Kamala Harris’s Lost Opportunity on Immigration

Kamala Harris in Guatemala looking for the root causes of the migration boom. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

There’s not much question that if Kamala Harris loses this crazy-close election, it will mostly be over public unhappiness with the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economic and immigration issues (despite the bizarre and mean-spirited heavy bet the Trump campaign is making over the salience of hateful anti-transgender attack ads). It has certainly been frustrating to Democrats that instead of noting and approving of recent improvements in the economy and the virtual collapse of inflation, persuadable voters seem to be misremembering the Trump years as prosperous beyond measure.

Similarly, Harris and Biden aren’t getting much credit for the sharp reductions in border crossings by migrants in recent months. But as Nate Silver argues, it’s pretty hard to make the case that Democrats haven’t mishandled the situation at the border:

The number of Southern border crossings greatly increased during the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration … Some of this can be attributed to the strong labor market amid the post-COVID recovery, but policy changes enacted by Biden are also directly responsible for much of it.

Harris is closely associated with the issue; liberals don’t like the term “border czar” but Biden appointed her to lead the response on the Southwestern border. 

Harris articulated a series of extremely liberal policies on the border as a presidential candidate in 2019, including raising her hand in the first debate when asked whether she supported health care coverage for undocumented workers — as the other Democrats did too, including Biden.

And this comes at a time when there is a huge global backlash to immigration — even in famously immigrant-friendly Canada.

I’d challenge Silver’s assertion that Harris had a lead role in responding to the situation on the southern border; her assignment, which didn’t seem to last long, was to look into the “root causes” of the migrant boom in Latin America, which has little to do with the border policies themselves. But in any event, we are where we are, and the Biden administration chose to change the policies to reduce pressure on the border and to increase deportations. Harris also has a plausible counterargument to Trump’s claims that he’s Border Savior if she focuses on his sabotaging of bipartisan legislation that included many of the policy changes Republicans had been supporting.

But Harris has certainly been on the defensive on immigration policy, and her problems are encapsulated by a polling trend that the final New York Times–Siena national poll puts in sharp relief: She’s struggling with voters who prioritize tougher immigration policies, even as she’s struggling to reach Biden’s 2020 levels of support among Latino voters. It’s increasingly clear that one political imperative for Harris — being consistently tough on immigration while emphasizing her own background in law enforcement as a prosecutor battling south-of-the-border cartels — may be interfering with efforts to convince Latinos that she’s more understanding of their values than Trump. If she were not so intent on being Kamala the Cop, she’d probably be making a lot of hay by exploiting concerns (among Latinos and others) about what Trump would do to implement his “mass deportation” pledge.

For one thing, polls showing majority support for “mass deportation” don’t reach contradictory impulses in public opinion, as Christian Paz explains at Vox:

A good share of voters, it seems, are fine with increasing deportations. Some might even want the kind of operation Trump is floating. But many also want exceptions and protections for specific groups of immigrants who have been living in the US for a while, or have other ties to the country.

Attacking the indiscriminate nature of the “mass deportation” pledge — particularly in the hands of confirmed nativists like chief Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller — could yield some benefits for Harris among all sorts of voters. But an even richer lode of potential trouble for Trump might ensue from a sustained effort to warn Latino citizens of the discrimination and harassment they will likely face thanks to the racial and ethnic profiling that will inevitably accompany an effort to identify and round up 11 million undocumented immigrants. Worse yet, if Trump wins thanks to his handling of the immigration issue, he will have every incentive to make the mass deportation initiative as harsh and racist as possible, notes Ron Brownstein:

The implication of Trump gaining big w/Latinos while stressing mass deportation as his cornerstone domestic policy can hardly be overstated. Likely he (and Miller) would interpret that as proof there’s no political constraint on pushing deportation (w/camps) to the max if he wins.

All these implications should be fair game for the Harris campaign in sowing doubts about Trump’s immigration agenda. But you don’t hear much if anything about it, presumably because her campaign has made a strategic decision to avoid the whole topic aside from stressing her tough-mindedness and credibility on law enforcement. It’s a lost opportunity that could come back to haunt the vice-president — and the whole country if she loses.