Immigration as a wedge issue

With the 2018 midterms approaching, Trump is doubling down on one of his key campaign issues: immigration.

Last week, President Trump tweeted almost every day about immigration. He tweeted about Democrats being weak on borders and thus weak on "drugs and crime," about a rumored "caravan" of migrants heading toward the southern US border, and renewed criticisms of DACA.

Trump's remarks about immigration weren't confined to Twitter. On Thursday, Trump visited West Virginia to meet with 200 of his supporters. The original plan was for him to deliver a speech on the Republican party's recent tax reform bill. Instead, Trump threw away his "boring" prepared remarks and delivered a rambling speech focused on U.S. immigration policies, while also referencing a purported Democratic conspiracy to secure immigrant votes. Within the past month, Trump and his administration have also sharply criticized sanctuary cities (going as far as filing a lawsuit against California for its sanctuary city policies), authorized the deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops to the U.S./Mexico border, and re-added a citizenship question to the 2020 census (a move critics fear will result in diminished federal funding for needy communities).

This is nothing new for Trump. His 2016 presidential campaign capitalized on anti-immigrant rhetoric. However, it's interesting that instead of focusing on the biggest legislative "success" of his presidency (the tax bill), or speaking to kitchen-table economic issues central to his working-class base, he remains focused on the wedge issue of immigration. Why?

Philip Bump of the Washington Post has a hypothesis - this is Trump's tactic to further alienate white working-class voters from the Democratic party. First, Bump points to various polls showing that a majority of Americans  have positive or neutral views about immigrants. Most Americans are anti border wall, and support DACA. Bump then points to one group with higher-than-average negative views on immigration: the white working-class. Noting that a third of Democrats are working-class whites Bump goes on to say:

Maybe this is the intended goal: further drive a wedge between working-class white Democrats and the party’s advocacy of immigrant issues. Seek to build his base by reinforcing the issue central to his appeal at the beginning of his campaign.

William A. Galston, writing for the Wall Street Journal, agrees that Trump is using immigration to galvanize the white working-class. He argues that to court these voters, many of whom have fallen victim to Trump's brand of anti-immigrant populism, Democrats should back away from more liberal immigration policies and instead embrace moderate (or even conservative) immigration reforms.

Defenders of liberal democracy should acknowledge that controlling borders is a legitimate exercise of sovereignty, and that the appropriate number and type of immigrants is a legitimate subject for debate. Denouncing citizens concerned about immigration as bigots ameliorates neither the substance nor the politics of the problem. There’s nothing illiberal about the view that too many immigrants stress a country’s capacity to absorb them, so that a reduction or even a pause may be in order.

While I agree with Galston that calling people bigots is not an effective or persuasive tactic to woo working-class whites, I don't agree that reducing or pausing immigration is a valid alternative. While I believe it's worthwhile to reach out to white working-class voters, I can't support immigration policies that are illogical at best and harmful at worst.

Immigrants do not steal American jobs. There is evidence that America's economy actually benefits from immigrant workers and entrepreneurs. In fact, many economists believe that the country will need immigrant workers to make up a labor shortage as the baby boomer population ages.  While some argue that immigrant labor reduces the wages of blue collar workers, research suggests that automation, globalization, the death of unions, and bad government policies have played a much greater role. Where crime is concerned, research shows that "immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born and that overall crimes rates decline in areas where immigrants settle." Finally, and perhaps most importantly, immigration policy implicates a number of human rights issues.  For some, immigration is more than an economic decision - it is a life or death decision.

The Democrats' approach to immigration must be rooted in facts. Furthermore, immigration policy should uphold our traditional American values. As Professor Gabriel Chin stated in a recent talk at King Hall:

"[E]xtreme proposals for immigration restriction are as un-American as they are unwise. . . . this country is, as it should be, a nation of immigrants, a nation of nations [and] the first universal nation. Immigration has always been the goose that has laid the golden eggs for the United States. It’s also served as a moral model for the rest of the world.”

So what immigration policies should Democrats propose to assuage working-class whites' economic (and perhaps cultural) anxieties while still staying true to our American ideals of multiculturalism and strength rooted in diversity?

If I had my way we would modernize and expand our visa system to reflect the realities of a 21st century economy; support smart border policies (hint: "the wall" is not one of them); strengthen penalties for those employers who hire illegal workers and, arguably, depress blue collar wages; and create a path to citizenship for those immigrants already within the United States. However, the answer may lie, not in bickering over the nuances of our immigration message, but in highlighting other more salient economic issues. As Ruy Teixeira suggests in a recent Vox piece, Democrats will never be able to win over die-hard, anti-immigration Trump voters with detailed immigration policy proposals. Instead, Teixeira advocates for courting working-class whites on the political/ideological margins with a simple counter-message that will override the salience of immigration altogether: jobs, jobs, jobs.

Teixeira advocates for a "bold" public jobs initiative, reminiscent of the New Deal, that will help to rebuild infrastructure and staff community institutions like schools and childcare centers - "a signature offering" that would reflect the well-documented reality that "infrastructure and community investments are popular across the lines of party and class."

Not only would a major jobs program appeal to the white working-class, it would likely appeal to Latinx voters who rated the economy as the most important issue of the 2016 election. It would also serve as a strong contrast to Trump, whose immigration proposals focus on fear-mongering and nationalist grandstanding rather than actual solutions. That is the type of platform that help unite the white working-class and other traditional liberal voters behind the Democrats in 2020.