The Context

A review of the recent past reveals more commonalities than divergences between Democratic and Republican administrations on the issue. The two parties tend to distinguish themselves more in discourse than in practice: the Republicans adopt an openly racist and xenophobic rhetoric, while the Democrats assume a posture of apparently pragmatic realism, with modest humanitarian gestures.

Nevertheless, even these distinctions matter. The current cycle of mass exclusion and expulsion was consolidated under the Obama administration (2009–2016) in the context of the global financial crisis and Great Recession. But the Trump administration stood out for the spite and enthusiasm with which migrants were repressed, criminalized, and persecuted. Under Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” policy, more than 5,500 children and infants were forcibly removed from their guardians by US immigration authorities, some two thousand of which have yet to be reunited with their deported relatives to this day.

Trump turned Latin American states into bricks in his border wall. Under threat of punishing import tariffs, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador abandoned his initial policy of facilitating the safe, legal passage of migrants in transit toward the United States in favor of a strategy of contention and repression at the hands of the newly formed National Guard. The imposition of the “Migrant Protection Protocols” or “Remain in Mexico” policy in 2019 confined asylum seekers to Mexico’s northern border while they awaited appointment dates.

That same year, the United States signed “Safe Third Country Agreements” with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, forcing migrants who passed through those countries en route to the United States to apply for asylum there first — effectively banning most migrants who arrive at the US southern border from requesting asylum.

At the same time, longtime US residents were targeted for removal by US authorities. Trump sought to suspend critical if insufficient programs that shield hundreds of thousands from deportation, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS). “Interior removals” of migrants arrested and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rose from 65,332 in 2016 to over 95,000 in 2018.

The pandemic context only heightened the exclusionary turn. Amid unprecedented global recession, increasingly diverse populations were displaced from across the Global South and began making their way to the US border in search of work and safety. Biden responded — in typical fashion — by abandoning his professed commitments to migrant rights and inclusion and making the Republican position his own.

Even as the Biden administration revoked Trump’s Safe Third Country Agreements and moved to safeguard temporary immigrant protection programs, it advanced the southward externalization of the US border well into Colombia, with military operations in the Darién Gap. Expulsions to Mexico under Title 42, initiated by the Trump administration under a public health pretext, continued well into 2023, effecting three million deportations in less than three years.

These numbers made Biden the biggest deporter in a single presidential term since George W. Bush. When Title 42 was set to expire, Biden revived Trump’s asylum ban. In February, he backed a failed bipartisan bill that would have enshrined Trump’s agenda by raising the burden of proof necessary to receive asylum; mandating border closures after daily crossings reached an average of five thousand; continuing border wall construction; expanding the Border Patrol; and more. As the 2024 campaign season heated up, Biden went further, unilaterally mandating the border’s closure to asylum seekers when the daily average of migrant “encounters” registered by US authorities surpassed 2,500.

If the sobs of incarcerated children torn from their parents come to haunt the Trump administration through history, Biden might be remembered for the 2021 images of US Border Patrol agents on horseback riding down terror-stricken Haitian asylum seekers.

The last fifteen years of prolonged and profound economic crisis is doubtless the principal culprit for the new and changing populations of the dispossessed driven toward the US border. A significant portion of that displacement, however, can be directly attributed to the failed US regime change campaigns in two countries that have topped the lists of asylum seekers in recent years: Cuba and Venezuela. In that sense, Biden also bears significant responsibility for continuing Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanction regime and keeping Cuba on the “State-Sponsors of Terrorism” list, which have contributed to economic crises and caused extreme suffering in both countries.

At the same time, Biden returned to Barack Obama’s strategy of creating and expanding temporary immigration categories that the Migration Policy Institute calls “twilight statuses” and which scholar Cecilia Menívar theorizes as providing an uncertain and vulnerable “liminal legality.” He broadened TPS to include over a million immigrants already present within US borders and increased the use of “humanitarian parole” for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants with US economic sponsors.

Paired with the steady rise of militarized enforcement, a broader pattern in immigration policy is emerging that appears to favor the selective exploitation of precarious and contingent but documented low-wage migrant laborers in the lowest ranks of US labor markets. Many more are stymied in countries of transit, where they may be more useful to US capital’s emergent “nearshoring” strategies, toiling on the losing end of reconfigured global value chains.

The Campaign

As Daniel Denvir has noted, the 2024 presidential campaign evidences the dangerous trend of asymmetric ideological polarization around immigration, in which a radicalizing right drags the cowardly center further into its court.

Predictably, Trump has escalated his line of attack this election cycle, erroneously attributing fentanyl trafficking to undocumented immigrants and calling for the mass deportation of twenty million people. He and running mate, J. D. Vance, have proposed invading Mexican territory with the US military to combat organized crime and sparked a surge of harassment and threats against Haitian TPS holders in Ohio after relating spurious, racist claims.

At a summer campaign event, Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters, “Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk.” Harris, who has retained much of the Biden’s campaign personnel and infrastructure, has continued the president’s strategy of trying to outflank the Republicans by espousing a hard-line anti-migrant position. In so doing, the Democrats have accepted the premise that migration itself is a problem.

This is a perilous strategy, making immigrants and their families vulnerable to violence. It’s also a losing one. The Republicans will always be more overtly racist, more extravagantly xenophobic, and more ambitious in their enforcement fantasies than the Democrats. If undecided voters are looking for nativism, why would they settle for second best?

Most disturbing is that the Democrats would cater to the basest, knee-jerk responses of migrant scapegoating, rather than use the election to advance a counternarrative of solidarity. Instead of pointing to Trump’s border wall as a monument to “venality and disillusionment,” as Greg Grandin writes, the Democratic Party is scrambling to build a bigger, better, more beautiful one.

This outcome is not predetermined. A more emancipatory resolution to the unfolding crisis of neoliberalism, however, would require a vision for economic restructuring based on cooperation, equality, and dignity, not on the superexploitation of racial minorities and capital’s zero-sum race to the bottom.

Absent from US political discourse at present is a Left capable of making that case. It was the popular threat posed by the Bernie Sanders campaign that forced candidates like Biden and Harris to profess progressive positions on immigration in 2020. Without a credible challenger on that flank this time around, the Democrats have entirely caved to the Right.

From Gaza and Lebanon to the US southern border, the Democrats are choosing complicity in grotesque atrocities and injustice, motivated at least in part by craven (mis)calculations of political gain. In so doing, they continue to cede terrain to fascistic responses to the spiraling economic, geopolitical, and ecological crises that engulf the globe. For the Left, the current moment underlines just how urgent the work of building power is and how very far we have to go.