same thing Trump did.

"Donald Trump never opened up legal pathways, Donald Trump jailed families, Donald Trump separated small children from their mothers," she said. "I know some advocates and members of Congress are not happy with President Biden's efforts, but what can not go unrecognized is he only has the tools available to him that Congress has given him."

Asked for comment, the Department of Homeland Security referred The Messenger to a fact sheet it released last month that said as a result of Congress’ "failure" to enact reform, the administration has been using the limited tools it has available to secure the border and build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system while "leading the largest expansion of lawful pathways for immigration in decades." It also urged passage of fully funded emergency appropriations, including the $4 billion supplemental funding request for border security, as requested by Biden this past summer.

DHS also said it was combating smugglers, deploying a military personnel surge to support border efforts, expediting family removals of those without a lawful basis to be in the country, and working with international partners to speed removals and returns.

But with border enforcement agents now making more than 9,000 arrests a day, which is a near record, and September's apprehensions surpassed only by the records set in May and December 2022, Republicans have a ripe target in the border they say is plainly in crisis.

"Biden’s botched open borders policies are impacting the lives of Americans all across the country, regardless of political affiliation," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who once supported the Senate's bipartisan Gang of 8 for immigration reform during the Obama era, but has since fallen more in line with his party's views, told The Messenger. "The world is a dangerous place and we don’t know who is illegally entering our nation. This unprecedented chaos puts all of our communities at risk. The Biden Administration and left-wing activists need to answer for their reckless policies, which are undermining our national security interests and sovereignty.”

It's no surprise that Rubio is slamming the Biden administration on the border, but it's unusual to see criticism extend to a group like FWD.us, a bipartisan immigration advocacy organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech and business leaders that has worked with Democrats for a decade.

While its president, Todd Schulte, said the administration has done "transformative" work in 2023 on opening up legal pathways, he told The Messenger Biden's rhetoric as a candidate and first two years as president did not align successfully, citing keeping the Trump-era Title 42 policy as a mistake.

"Biden shifted left rhetorically, but right on policy in ways that didn’t reduce migration, which is not a good place to be politically," Schulte said.

Immigration and the border is not a new issue for Republicans to rail against.

The Republican Party platform during the 1996 convention, for example, charged that "Bill Clinton's immigration record does not match his rhetoric."

While "talking tough" on illegal immigration, it said he proposed a reduction in the number of border patrol agents authorized by Republicans in Congress, opposed the "most successful border control program in decades" (Operation Hold the Line in Texas), opposed the infamous Proposition 187, and opposed Republican efforts to ensure that non-citizens "do not take advantage of expensive welfare programs."

"Unlike Bill Clinton, we stand with the American people on immigration policy and will continue to reform and enforce our immigration laws to ensure that they reflect America's national interest," the party platform read.

While they now seem ubiquitous, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are not enshrined in the Constitution, but instead are all post-9/11 creations, erected during a four-month period from 2002 to 2003.

The focus on the border was only amplified in 2014, when thousands of unaccompanied minors came to the United States, creating a political problem for Obama. Similarly, ahead of the 2018 midterms, Trump himself warned of caravans of migrants coming to the country — an issue that received wall-to-wall Fox News coverage, but was washed away by the Democratic blue wave that November.

Sensing blood in the water, Republicans are betting — and spending — big that immigration and border messaging will be a political winner next November, with $15 million spent on immigration-related ads in combined streaming and broadcast spending, according to AdImpact data provided to The Messenger by immigration advocacy organization America's Voice, which is tracking the ads.

Most of that spend has come from Trump allies MAGA Inc. and Never Back Down, the super PAC aligned with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but also includes ads run by Sen. Tim Scott. The topics mostly fall into three buckets: Invasion rhetoric, open borders, and fentanyl and crime coming across the border.

America's Voice, which has been tracking the ads closely since 2018, told The Messenger it could "confidently" say the rhetoric in the ads is getting worse. The group stressed that the "ugliest" rhetoric that references "white nationalist conspiracies and courts political violence like the 'invasion' language" is becoming more ubiquitous.

