Five Basic Truths About America’s Most Polarizing Policy Debate

“If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”

So warned my colleague David Frum in the headline of an April 2019 article about America’s failure to control mass immigration. “Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address,” he wrote. “If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.”

That thesis looked shaky in 2020. Voters declined to reelect Donald Trump; for the first time in more than 50 years, Gallup found that Americans who wanted immigration to increase outnumbered those who wanted it to decrease––a seeming rebuke of Trump’s cruel family-separation policy and attacks on Mexicans and Muslims––and that 77 percent said immigration is a good thing for the United States. Then Joe Biden failed to control the southern border and presided over record surges in unlawful entries. By 2024, a majority wanted less immigration, Trump won the presidency while promising the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, and an analysis of why voters rejected Kamala Harris found that “too many immigrants crossed the border” was nearly tied for the top reason.

Today, Frum’s warning seems prescient: The Trump administration has deployed a force of aggressive masked officers onto American streets while promising “retribution.” They’ve detained, pepper-sprayed, assaulted, shot, and killed Americans. And high-ranking officials have repeatedly gotten caught lying about events captured by citizen video footage.

A majority now disapproves of Trump’s handling of immigration. Perhaps Democrats will prevail in their current efforts to force ICE officers to take off their masks and get warrants, or even win back Congress as a result––the MAGA coalition is no less vulnerable than the left to voter backlash. But a Democratic victory in 2026 is not likely to end this cycle, in which majorities hate how both parties handle immigration and ping-pong unhappily between them.

I have covered immigration politics and policy for 25 years; here’s my sense of five basic truths that lawmakers need to acknowledge if they want to implement immigration policy that is both popular and in the nation’s best interest.

1. Even many of those Americans who say that they want to deport all immigrants who are here illegally would likely not stand by that position in practice.

Lots of MAGA supporters insist that deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally is a prudent goal. Some argue that conserving the rule of law requires doing so. “I don’t care if it’s a grandma who’s been here for 23 years and sits quietly on her porch all day long,” the populist-right pundit Walter Curt wrote. “We either have laws or we don’t, we either have borders or we don’t, there is no middle ground.”

Although superficially seductive, that logic is monomaniacal. In the real world, federal laws are enforced by presidents in a manner that predictably fails to catch anything close to 100 percent of lawbreakers, because resources are scarce, trade-offs are real, and maximalist outcomes are simply incompatible with limited government.

Consider the example of tax law. Most Americans abhor tax cheats. But they, and especially most conservatives, would oppose deploying thousands of masked, armed IRS agents into whatever American neighborhoods the president fancies and allowing them to search houses, workplaces, and private papers to catch all the tax cheats.

Yes, lots of Americans tell pollsters that they want every immigrant who came here illegally deported, but how many would stick to that position if told that it would require house-to-house raids, or that the federal government must choose between spending limited funds on apprehending undocumented grandmothers who stayed after their work visas and spending on other societal needs, such as finding a cure for cancer or paying down the national debt?

2. A majority of Americans support some level of immigration enforcement, particularly for unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crimes.

If excessive immigration enforcement is incompatible with liberty, insufficient immigration enforcement is incompatible with representative democracy––Republicans are correct that our immigration laws were duly enacted, and every plausible read of election results and polling data confirms that Americans favor some meaningful level of immigration enforcement.

Americans’ preferences are clearest on the question of immigrants in the country illegally who have been convicted of violent crimes: According to an Associated Press poll, 83 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat favor deporting them, a position that is also held by 79 percent of Democrats. The persistence of contrary policies in some Democrat-controlled jurisdictions is harmful to public safety and the political interests of that coalition.

I support sanctuary cities insofar as that means that local police don’t enforce immigration law, because they want residents to cooperate with law enforcement. But it doesn’t follow that jailers should refuse all cooperation with deportations. If you favor any immigration enforcement at all, who better to focus on than incarcerated bad actors, who can be found without spending any money on searches or deploying federal officers among the public?

