Trump's Border Scheme Was Never Popular. Democrats Are Just Cowards.
It's time to reject centrist hand-wringing over their own historic surrender to the Republicans' manufactured "border crisis".
As Trump destroys any illusion of the rule of law in his effort to torture random immigrants and pull children out of chemotherapy, American public opinion is pretty rapidly shifting against the Republican border regime as people gradually learn what it’s doing.
But how can this be? We were told over and over by centrist liberals that immigration was Trump’s strongest issue. We were told to stop fighting by the brightest minds of the liberal consultancy class. And all the better, they insisted, if we could show a little sadism towards immigrants ourselves.
How One “We See You, We Hear You” Completely Shattered Public Understanding of Immigration
In 2023 and 2024, Joe Biden and the Democrats decided to just be done fighting Republicans on immigration. They believed they could:
Concede the problem. Meet people where they were.
Promise to “get tough” (on abuelas)
Join in Republican fearmongering about immigrant gangs
After all, acknowledgement is the first step of empathy, and empathy is the first step of redress! There’s just one problem:
They were the party in power.
By conceding to a “border crisis” that Republicans literally dreamt up despite a historical low point in border crossings, they conceded to the whole narrative. And it must not have occurred to these Democratic Party think tank types, but that narrative has a lot of insane shit to say about the Democrats themselves!
Uh-Oh, What Did Democrats Cosign?
The Republican border crisis mythology goes a little like this:
Democrats were funneling heavily armed squads of Hyper Predators from South American jails into the basements of Midwestern preschools
Democrats were doing this because of their love for “White Genocide”
Captured serial killers were being let free, by Democrats, just because they were immigrants, for some reason
Society was on the verge of collapse in some unspecified border counties
Medicare For All Bad Motherfuckers?
When Democrats kept parroting the words “border crisis”, I don’t think they realized that this is what they were tacitly admitting to. If you said “oh, 53% disapproval still isn’t that much” remember how many people think Biden was killing Americans for sport.
Why Was Trump Ever Popular on Immigration?
When you actually asked people why they wanted Trump’s hands on the border, the answer was basically “Trump’s going to go after criminals.” They thought Trump would put an end to the crisis that the Trump Campaign invented out of thin air and Democrats accepted for no reason.
Sure, Trump’s base loves what he’s doing now - they’re baying for blood. But when new and less-engaged Trump voters describe their ideal immigration policy, it’s just Obama shit! That’s far from my ideal policy, but it’s miles from what we have now.
I mean, look at how Latinos voted and how they’re polling now. They didn’t want any of this. Most thought he’d never go after hard-working undocumented people, just MS-13. They didn’t want to get black-bagged for speaking Spanish in public. They didn’t want their uncle to get banished, enslaved, and probably thrown in an oven soon because of a fucking speeding ticket.
They thought it was about gangs! The Biden admin was being accused of letting criminals kill everyone, and all they could muster was “Yes, sorry, we definitely did that on purpose, but we promise to fix it if you re-elect us.”
What did they think was going to happen?
Well What Now?
It’s time to build a positive alternative vision for immigration.
Call out the abhorrent policies favored by Republicans.
For the love of God, stop bragging about how Biden and Obama were better at rounding people up!
Build grassroots and institutional resistance to this regime. Build solidarity with undocumented people.
Begin to dispel the persistent myth that there’s even been a viable legal path to citizenship in our lifetimes. Or that immigrants and foreigners in general are exploiting US citizens, and not the other way around.
And most of all, run every single one of these fucking cowards out of politics before they get us all killed.