There Is No Winning Immigration Argument
People Just Don't Want Foreigners In Their Communities
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis started bussing migrants to liberal cities, I sent up red flags to everyone in my orbit that it would “kill” the progressive movement and force the Democratic Party’s hand in becoming more anti-immigration. Progressives said I was “concern trolling” and snapped at everyone for being too cowardly and xenophobic. They assured me America would see through the stunt and reminded me that immigration reform polled well and former President Donald Trump’s policies polled badly.
My argument was simple, however: The cities cannot handle an influx of migrants; they are only equipped to handle a small number of immigrants at a time. Eventually local communities will be overwhelmed, people will notice and slowly turn against liberal immigration ideals. The warning was met with many ideological and emotional responses: “These are human beings,” “We will do what we can,” and “It will be all hands on deck,” and “shut up racist.”
Then, a plane full of migrants landed at Martha’s Vineyard, a stunt that was meant to convince working-class Americans that the elites who live on the New England island resort were hypocrites. To their credit residents there did do whatever they could do to help. The outpouring of donations and the dedication of volunteers on the island was inspiring to many who wanted to prove America was a hospitable place and the Donald Trumps of the country are not representative of the American people. Unfortunately, no one noticed.
As it turned out, a remote island of 15,000 year-round residents was never going to be equipped to handle that size of an influx of migrants. The migrants themselves did not want to be there anyway, so most of them were ferried off the island so they can find work and live on the mainland. In doing so, they proved that cynics like Abbott and DeSantis were correct. “They want us to deal with the migrant problem while they could never deal with it, and then they want to judge us from high atop their ivory towers.”
It was extremely effective.
There was no way for pro-immigrant liberals to win this argument. Martha’s Vineyard is not Brownsville or El Paso. It’s not even New York or Los Angeles. It only became a target because it was a vacation mecca of the deemed “elite” and because cynical Republicans like DeSantis, who organized the stunt, knew they couldn’t handle it. The border region is accustomed to this issue and has built up infrastructure to handle it – albeit infrastructure that has been taxed these past few years. Ellis Island could process an average of 5,000 immigrants a day at its peak and did so without much issue. Had the boats that landed in New York Harbor been rerouted to Newport, Rhode Island in the early 1900s, they wouldn't have been able to handle it just as Martha’s Vineyard wasn’t.
Nevertheless, optics are critical in politics, and the optics of watching an island of affluent smug liberals scurry to deal with a problem border towns had been dealing with for decades, only to ferry the problem to someone else in the end, was disastrous. It is the epic “owning the libs” moment.
Progressives complain that Democrats never really countered the conservatives on the issue with a winning message. The problem is there isn’t one. The “diversity is good” argument is not compelling anymore – if it ever was – and even though it was clear immigrants were not contributing to crime or quality of life issues, that didn’t stick since there was always a counterexample to point to; an undocumented immigrant who killed someone or robbed a store.
Progressives now had fall back on what should be the most persuasive argument—the economy.
Mass deportation will wreck our economy. There are not enough legal immigrants and American citizens to fill the jobs undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers like the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, hold. Unemployment is historically low, and very few long-term unemployed people are desperate for work. This is not 2009. Farmers will struggle to get workers to pick crops; contractors will struggle to find workers to build housing; hotels will be unable to find cleaning crews to clean rooms and amenities. It will be an economic disaster.
It won’t matter though. That argument may seem persuasive, but it won’t work. I made it to my mom’s cousin in 2016 when he said he would vote for Trump even after he admitted deporting and restricting immigrants would destroy his construction business.
“I rely on these guys, and they’re hard workers,” he told me. “But it’s unfair that they’re here, and yeah, it’ll hurt my business, but so what?”
He got further incensed the more I made the argument, finally just acknowledging that if we kept “allowing” immigrants to come here without any restriction, “I’m going to have to learn Spanish to keep my business afloat. That’s insulting to me.”
Liberals and leftists hate to hear this, but the "mass deportation will hurt our economy" argument not only doesn’t work, it makes the entire issue worse for them. Americans have always been leery of immigration changing the demographics and culture of their communities and, ultimately, the country. The recent right-wing shift on immigration is about Americans feeling their past pro-immigrant sentiment and empathy have been taken advantage of. They think it's what triggered the migrant crisis, and they believe migrants are abusing their past empathy. Telling Americans that mass deportation will hurt the economy only reminds them that undocumented immigrants have made themselves vital to their livelihood at their expense, and that will make them feel more like they've been taken advantage of. They broke the law, and now they have us by the balls. It makes Americans feel disempowered and submissive, and they don't like that. It also makes them feel less free – their freedom now depends on other people they think wronged them.
People who feel that way want to set things straight at any cost—even to themselves. My mom’s cousin would rather lose his business than risk the country’s demographics changing. You cannot reason with people like this, it’s not logical.
Telling Americans that mass deportation will hurt the economy only reminds them that undocumented immigrants have made themselves vital to their livelihood at their expense, and that will make them feel more like they've been taken advantage of. They broke the law, and now they have us by the balls.
Immigration politics was always tenuous in America, as it is worldwide. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing Prime Minister of Italy, won her election on the issue. Far-right parties have risen to the top of the polls in Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden, running hard on immigration. New Zealand’s leftist former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern took a hard line on immigration during COVID, using the virus as an excuse. Her party was soundly defeated by the National Party in 2023, which has taken an even more far right position on immigration. Even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now taking a hard line. Five years ago, policies like mass deportation and detention camps for immigrants polled terribly; today, they have majority or near-majority support.
If Americans are coming to the hard right position on immigration, they’re coming later than the rest of the world, but that isn’t helpful to progressives or Vice President Kamala Harris, who served in an administration under which the migrants flooded the border. It’s still a losing issue that is burying the progressive movement and there’s no way to make it a winning one right now.
In the future, Democrats will have to take the stances held by other left-of-center political parties around the world, including those taken by Ardern and now Trudeau, but it may be too late for that in this election.
I have no doubt that people living on Martha's Vineyard are uncomfortable living around immigrants, but here in the suburbs we have plenty of them and no one, not even the people voting for Trump, have any problems with it. Illegal immigration is a losing issue because it looks chaotic, but majorities of BOTH parties favor increases in legal immigration.
I think because the long standing problems that have plagued the southern border—and southern hemisphere in general—have long been inadequately addressed, the patience of a more generous American populace has grown thin. We can’t do what was attempted in the early 2010s, or even what Reagan did during his presidency in this moment. The opportunity has been squandered for a more left-leaning immigration policy. It’s all going to the right. The question we have to ask ourselves especially as Democrats is how long until we have room to move back to the traditional Democratic Party position? Only time will tell. But if we don’t win this next election, it will be worse than we could ever have imagined.