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It’s now pretty well settled wisdom that Democrats lost the presidency in 2024 mostly because they fumbled two key issues: inflation and immigration. Yes, there were other issues that mattered, notably Joe Biden’s age and late replacement with Kamala Harris. But while that won’t be an issue when Democrats reach for the White House again, where they stand on inflation and immigration will still matter. Donald Trump has kept the inflation issue alive with his foolish tariffs and unnecessary Iran war. He has also overreached on immigration, creating an opportunity for Democrats to offer an alternative path in 2028.
Had President Trump simply focused on temporarily closing the border to asylum seekers and deporting undocumented people with violent criminal records, he’d be in vastly better shape. But instead, his mass-deportation program has extended far beyond the “worst of the worst” he’s always talking about, heavily targeting legal immigrants whose status is being arbitrarily revoked and using highly visible cruelty to encourage self-deportation. These tactics have turned what was originally and should have remained a perceived accomplishment for Trump into a handicap. Silver Bulletin’s polling averages for Trump’s handling of immigration shows his approval ratio at 43 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval.
But a return to Biden policies by Democrats is a bad idea nonetheless. Yes, Trump and his allies lied regularly about the dangers posed by illegal immigrants and the consequences of a surge in net immigration. Notably, there was not, so far as anyone can actually show, an immigration-adjacent spike in violent crime or any significant illegal voting. There’s no question, though, that immigration got out of control under Biden, as the New York Times reported just before he left office:
Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.
That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.
So Democrats need a credible alternative to what the Biden administration was doing, without echoing MAGA nativist rhetoric or betraying immigrant communities. Generally speaking, that means better border control and more clearly identifying a path to citizenship that until recently Republicans supported as well. As Bloomberg’s Ron Brownstein explains, there’s a specific proposal being advanced by immigration lawyers that might fit the bill:
The principal reason for the chaos at the border under former President Joe Biden was the surge in migrants arriving to file asylum claims. Under Biden, as during previous administrations, people filing such claims were usually released into the US while their cases worked through the backlogged immigration court system — a process that can take years. …
The immigration lawyers propose…empowering asylum case officers to decide most cases, rather than routinely referring cases to immigration judges. That change — coupled with hiring more case officers and streamlining the guidelines for assessing applicants — would allow claims to be decided in weeks or months, not years, the lawyers say, and reduce the incentive to seek asylum without a strong case.
Politically, the sharp focus of so many Democrats on combating Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass-deportation program, up to and including calls to “abolish ICE,” makes a credible position on border control all the more urgent. A choice between the status quo and the Biden-era status quo ante is not necessarily one that will work for Democrats. Anti-immigrant sentiment is not just going away and cannot be co-opted with empty rhetoric as Britain’s now-former Labour Party prime minister Keir Starmer arguably attempted to do, notes Vox’s Zack Beauchamp:
In the summer of 2025, Starmer gave a high-profile speech outlining his new aggressive approach to immigration. Arguing that mass cultural change was turning Britain into an “island of strangers,” he announced an intention to significantly cut the number of legal immigrants entering in the UK. …
Yet Starmer’s numbers continued to fall. Reform UK — an extreme anti-immigration party — surged, becoming the most popular party in the country and the odds-on favorite in the 2029 election. Disillusioned left-wing voters defected en masse to the Green Party, a former fringe party that took an unapologetically pro-immigration stance.
Democrats must not, and need not, fall between two stools on immigration as Starmer did. Developing a new message and agenda in this area remains as urgent as it was when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decided not talking about it at all would help them muddle through.
