Polls regularly find that most voters believe Donald Trump will do a better job on immigration than Kamala Harris. After three years of record immigration levels that have strained the budgets of some local governments, even supporters of liberal immigration policies are wondering why a majority of voters believe such ideas. Maybe I can understand what you’re holding.
Regardless of where you stand on immigration, I can confidently say that if elected, Harris will accomplish more on her immigration reform agenda than Trump.
That’s because while Republican immigration proposals are not tied to reality, Harris is open to bipartisan compromises that could be passed quickly if voters elect a cooperative Congress.
As president, Trump has fallen far short of his grand promises to reduce illegal immigration. His greatest success has been in reducing legal immigration, a part of his immigration policy that he avoids mentioning. Expect more of the same if he can return to the Oval Office. The core of President Trump’s immigration policy is mass deportation. “On day one, we will begin the largest deportation program in American history,” he said at a rally at Madison Square Garden this week.
This is not the first time he has made such a promise during this election campaign. This is not his first successful campaign.
Here’s Trump’s 2016 candidacy.
[T]There are at least 2 million…criminal aliens in our country right now…we will start moving them…first day, the first hour I get to the office, those people are gone. And you can call it deportation if you want — the press doesn’t like that word. Call it what you will, they are gone. More than 2 million criminally illegal immigrants are on the run, and an even larger number are on the run. However, their lives ended in this country. Crime will stop. They will be gone. It’s over.
The 2 million foreign nationals who are considered “criminals” falls short of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States in 2016, and this number remains essentially the same today. But deporting 2 million people would almost certainly be a record mass deportation.
President Trump has cited the offensively named Operation Wetback under President Dwight Eisenhower as an inspiration. Government figures put the number of deportees under Ike at 2.1 million, but historians say this number is greatly inflated by double counting and voluntary and, in some cases, temporary deportations. This is the agreement. More accurate estimates place the number of deportees in the 1950s at between 250,000 and 800,000. (The second element of Eisenhower’s program was to double the size of the legal immigrant worker program in which previously deported workers could participate.)
The CATO Institute compared domestic deportations under the George W. It turns out that illegal immigrants have been deported.
And what about Trump? 325,660.
Sure, he had half the time of Bush and Obama, but he fell far behind their pace, falling about 1.7 million short of his “first day” promise.
A June 2024 analysis by the Migration Policy Institute found that the Biden administration is on pace to match President Trump’s overall deportation numbers, but with more attention paid to the border and fewer internal removals. It turned out that
Of course, President Trump’s relatively low number of internal deportations does not address the extraordinary brutality of his immigration history. As my colleague Mark Novikov detailed, President Trump’s so-called “zero tolerance” border crossing policy resulted in the separation of 5,500 children from their families, with the highest number occurring in the spring of 2018.
However, even this heartbreaking policy did not accomplish what President Trump intended. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump took a closer look at President Trump’s “favorite chart” that tracks border security in the Southwest each month. Despite President Trump’s fiery spin, anxiety voices rose dramatically in his first three years in office, from a low of about 16,000 in April 2017 to about 144,000 in May 2019. increased to humans. Between that point and the onset of the pandemic, the number of anxious voices dropped to about 100,000. That number plummeted even further, to nearly 17,000 in April 2020, after President Trump asserted Title 42 public health emergency powers to expedite evictions. But the number began to rise again in the final months of Trump’s presidency, reaching 78,000 in January 2021.
President Trump’s greatest success in office was not in restricting illegal immigration, but in restricting legal immigration.
President Trump has not immediately acknowledged his interest in reducing legal immigration. His platform makes no mention of lowering legal standards, saying, “Republicans will prioritize merit-based immigration, ensuring that those admitted to our country make positive contributions to our society and economy, and that we never “We will ensure that it does not become a waste of public resources.” (All strange capitalization is from the original document.) Earlier this month, he told the pro-immigration Wall Street Journal editorial board, “I want a lot of people to come into the country, but… “I want them to enter the country legally,” he said. ”
But his record doesn’t match the rhetoric. CATO states that “During its first term, which ended in November 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people overseas by at least 418,453 and the number of nonimmigrant visas by at least 11,178,668. ‘. Much of the decline in green card numbers occurred during the pandemic, when issuance “effectively ended.” Previously, Trump’s other attempts to restrict green cards had been “blocked by Congress and the courts,” according to the Washington Post. Still, he “frustrated immigrants and their lawyers by insisting on additional checks that would delay visa processing, including for some high-skilled immigrants and their families.”
Novikov then reported that “President Trump has cut the refugee cap by 80 percent, reducing the number of refugees we admit by more than 65,000 per year.” (Refugees, unlike asylum seekers who cross the border, undergo years of rigorous vetting before being granted permanent residence in the United States.)
Trump’s unfulfilled promises on illegal immigration have come as a surge in asylum seekers reached record levels under Joe Biden’s watch, with the number of people in custody reaching about 300,000 in December. has been ignored. But that number plummeted to about 100,000 in September after Biden imposed stricter border restrictions through executive order.
The kind of question often asked of Kamala Harris: If your administration hasn’t been able to get it done in the last three and a half years, why should we believe it can do it in the next four years? Why did it take your administration so long to crack down on the border? — Same goes for Trump. If he couldn’t deport 2 million illegal immigrants, let alone 11 million, in his first term, why should we believe he can in his second term? Why did it take so long to stop the surge in border crossings, and why was the reduction in border crossings only temporary despite the use of emergency powers?
His published platform does not include many policy details that explain how his approach differs. The document subtly promises radical militarization, saying it will move “thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our southern border,” but does not specify how many troops there will be or from which facilities overseas. It did not say exactly whether it would be moved. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s former chief of staff, head of America First Legal, and the former president’s immigration muse, has predicted “the largest deportation program in American history.” However, details have not been disclosed as to what kind of agency will carry out the work and at what cost. He said this includes bringing in the National Guard. According to a recent CBS News report, deporting 1 million people could cost $88 billion. When CBS asked Tom Homan, Trump’s immigration adviser, to provide a written deportation plan, he said he was unaware of any such plan.
Similar to President Trump’s previous “zero tolerance” policy, attempts at mass deportation will have real harm. The immigration advocacy group FWD.us reports that 28.2 million residents live in mixed-status immigrant families, and one in three Latino families will be at risk of separation. President Trump is likely to cause personal harm, but is unlikely to achieve his stated policy goals.
In stark contrast, Harris has a detailed plan in place. The Senate’s bipartisan border security bill was negotiated between Republican James Lankford, Democrat Chris Murphy, and Democratic independent Kyrsten Sinema. The plan would fund more border officers to help limit illegal immigration, improved technology to detect fentanyl, and additional immigration judges to help process the backlog of asylum cases. It is. If Democrats win the House and hold the Senate, it could be mathematically possible for them to muster enough Republican support to overcome the filibuster.
This week I wrote about Kamala, based on President Trump’s aversion to bipartisan deals during his time in office and Harris’ limp performance thanks to her emphasis on bipartisan positions in her campaign. I wrote about how Harris will outdo Donald Trump. Despite President Trump’s fixation on immigration, Harris is poised to enact permanent border security measures without causing unnecessary harm.