Arguing that the ads will only get worse over the next year, the group offered as an example that Citizens for Sanity, begun by Stephen Miller allies, which was the 8th top spender on TV in 2022, hasn't made any significant buys yet.

"Republicans use migrants as political scarecrows to gin up fear among Americans, especially white Americans, that people different from you, who speak a different language, are out to hurt you and are going to change the makeup of America," Rep. Joaquin Castro told The Messenger. "When that's what you hear every day on Fox and on rightwing outlets, implicitly or explicitly over time, that has an effect, especially if the other side isn't standing up for what it believes it should."

None of this is happening in a vacuum on the GOP side, with Republicans not just ramping up spending on TV on border messaging, but Trump starting to go even farther to the right on immigration during campaign stops in recent weeks, The Washington Post reported.

Trump has shocked watchdog and Latino groups by accusing undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” casting them as dangerous threats to the nation, and going as far as to associate them with the Hamas attack on Israel.

“It’s the blood of our country; what they’re doing is destroying our country,” Trump said in Iowa last month. In New Hampshire last week, he said: “People (are) pouring into our country, and we have no idea from where they come,” he said.

This week Trump again reiterated a pledge from September — that upon his inauguration he will "quickly" seal the border, terminate Biden's "open borders" policies and "carry out the largest domestic deportation operation" in history, larger than Eisenhower's infamous and offensively named "Operation Wetback" from the 1950's.

If it sounds familiar it's because Trump favorably cited the program in 2015 when he first ran for president.

Domingo Garcia, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the oldest Latino civil rights groups in the nation, who has compared Trump's new extremes around immigration to Nazi propaganda about Jews, told The Messenger Democrats must respond forcefully.

"The Democrats have been totally asleep at the wheel and have had a milquetoast response or no response and Trump and other Republican candidates feel there is no consequence to their hate speech," he said, calling the new messaging "fear mongering straight out of the Nazi playbook" to scapegoat a group that's "defenseless" and make them the enemy "so that fear drives voters to their camp."

Seemingly adrift on possible policy solutions and internalizing Republican attacks on a porous border, Democrats are asking themselves a simple yet critical question ahead of the general election: Can immigration still be a political winner in 2024?

The Immigrration Hub, a group incubated by the Emerson Collective in 2017 to fight back against rising anti-immigrant sentiment and policies, sees an opening for Biden and Democrats in its polling of battleground states and Latino voters — if they once again lean into the issue over the next year.

In April, the group found voters disapprove of the way both parties are handling immigration "but Democrats face a tougher public opinion environment on the issue because voters don’t know where they stand on immigration."

The group also found voters overwhelmingly support balanced solutions that include border security and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants at 68% of all voters, including 74% of swing voters.

Additionally, a September Latino battleground survey found that 61% of Latino voters do not support Republican policies and continue to view the GOP as hostile to immigrants and their contributions to the economy.

"The American public is not anti-immigrant, they're anti-chaos — and chaos is all Republican candidates have to offer," Beatriz Lopez, the deputy director of the Immigration Hub told The Messenger. "President Biden and Democrats should seize the moment, counter, and pick up critical votes by reminding the American people what they've done to rebuild our border security infrastructure after the former administration all but destroyed it and by — most importantly — delivering work permits for long-settled immigrants in the U.S." 

"I can only speak for myself, based on polling, the conversations I've had, and knowing the realities on the ground on the border, I know the American public wants us to create order and is still supportive of immigration overall," Escobar, the El Paso representative said, before turning to the humanity that undergirds the broken immigration system. "We absolutely should lean in on this, not because fixing the immigration system could be a political winner, but because it's the right thing to do. We're in one of the most difficult moments on this issue and the solution will have to be bipartisan."

The senior Democratic lawmaker agreed, but said the Biden administration is going to have to fight on the issue.

"It can't just be all defense from the Biden administration, you have to make the case for how immigrants and migrants contribute to the country," the source said. "Like a boxing match, if all we're doing is ducking and weaving and not throwing any punches ourselves we're going to get knocked out."