The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

While his administration seems to have opened new fronts in every political conflict and culture war in our society, there’s little question that immigration is the focal point of the Donald Trump 2.0 agenda. Obstructing immigration (both legal and not) has proven to be the clearest line connecting his rhetoric to his action, and consequently the issue where he has the most obvious mandate; if he ran on anything, it was immigration restriction, and as much as I hate to say it a man who won the popular vote and every swing state enjoys public backing for his signature issue. Not coincidentally, immigration policy is also the area where the consequences of Democratic failure are most stark. Despite years of knowing that this was coming, this anti-immigrant backlash as wedge issue for a supremely nativist candidate, despite all the warnings, despite polling, press coverage, internal memos, and reality screaming in their faces, the Democratic Party was powerless to neutralize Trump’s immigration rhetoric – because the party still does not have an immigration policy.

To be clear, they do have slogans. They have talking points. They have hashtags and symbolic gestures and sternly worded denunciations. But they do not have a plan, not one that anyone can point to, explain, or run on. After a first term defined as much by incompetence and instability as by its accomplishments, second-term Trump quickly rounded into form with ICE raids, mass deportation, and a grim machinery of border enforcement both far more expansive and more effective than that of his first term. And what’s the response from the opposition party? The accurate contention that this was all inhumane, and probably economically ruinous, and certainly not in keeping with America’s immigrant past, but not much else. Policy specifics – who we should be letting in, how many of them, via what mechanism, with what form of enforcement or oversight – have been and remain very scarce.

This isn’t just a tactical blunder. It’s not merely a matter of bad strategy or poor messaging. It’s the culmination of a deeper rot among the Democrats, a party that has ceased to be a party of governance and become, instead, a kind of anti-party: a coalition of elites whose only unifying impulse is opposition to the right. They run on vibes, outrage, and cultural identification. They organize around preventing Republicans from doing things, sure, but it frequently seems that they no longer bother with the hard work of articulating what they themselves would do instead. The same old war over neoliberalism is raging in the party, this time with the new euphemism “abundance,” but the party has avoided directly confronting that debate for years, still stung by the Clinton-Sanders war. In more concrete terms, the question of economic populism and cultural issues continues to haunt Democrats, whether it’s an organic conflict or not, and there too, they punt. With Trump as an all-encompassing target to rally against – and, crucially, to fundraise around – it’s just too easy for the party to be only what it is not, for it to play into precisely its modern reputation for incoherence. On immigration more than anywhere else, that vacuum has become undeniable.

This isn’t just retrospective grievance, either. The stakes are immediate and real. The policies being implemented right now by the Trump administration -draconian new asylum rules, expanded detention capacity, sweeping ICE raids targeting “sanctuary cities,” and renewed legal efforts to end birthright citizenship- are not happening in a vacuum. They’re the product of a political context in which Democrats failed, again and again, to make the case for an alternative. And they’re still failing to do so now. Go ask an ordinary voter, someone not glued to MSNBC, not hanging out on liberal TikTok, someone who maybe voted for Biden once but sat out 2024, for the Democrat stance on immigration. What’s the platform? What’s the plan? Normies can’t tell you. I can’t tell you, as a political obsessive whose livelihood requires me to keep track of partisan politics. Because there isn’t a plan. There’s no theoretical bill to rally around and no framework to base such a bill on. Isn’t that… strange?

The party spent years reacting to Trump’s rhetoric with moral condemnation but never put forward a coherent program of their own. They made “kids in cages” into a rallying cry and then quietly dropped it when Biden rebranded the same facilities. They opposed the wall but never offered a serious border security policy to replace it. They spoke in sweeping moral terms about asylum seekers and refugees, but never resolved the obvious contradiction: as much as I’d like to, public sentiment and existing policy and arguably international law say that you can’t admit everyone, and most people crossing the border are not, in fact, legitimate refugees under the legal terms that underly asylum policy. They just aren’t. That’s why you have to define some different reason for taking them in, a different kind of policy – which is exactly what Democrats seemingly refuse to do.

