Trump's Immigration Nightmare Needs to Be Opposed - So Where is the Opposition's Policy?

the anti-party strikes again

While his administration seems to have opened new fronts in every political conflict and culture war in our society, there’s little question that immigration is the focal point of the Donald Trump 2.0 agenda. Obstructing immigration (both legal and not) has proven to be the clearest line connecting his rhetoric to his action, and consequently the issue where he has the most obvious mandate; if he ran on anything, it was immigration restriction, and as much as I hate to say it a man who won the popular vote and every swing state enjoys public backing for his signature issue. Not coincidentally, immigration policy is also the area where the consequences of Democratic failure are most stark. Despite years of knowing that this was coming, this anti-immigrant backlash as wedge issue for a supremely nativist candidate, despite all the warnings, despite polling, press coverage, internal memos, and reality screaming in their faces, the Democratic Party was powerless to neutralize Trump’s immigration rhetoric - because the party still does not have an immigration policy.

To be clear, they do have slogans. They have talking points. They have hashtags and symbolic gestures and sternly worded denunciations. But they do not have a plan, not one that anyone can point to, explain, or run on. After a first term defined as much by incompetence and instability as by its accomplishments, second-term Trump quickly rounded into form with ICE raids, mass deportation, and a grim machinery of border enforcement both far more expansive and more effective than that of his first term. And what’s the response from the opposition party? The accurate contention that this was all inhumane, and probably economically ruinous, and certainly not in keeping with America’s immigrant past, but not much else. Policy specifics - who we should be letting in, how many of them, via what mechanism, with what form of enforcement or oversight - have been and remain very scarce.

This isn’t just a tactical blunder. It’s not merely a matter of bad strategy or poor messaging. It’s the culmination of a deeper rot among the Democrats, a party that has ceased to be a party of governance and become, instead, a kind of anti-party: a coalition of elites whose only unifying impulse is opposition to the right. They run on vibes, outrage, and cultural identification. They organize around preventing Republicans from doing things, sure, but it frequently seems that they no longer bother with the hard work of articulating what they themselves would do instead. The same old war over neoliberalism is raging in the party, this time with the new euphemism “abundance,” but the party has avoided directly confronting that debate for years, still stung by the Clinton-Sanders war. In more concrete terms, the question of economic populism and cultural issues continues to haunt Democrats, whether it’s an organic conflict or not, and there too, they punt. With Trump as an all-encompassing target to rally against - and, crucially, to fundraise around - it’s just too easy for the party to be only what it is not, for it to play into precisely its modern reputation for incoherence. On immigration more than anywhere else, that vacuum has become undeniable.