3. Refugee crises will happen––and every response likely to satisfy the public requires prior planning.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge on immigration is what to do with large, sudden surges of people. The future will bring wars, natural disasters, regime collapses, famines, and more. Barring entry to desperate refugees seems cruel, but letting in large, unanticipated flows of foreigners can cause voters in democracies to feel overwhelmed and empower authoritarians. Escaping this dysfunctional cycle is in the interests of restrictionists and inclusionists alike. All potential solutions come with challenges, but none is more formidable than the status quo. The future will confront us with many such crises. We need a plan.

4. Even many Americans who argue for a stricter immigration policy find the demonization of immigrants concerning.

It is one thing to deport people and another thing to vilify them while doing so. In my youth, the Republican Party was explicit about the goodness and humanity of most immigrants––see, for example, the way that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush talked about the issue in 1980. Bush noted that “honorable, decent, family-loving people” were in violation of the law.

Today, in an America where there are many more immigrants, lawful and not, and where violent crime is lower than it was for the entire 1980s and ’90s, data suggest that unauthorized immigrants commit felonies at lower rates than U.S. citizens and immigrants who are authorized to be here. Obviously, some do commit murders and other serious crimes, but it is misleading and incendiary to talk about the entire class as if a large share are violent criminals, or to treat particular ethnic groups as scapegoats for citizens’ financial struggles. Many Americans find such talk unnerving and distasteful.

That is not mere political correctness. It is rooted in the fact that U.S. history is rife with examples of the demonization of ethnic-minority groups preceding mob violence against them. I hope America is beyond atrocities like the Los Angeles Chinese massacre, the World War I–era lynching of ethnic Germans, and the Zoot Suit Riots. But humans today are no more evolved than the perpetrators of those atrocities. Insofar as we’re less likely to participate in mob attacks, it’s because of the existence of cultural guardrails—the very ones that the MAGA coalition is dismantling.

5. Every high-immigration country has citizens who fear immigration and immigrants. They are least likely to sow dysfunction when their predispositions are understood and to some degree accommodated.

The United States has no choice but to tolerate people who fear immigration and immigrants. Although many humans enjoy diversity, a percentage of people in all countries and racial and demographic groups are psychologically uncomfortable with difference. Their discomfort may be to some degree innate, and they are either unable or unwilling to change.

America should never allow its xenophobes to persecute immigrants or violate their rights. But people who hold anti-immigrant views are fellow citizens who influence our culture, politics, and public policy––and we can influence whether they do so in ways that are better or worse for immigrants.

In The Authoritarian Dynamic, the social psychologist Karen Stenner explains how people with a latent predisposition to authoritarianism get triggered, and how best to respond to preserve a pluralistic society. Her work suggests that liberals should stop framing immigration as a celebration of multicultural difference and instead emphasize ways in which immigrants are just like the rest of us: people who seek safety, opportunity, and a better future for their family. These framings can better assuage the fears of those with xenophobic tendencies, she argues. Stenner suggests that countries implement practical assimilationist policies, such as encouraging and assisting with English fluency. She argues that immigration is most sustainable—and backlash against it least likely to succeed—when inflows of new immigrants are controlled, and subject to known limits rather than unlimited in a way that feels unpredictable.

As she puts it in her book, insisting on unconstrained diversity “pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.” And once a society’s authoritarians are activated, the outcome depends in part on how its conservatives react. If they side with authoritarians, repressive policies follow. But under the right conditions, conservatives can be counted on to rally behind pluralism and tolerance. One condition is that they feel reassured “regarding established brakes on the pace of change, and the settled rules of the game,” Stenner writes.

If Democrats or Republicans hope to create sustainable immigration policy, that policy must roughly reflect the public will. Instead of efforts to alter public opinion through persuasion, we’ve seen a succession of fringe factions forcing extremist positions on majorities that hate them. Politicians from both parties should moderate according to what voters actually want. Otherwise, endless political failures risk causing many to lose faith in all politics––which is an existential danger to our democracy.