The trouble is that the Democratic party has not really stood for much of anything for my entire lifetime; this is the party of the 1996 Bill Clinton campaign, which seemed almost gleeful in the face of Bob Dole’s repeated complaints that Clinton had stolen the Republican agenda. With no values, you have nothing guiding your strategy. Even when Biden tried to move to the center on immigration starting in 2023, issuing executive orders to restrict asylum claims and restart some form of expedited removal, he was pilloried from within his own party. It was typical of Biden’s serial inability to placate any particular constituency in his coalition even while he tried to appeal to all of them. He got hammered from the left, gained no traction in the middle, and alienated immigrant advocacy groups whose support he needed. By the end of his term, the “Biden plan” on immigration was essentially whatever Customs and Border Protection was doing that day, combined with some vague hope that Congress might eventually act. The Democrats had four years to make immigration reform a central, affirmative part of their platform, to make their immigration policy intentional, a statement of morals and good governance. Instead, they did the opposite, allowing policy to stay sufficiently vague and arbitrary that vast throngs of migrants moved in without actually codifying any legal rights for those migrants. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democrats!

They could have created a framework that combined increased legal immigration with firm border enforcement and a realistic path to legalization for the undocumented population already here. They could have made the case that the U.S. has both the right and the obligation to manage its borders but that we can do so without cruelty or chaos. They could have made immigration part of a larger labor market vision: regulated, humane, and consistent with the interests of working people. They could have pointed out that the American fertility rate has cratered and we need immigrants to fund the social safety net our greying population needs. But they didn’t do those things because that would have required picking a side, and picking a side would probably require defying the party’s intellectual base, the nonprofit industrial complex, or at least having a fight that would expose just how overwhelming their influence has become. And the party has been avoiding having that fight since the last days of the Obama administration. I say that as someone whose own politics are closer to “the groups” than they are to that of the more practical political apparatus.

The Democratic Party is paralyzed by its internal contradictions. On one hand, it’s still dependent on an institutional base (unions, state governments, urban mayors) that knows unmanaged immigration creates fiscal strain and political backlash. On the other hand, it’s hostage to a progressive donor and activist class that treats any effort to restrict immigration as inherently racist. The result is that Democrats spent Biden’s presidency vacillating between rhetorical pro-immigrant maximalism and panicked half-measures that mimicked Trump in everything but tone. And now, under Trump 2.0, they’re still playing defense, still just reacting, still hoping the cruelty of Republican policy will speak for itself. But it won’t. In politics nothing ever speaks for itself; you have to control the narrative with a strong affirmative message, and the Democrats are unable to muster one because of the fundamental divide between their source of political strength and the source of their fundraising dollars.

Look at what’s happening: Trump has restarted mass ICE raids in earnest. Federal agents are coordinating with local police in states that have passed new “immigration enforcement” laws, many of them functionally designed to drive immigrants out of public life entirely. The Department of Justice is fighting in court to curtail birthright citizenship, citing novel interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment that once would have been considered fringe even on the right. Deportation flights are up. Detainee numbers are higher than at any point in the past decade. And the right is openly campaigning for federal funding of vast detention camps, citing “national security.” And the Democrats? They’re back to saying “this is not who we are,” practicing bromide politics. They’re tweeting angry gifs. They’re talking about the cruelty of it all. They still don’t have a policy because they don’t have a vision. Morals alone cannot animate actual winning politics, and it’s not like the party’s morals are super clear.

The trouble is that, from an Iron Law of Institutions standpoint, for many within the party the incentives point against clarity or specificity; they have no internal motivation to pick the exact fight that I’m suggesting they should pick. A real immigration policy would be messy, complicated, controversial. It would require drawing boundaries, setting limits, making tradeoffs. It would have to start from a few core admissions, which do not point comfortably in one simple direction: under real-world political conditions, the U.S. cannot admit everyone who wants to come; the border must be enforced if the party is to survive as a remotely viable national political force; unauthorized entry must have consequences or else there’s no real difference with an open border, which is wildly unpopular; our labor market both depends on and is badly distorted by migrant labor; asylum law has been stretched far beyond its intended scope; and millions of undocumented people already here need a path to legal status, because the alternative is a permanent underclass that can’t serve as the economic force we need them to.

