What Republicans Don’t Understand About Immigration

The administration’s immigration policies over the last few months have it backwards.

Immigration was the issue that most helped get Donald Trump elected. A lot of Americans are furious about immigration and want change. For years, the issue topped lists of Americans’ most important concerns, while Washington ignored popular opinion on the issue. Many Americans voted Republican this year explicitly because they wanted something big to happen on immigration. Now the administration is engaged in an aggressive campaign to overturn the immigration consensus. While a portion of the party is cheering wildly, it’s also fair to say the general response from many who voted Republican has been discomfort, if not dismay. It’s more than buyer’s remorse. It increasingly appears Republicans never truly understood the energy in America around immigration—what people wanted or why they wanted it.

The core problem is that, for many Americans, anger about immigration was never about the immigrants. Obviously, some portion of America just doesn’t like immigrants. People increasingly express these opinions in the public square, and some public figures echo them, whether seriously or performatively. If you listen to some Democratic Party leaders, however, that’s the only reason anyone might have to oppose America’s last few decades of immigration policy—they’re hateful bigots who dislike people who are different. That’s not a reasonable interpretation, and it’s absurd to dismiss a majority of America as irrational bigots.

In fact, the majority of the energy around immigration has nothing to do with immigrants themselves. Anyone who has spent time around politics knows political issues are rarely just about the issue. Issues and policies are more often symbols voters latch onto as evidence for more abstract concerns. It’s often difficult to put a finger on very real but abstract causes, while it’s easier to point at their visible symptoms. This is why immigration became a flashpoint; it’s an easy-to-identify symbolic indication of two deeper national problems lurking underneath the immigration debate.

Immigration policy has first become a symbol of the disregard many American elites have begun to show toward democracy, viewing themselves as a rightful ruling class unbound to the opinions or interests of ordinary Americans. For decades, Americans expressed discomfort with immigration policies, but when they tugged at the levers of democracy to change them they found to their dismay those levers were no longer connected to the machine of state. No matter who they voted for, who they voted out, what they said in polls, or which party won, nothing ever changed. Washington’s leaders from both parties ignored them, and the policies they objected to continued on full steam ahead.

This was particularly alienating because the policies to which people objected were themselves violations of democratically-enacted law. Government officials didn’t simply pass immigration policies people didn’t like through Congress after vigorous national debate. Believing the law too restrictive, but knowing they couldn’t win the argument democratically, they simply did it. They allowed large numbers of people to enter America illegally, and then turned a blind eye and refused to enforce the immigration laws the people’s representatives passed. Since they couldn’t win their goals through democracy, they simply ignored the law and leveraged their power over enforcement to get their way.

Everyone at the top of American society was in on this. Leaders from both parties were in on it. The heads of large companies were in on it. The media was in on it. Each believed they were justified because they thought their policies were moral and popular sentiment was wrong. Democracy wasn’t yielding the answers they liked, so they used their power to sidestep troublesome democracy. This made immigration a potent symbol of the powerlessness of ordinary Americans to affect the system with their voice or vote. It communicated that the law was only for the little people, voting was a farce, and people with power will do whatever they like no matter how ordinary Americans think or vote.

The second reason immigration policy became a flashpoint is because it signaled a national abandonment of the idea of America. Despite what some people tell you, Americans are an exceedingly welcoming people both by nature and national creed. We’re genuinely proud to be a nation of immigrants who abandoned past allegiances to join our new family as Americans. This doesn’t mean America doesn’t have a culture and national beliefs, or that these culture and beliefs aren’t important parts of America’s success. There’s nothing immoral or exclusionary about celebrating hot dogs, apple pie, or the Fourth of July. There’s nothing wrong with having pride in America or honoring our national achievements and heroes. Most important, while America has been far from perfect, the ideals of America are clearly good—ideals like democracy, freedom, social equality, treating people with respect, rewarding hard work, following the rules, and the American Dream. Just because past leaders sometime failed to live up to these American ideals doesn’t mean those ideals weren’t real or worthy of celebration.

National cohesion is real and it’s important. We need to believe we’re a national family that’s all in this together. We need to trust each other. We need to know it’s okay to feel pride in ourselves and that our nation is good. Those who ran the immigration regime challenged these once-uncontroversial ideas. They didn’t think it reasonable or moral to ask those joining a national family to embrace its common culture and ideals. This wasn’t about celebrating wonderful personal differences like national foods, styles of dress, accents, languages, cultural names, or where we go to worship. It was about America’s ideals like a belief in democracy, liberty, social equality, trust, and the American Dream. Well-meaning people in the establishment simply didn’t think these concerns were valid, and openly hoped to subvert them. They claimed nationalism was exclusion, cohesion was discrimination, and ideas like democracy and social equality were ideas no one had to teach or inculcate. They rejected assimilation as immoral. Many seemed to believe, if some Americans once did evil in its name, America was irredeemable.

Most Americans, however, still believe nations need common identities and rituals because social cohesion is important. They want to feel good about their nation. They believe American ideals like democracy, liberty, social equality, trust, and the American Dream are good. They believe these are things you have to work toward and maintain to create a good nation that allows people to flourish. They welcome immigrants because, as Americans, they want people to share in America’s ideals, but they also expect newcomers to want to become Americans. In rejecting these ideas, those who ran America’s immigration policies irresponsibly turned immigration into a symbolic rejection of the core idea of America.

In other words, most Americans were never angry about our immigration policies because of immigrants. They didn’t have a problem with people coming from around the world and choosing to become Americans. What they expected was their government to follow the law and respect democracy. They expected the people who sought to lead them to believe in and support America’s ideals. They were angry because the officials making policy turned immigration into a symbolic signifier of a ruling class indifferent to undercutting the foundations of America.

The administration’s immigration policies over the last few months, however, seem to believe the problem actually is the immigrants. They claim the problem is one of numbers, that President Biden allowed millions of new immigrants to enter America illegally. Their remedy is to quickly make those people leave whatever the cost. They see a short window to respond to what they view as an emergency, and refuse to be held back by quaint ideas like process, personal liberty, or notions of democratic legitimacy. This has everything in reverse. If America truly is upset at elites flouting the law and democracy to get preferred outcomes, how is the solution to flout the law to get preferred outcomes? If Americans are worried about a rejection of America’s culture and ideals, why further violate those ideals? Instead of insisting on the rule of law and enforcing it to the letter, this simply ignores it in the opposite direction. Instead of honoring America’s culture and democracy, it casts them further away as fictions in a world ruled by tribalism and power.

What Americans want right now is to believe again in their democracy. They want to know their government is honest, transparent, and works for them. They want to know their government is more than a club of rival gangs struggling over power, but a system constrained by laws they influence, control, and trust. They want to once again believe America is good. They want to know American ideals like democracy, freedom, social equality, treating people with respect, rewarding hard work, following the rules, and the American Dream are more than slogans but shared values. They want to go to a Fourth of July parade and buy a red, white, and blue bomb pop while listening to a band playing the Star Spangled Banner among a throng of fellow patriotic citizens all feeling a well-deserved sense of national pride. They want to welcome new Americans, but want them to truly join us as Americans. It increasingly appears no one in power on either side of our current political divide gets this. This is why Americans are angry about immigration, and until some political movement that gets it rises to prominence this issue will continue to roil politics.

What do you think about the meaning of the immigration debate? Join the conversation in the comments.