Columns, Opinion By Andrew Moss, Guest Columnist
To date, Democrats have largely failed to lay out a comprehensive vision of what our immigration policy should be. Some of the announced presidential candidates have, over time, staked out positions on specific issues, such as the status of the Dreamers or the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but they’ve largely left it to President Trump and his allies to set the broader terms of the debate.
If the candidates hope to offer a genuine alternative to the administration’s policies, it’s imperative that they shift the debate from sloganeering about the wall and “open borders” to a consideration of an underlying question: what priorities and values will guide our immigration policy in the coming years? Will we continue along the present path of increased militarization and incarceration, or will we forge policies guided by a vision of a more just society?
No challenger will succeed in this project unless he or she can begin to counter Trump’s greatest political weapon: fear. Right from the start, candidate Trump began stoking people’s anxieties about their job security, their physical safety and the cohesion of American society itself. Since his election as president, he has used the enormous power of his office to amplify his message, supported by Fox News and other conservative outlets. If Democratic challengers are to succeed, they’ll need to employ facts and narratives skillfully to align the mainstream debates to reality. For the facts, they’ll need to draw on extensive research, including a recent report of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which documents the positive overall effects of immigration on U.S. economic growth.
They’ll need to show that Trump is wrong on crime and immigration. A number of recent, large-scale studies of metropolitan areas throughout the United States have shown no correlation between crime and the growth of immigrant communities. If anything, crime in those areas has decreased. Moreover, challengers to Trump must show that his repeated characterizations of migrants as constituting a destabilizing “invasion” are dangerously distorted. Although news reports have focused on recent migrations to our southern border of people fleeing violence and destitution in Central America, the greatest percentage of people coming to the U.S. since 2010 is from Asian countries, and many of these immigrants are college educated. The percentage of foreign-born persons in the U.S. — 13.7 percent as of 2017 — is still lower than the peak percentage of around 15 percent at the turn of the twentieth century.
But in addition to neutralizing the weapon of fear, successful challengers to Trump must show in stark terms the tragic failures of the present policies. They must remind voters how Trump’s harsher policies on asylum, prosecution and detention have failed to deter migrants from coming to our southern border (a record 76,000 came in February). They must keep before the public mind those images of cruelty that have repelled people of all political persuasions: the separation of migrant children from their parents, the caging of children in make-shift facilities, the teargassing of migrant families by U.S. agents at the border and the deaths of both adults and children in detention.