I genuinely think the Democrats have no coherent policy because they simply cannot tell the activist wing of the party “We can let a lot more people in, but we have to turn away some people too.” The immigration nonprofits and general-interest progressive groups like the ACLU will likely accept nothing that does not comport with the simplistic morals of a protest sign. And this is particularly frustrating given that “the groups” are not able to enforce nearly as much discipline when it comes to issues like Medicare for All, which seem vastly more politically achievable to me than an open borders immigration policy. This is a function of a bare fact about modern progressive life, which is that issues have force within the coalition to the degree that they enable simplistic accusations of racism. I’m just being real with you; in intra-progressive debate, that’s where power lies. Immigration is easy to weaponize in this regard, universal healthcare much harder, and thus the former has much more institutional backing.

Still, it’s not hard to sketch the outlines of a plan:

• Substantially increase legal immigration pathways, particularly for low-wage workers, agricultural labor, and family reunification. Try to offset public resistance to uneducated brown workers by pointing out that tons of such workers are (still) coming into the country undocumented anyway. Stress the practicality of that point – it’s not a choice between no low-skilled migration into the country or some but a choice between having a coherent and orderly system that governs that migration or not.
• Build a fast, streamlined asylum process that distinguishes clearly and quickly between those with valid claims and those without.
• Enforce the border – actually enforce it – with trained personnel and real infrastructure, not just slogans or “smart wall” nonsense. Find ways to make enforcement more humane and safer for migrants, adopting an ethos of practicality rather than the rabid crusader mentality that dominates now.
• Mandate employer verification and crack down on wage theft and under-the-table exploitation. The left stands for labor law! Celebrating the exploitation of migrant labor is so perverse for a pro-worker party.
• Create a one-time amnesty for long-settled undocumented residents, tied to back taxes or fines and criminal background checks.
• Coordinate federal support for cities and states absorbing large numbers of new arrivals.

There’s no magic here. This plan, or outline of a plan, is not utopian. It is however at least the skeleton of a framework for a future policy, a real, grounded, technocratically feasible immigration agenda. And crucially, it would give Democrats something to stand for, not just something to complain about. But to do that, they would have to accept that immigration is not just a moral issue. It’s a political and economic one too, in fact a political and economic one first. They would have to accept that most voters (white, Black, Latino, urban, rural) support some restrictions on immigration. They would have to admit that open borders, even if it’s more of a straw man than anything else, is a potent target for the right for a reason. And they would have to stop being afraid of their own shadows.

What’s most galling about this failure is how predictable it all was. We knew Trump was going to run hard on immigration. We knew Democrats had a weakness here. We knew voters in key states were angry about the visible breakdown of the asylum system and the sense that no one was in control. And we knew (because Biden’s polling numbers were screaming it) that the party’s credibility on immigration was shot. Absolutely none of this should have been a surprise. Yet instead of doing the hard work of creating a real plan and selling it, the Democrats chose to rely on the oldest play in their book: directionless moral indignation. They hoped Trump would once again defeat himself by being too cruel, too chaotic, too extreme. And now here we are, six months into a second Trump term, and they’re still hoping the same thing.

You can’t govern through opposition alone. You can’t beat something with nothing. Not in an online-enabled, 24/7 news cycle. Not against a party that’s much more comfortable with nihilism than the Democrats.

This is of course my broader complaint with the Democrats, that they fail because they stand for nothing and on many issues default to aping the Republicans while being more sweaty and anxious about it. The Republicans, as awful as their basic ethos always has been and as crazy as they’ve become and as much as their riven with internal fighting over foreign policy and entitlements, are a coherent party, evil but coherent. The Democrats are an anti-party. That’s the reality. They exist to oppose, not to propose. They govern only when compelled, never when inspired. They rely on institutions they no longer control and moral language they have never earned. And when confronted with a real crisis, like the complete dysfunction of U.S. immigration, they freeze.

If they want to win again, they’ll need a real immigration policy. Not just because it’s good politics. Not just because Trump’s vision is monstrous. But because the country needs one. Because immigration, like it or not, is going to shape our labor markets, our politics, our cultural future, and ignoring it is no longer an option. The question isn’t whether Trump’s plans are bad. They are. The question is: what’s the alternative? So far, the Democrats don’t have one. And that’s why they’re losing, on immigration and everywhere else. Because anti-parties can’t win, and frankly, they don’t deserve to.

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