Donald Trump is preparing an assault on America’s immigration system
PART OF BEING Donald Trump is saying outrageous things. Yet what was outrageous in 2011 (suggesting that Barack Obama was born in Kenya) seems almost quaint in 2024. His rhetoric has turned darker. Immigrants are no longer just criminals and rapists, they are “poisoning the blood of our country”. Chants of “Build the wall!” have been replaced by “Send them back!” In MAGA world, legal immigrants from Haiti are threatening to eat the pets of the good people of Springfield, Ohio.
Mr Trump’s obsession with immigration has shaped this presidential campaign—and American politics for the past nine years. A chasm yawns between Mr Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s immigration policies, but his dominant focus on the issue has forced her to tack to the right to avoid looking weak on border security. Voters’ concerns (61% of registered voters say immigration is a priority for them in this election, according to the Pew Research Centre) mean that action on immigration will be at the top of the next president’s to-do list, no matter who wins.
Both Mr Trump and Ms Harris would be constrained by Congress, which has not meaningfully reformed immigration law since 1990. The result is a creaking, inflexible system ill-equipped to find the workers America needs. That is unlikely to change, no matter which party wins control of the Senate and the House. But, as Mr Trump and Joe Biden have shown in recent years, presidents can find ways to exercise immense power to affect policy.
J.D. Vance, Mr Trump’s running-mate, claims that 25m “illegal aliens” are living in America, and has said that a mass-deportation scheme could begin by removing 1m people, implying that more could follow. Yet his numbers seem plucked out of thin air. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) suggests that 11m unauthorised immigrants lived in the country in 2022, most of whom arrived before 2010. A second Trump administration will not get the funding from Congress it needs to carry out that many removals, but even rumours of raids or botched attempts to round up immigrants can do harm. Studies suggest that children of migrants get more anxious and depressed during periods of increased immigration enforcement. Police departments have noticed that immigrants become more hesitant to report crimes against them.
Mr Vance has not ruled out bringing back the family-separation policy of Mr Trump’s first administration, which tried to use the possibility of removing children from their parents to deter illegal border crossings. (In March, the DHS reckoned that roughly 1,400 children had yet to be reunited with their families.) He wants to restart the “migrant-protection protocols”, a policy which would force some asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims are adjudicated. Whether that happened would depend on how well Mr Trump gets along with Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Under Mr Trump, increased vetting requirements and fees for visa applications could slow them down. Presidents have the power to decide how many refugees the country will accept each year; that number would plummet. Mr Trump may again try to end DACA—a programme that protects from deportation immigrants brought to the country as children—if the courts do not decide it is illegal first. Court challenges are likely, but a second Trump administration will have learned from the first. Regulations will be more rigorously written, and a friendlier bench may be more deferential to presidential authority.
Ms Harris’s immigration policy would largely be one of continuity. Mr Biden adopted a carrot-and-stick approach: opening up new legal pathways for migrants where possible while restricting asylum at the southern border. This combination has proved successful in recent months. In 2023, monthly migrant encounters at the border reached record heights. They have since fallen to the lowest level since 2020, when Mr Trump was in charge.
Ms Harris wants to revive a bipartisan border-security bill that Mr Trump kiboshed so he could campaign on chaos. But Republicans would have little incentive to work with a President Harris on immigration. A daughter of immigrants, she alludes to finding ways to protect from removal unauthorised migrants who have lived in America for years. This could resemble the visa programme Mr Biden proposed for undocumented spouses of citizens, which is tied up in the courts.
Yet some daylight has emerged between Ms Harris and her boss. She has not only endorsed the limits placed on asylum at the border, but suggests she would make them harder to lift. Her rightward lurch is an admission that Mr Trump has been winning on the issue. It is also a calibrated response to the fact that Americans increasingly favour tougher border security. A YouGov poll from January suggests that 32% of Democrats support building a border wall, up from 20% in 2022.
Events could change either candidate’s agenda. If the economy weakens, fewer migrants will try to come. Unrest or economic collapse in Haiti or Venezuela, say, could push more people towards the border. Immigration is at the very centre of American politics. That is not about to change.■
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