The Case for a Different Approach

For a decade, Democrats talked about immigration as a strength while governing it like a problem they hoped would go away. That contradiction continues to undermine our policies and politics on this issue. If we don’t address it now, it will poison the 2028 election.

The political damage from President Biden’s failures on immigration was decisive. When Biden took office in 2021, he inherited a border policy built on cruelty and a public health emergency that had papered over the underlying dysfunction. Biden’s team was right to dismantle the ideas behind those policies, but they failed to replace them with something that worked. There was no coherent processing or resettlement system for people who’d been waiting for years and now wanted to enter the US, no resourcing plan for cities receiving large numbers of arrivals, no sustained public case for what they were doing or why. At the same time, irregular attempts to cross the border skyrocketed. Democrats failed to react and failed to resource effective resettlement. It looked like they couldn’t manage it, because too many people decided it was better politics to pretend there wasn’t a problem than to acknowledge it and resource the response. The political impact was disastrous.

That failure cost more than an election. It handed opponents a story they’ve been telling ever since. That Democrats are either unwilling or incapable of controlling the border, that compassion and order are incompatible, that the only people who take this seriously are the ones willing to be cruel about it. Even worse, it empowered a small minority of voices who believe immigration is bad for the country, and who are using every lever at their disposal to attack immigration – legal, illegal, and the opportunity for people to come to the United States in the future. And any Democrat who wins in 2028 without a real answer to that chaos will watch it swallow their administration whole, exactly what happened to Biden.

Some Democrats, looking at that wreckage, have concluded the lesson is to get tougher. Recent work from the Searchlight Institute reflects serious analytical thinking about how to rebuild public trust on immigration. When the only way to access relief is to physically arrive at the U.S. border, the system functions as an incentive for dangerous journeys. People pay smugglers thousands of dollars to walk thousands of miles. They arrive at the border because that is the only door anyone has told them exists. Reforming that system is necessary and long overdue.

But the analysis is incomplete. Legal pathways appear as a concession at the margins, not as the anchor. If you believe immigration is necessary for America’s future, then building affirmative, accessible legal pathways isn’t the thing you do after you’ve handled enforcement. It’s the thing that makes enforcement legitimate and workable in the first place. A system that says “come the right way” has an obligation to make the right way real. Right now it isn’t. Without that, Democrats are left offering a more humane version of restriction rather than a genuinely different approach, and voters notice. It creates a vacuum that Trump filled with the only answer he has ever had.

Since returning to office in 2025, President Trump supercharged the cruelty-as-a-deterrent policies at the border and across the country with devastating effectiveness. There is no doubt that his policies have resulted in border encounters dropping sharply, but they also led to drastic cuts to legal immigration. His overall approach is inflicting significant harm on American families costing the average American household an additional $2,150 per year by the end of 2028. Food prices are on track to rise nearly 15% as agricultural workers disappear from farms in California, Florida, and Georgia. Construction costs are climbing as the workforce that builds housing thins out. Care facilities are short-staffed. Immigrants pay nearly $580 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes and account for a quarter of all startup founders. They are not taking from this economy. They are holding large parts of it together.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City documented that declining immigration combined with an aging population is already reducing labor force growth to levels that cannot sustain a stable economy. Brookings found that net migration to the United States was negative in 2025 -- the first time in at least half a century -- and that the resulting decline in labor supply and consumer spending reduced GDP by between $40 and $60 billion last year alone. The Peterson Institute estimates that deporting 8.3 million undocumented immigrants would reduce GDP by 7.4 percent by 2028, a contraction on the scale of the Great Recession. These are not projections about immigrant welfare. They are projections about the future of American prosperity.

This is the argument Democrats have been too cautious to make directly: Trump’s immigration policy is not just cruel, it is a generational mistake. It is being sold to working people as protection, but it is removing the very engine of economic renewal that working people depend on. The scarcity story, that immigrants take rather than build, has always been false. What the administration is doing now is running that experiment in real time with disastrous results.

Not only is the policy hurting our families, it’s unsustainable. Last week a federal appeals court ruled that Trump’s declaration of an “invasion” to deny asylum seekers entry was illegal, clearing the way to reopen the border to asylum claims. The administration is vowing to fight it. But the legal architecture that has allowed migrants to seek asylum for decades is not going away. The courts have now said so plainly. The next administration will inherit a legal obligation to process asylum claims whether it has a functioning system or not. The question is whether Democrats arrive with a real plan or repeat the chaos of 2021.

What a real alternative looks like starts with a simple premise: people want to come to the United States, and will use whatever pathway is most visible and accessible. Right now, that pathway runs through the border. The answer is not to eliminate the need. It is to redirect it away from the border.

We must build a system that Republicans have spent the last 20 years dismantling: real legal avenues to apply without walking to the border to do it. A simple application process with fast vetting and real timelines. Regional processing centers across the hemisphere where people forced to leave their homes can wait and be processed in an orderly way. If we want people to stop arriving without authorization, we have to give them a real alternative before they get there.

None of this can be done alone. It requires a coordinated hemispheric strategy -- working with Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, and others -- built around a shared understanding that managing and unleashing the power of migration benefits every country in the region. That work is the next step. But it starts with saying something Democrats have been too reluctant to say out loud: the border is the worst possible place to process migration. It is chaotic, under-resourced, and built for enforcement, not case review. There are currently more than 3.2 million pending cases in the immigration court system. The law requires a decision within 180 days, but the reality is a decade of limbo. The answer is not to make it harder to apply. It is to shift where people apply.

The choice in front of us is not between open borders and closed ones. It is between a system organized around fear and one organized around function. Trump’s strategy based in fear is playing out in real time. The results are showing up in the price of eggs, in the farms that can’t find workers, in the care facilities that can’t fill shifts, in an economy slowly running out of the people it needs to grow. And voters are rejecting his approach. They know we need the immigrants already in our communities and the next generation who will come and help build what comes next. That is not a progressive talking point. It is an economic and demographic fact. Meeting that reality requires political will, operational seriousness, and the courage to say plainly what is true: immigration is not a problem to be managed. It is vital to this country’s future. The system that could actually work -- legal pathways, regional processing, enforcement built around compliance rather than spectacle -- is not complicated. It just requires leaders willing to fight for it.

That is the case Democrats have to make. And they have to mean it.