Democrats Can Stop the Bleeding on Their Worst Issue—Without Betraying Their Values | Opinion

Democrats are still reeling from the election—and searching for a way to rebuild their party.

The answer is straightforward. And it doesn’t require Democrats to abandon their values or make across-the-board concessions.

In fact, just the opposite—it merely requires the party to return to the rhetoric, and more importantly, policies that leaders like Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton espoused just a decade or two ago on a single issue—immigration.

Voters have been demanding lower levels of immigration for years. According to the latest Gallup data from June 2024, 55 percent of Americans believe immigration should be decreased from its current levels, while just 16 percent favored an increase.

A decade prior, in June 2014, 33 percent of Americans favored a decrease, while 22 percent favored an increase. A decade before that, 49 percent favored a decrease; only 14 percent favored an increase.

In the entire 54-year history that Gallup has asked the question, there have been just two years where the share of Americans favoring less immigration has been greater—often several times greater—than the share favoring more.

Voters’ desire for lower levels of immigration isn’t anti-immigrant. It’s completely rational.

Higher levels of immigration, both legal and illegal, increase competition for jobs and drive down wages—a fact that dozens of studies have repeatedly shown. Studies also confirm that immigration drives up rents and housing costs. And immigration strains school and health systems, especially since migrants are more likely to require extra resources—such as English as a Second Language instruction—and more likely to lack health insurance.

Despite voters’ clear and repeated demands for lower levels of immigration, the Biden administration appointed open-border ideologues to key policymaking positions, rolled back dozens of Trump-era policies that had kept the border somewhat secure, and twisted, and in some cases outright violated immigration law to mass-parole over 1 million migrants that the administration openly admitted were “inadmissible” into the country.

The result? In just the first three years of the Biden administration, the foreign-born population of the United States—which includes both legal and illegal immigrants—surged from 45 million to over 51.6 million. That net increase of 6.6 million immigrants, which is larger than the combined populations of Los Angeles and Chicago, represents that fastest three-year jump in American history.

When American citizens—including Black people, Hispanics, and legal immigrants—voiced concerns about the scale of this influx and the strain it put on their communities, many Democrat leaders villainized them as racists and xenophobes.

But just a few years ago, top Democrats wouldn’t have chastised voters for these concerns—they would have shared them.

In 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders condemned “open borders” as a “Koch brothers proposal” that’d make “people in this country even poorer.”

In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama warned that we “cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws.”

And Bill Clinton repeatedly castigated illegal immigration and even established the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform—chaired by Barbara Jordan, the civil rights leader who became the first southern Black woman elected to Congress—which recommended cracking down on illegal immigration and cutting legal immigration by roughly a third to protect “the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.”

By embracing the humane cuts to immigration that voters demand, today’s Democrats wouldn’t be abandoning their values. They’d be rediscovering them.

For starters, Democrats could mandate that all businesses use E-Verify, a free online system that cross-references federal databases to weed out illegal workers.

Making it harder to work illegally would disincentivize prospective illegal immigrants from coming here in the first place—and encourage many already here to voluntarily return home. A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the handful of “states with universal E-Verify policies typically experienced large reductions in the number of likely unauthorized immigrants and even greater declines in the number of unauthorized workers.”

It’s hardly an exclusively Republican idea. Former President Barack Obama implemented a rule requiring all federal contractors to use E-Verify. And there’s bipartisan support for bills that would mandate E-Verify in both the House and Senate.

Some Democrats have also recognized the need to reform our broken asylum and parole systems. Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.) recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and suggested using the House-passed Secure the Border Act—which includes asylum and parole reforms, along with mandatory E-Verify—as a starting point for immigration reform.

Simply put, Democrats can escape their electoral quagmire by recognizing what successful liberal politicians understood until quite recently—that there’s nothing compassionate or progressive about letting corporations exploit cheap foreign labor to undermine American workers.

Eric Ruark is director of research for NumbersUSA.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.