When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week at her party’s convention in Chicago, she sought to strike a delicate balance on immigration by promising to approach law enforcement and security at the nation’s southern border like the prosecutor she once was, without abandoning the country’s values.
“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” he said Thursday night. “We can create an earned path to citizenship and secure our border.”
It was the kind of balance on the issue that Democrats had sought all week: a balance between calls for more agents and judges on the nation’s southern border and a system that treats people humanely, between promises to uphold the law and rebukes of the fearmongering about “the other” that has permeated the national immigration debate.
But the Democratic Party’s overall message on immigration over the past week, and since Harris announced her candidacy last month, is decidedly the most rigid in decades. This shift reflects the political vulnerability of the issue for Harris and the Democratic candidates in November, with problems at the southern border a top concern for many voters and a small but growing minority of Republicans and independents seeking to curb entry routes into the country.
The most common refrain from the stage in Chicago was a denunciation of former President Donald Trump and Republicans for scuttling a bipartisan border security deal this year that, as former President Barack Obama said Tuesday, was “written in part by one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress.”
There was almost no condemnation of Trump’s immigration policies or promises to reverse them. There were vague calls for expanding legal pathways to citizenship, but no mention of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally who would benefit from the measure, many of whom have worked and raised families in the United States for years. Immigrants known as Dreamers, who were brought to the country illegally as children and have become leaders of a national campaign to gain legal status, were absent from the podium.
When Democrats weren’t trying to neutralize the issue with comments more closely related to border security, they downplayed it. The party relegated immigration to the bottom of its platform priorities. Few panels, organized by national Democrats or associated groups, focused on the issue. One of the most anticipated — billed as a debate on the future of comprehensive immigration reform — drew fewer than two dozen attendees scattered across a dull ballroom with several rows of empty chairs.
Andrea Flores, a former Biden administration official turned critic of his immigration policies and a moderator of the session, said she had found it difficult to distinguish between Trump and Democrats on border policy. She warned that the lack of contrast was allowing Trump to exploit voter discontent.
“We see growing support for mass deportations, we see growing support for ending asylum policies, we see growing support for their policies,” he said.
Last month, Republicans made the border and immigration the focus of their national convention, with a lineup of speakers accusing migrants of taking jobs and stealing votes and red-and-blue signs reading “Mass Deportation Now!” Before Harris took the lectern Thursday, Trump stood at the border fence in Cochise County, Arizona, and falsely argued that she and her fellow Democrats had “unleashed a plague of migrant crime.”
Harris has yet to release her full immigration platform, though she is expected to do so in the coming weeks. So far, her approach has echoed that of President Joe Biden, who in recent months — as the bipartisan deal in Congress fell apart — took a tougher line on the southern border while promising to open pathways to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the U.S. illegally for a long time. In June, he signed an executive order denying asylum to most immigrants and another expanding legal protections for immigrants married to U.S. citizens but in the country illegally.
On stage Thursday, as she has done at her campaign rallies, Harris pledged to sign the bipartisan bill. That law would have expanded detentions, barred most immigrants from gaining asylum as the number of crossings soared, provided funding for thousands of new Border Patrol agents and personnel and invested in new technology to catch drug smugglers.
In an interview, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said his party’s support for the border security bill was “a significant change in border security, in asylum, in the treatment of those who cross our border.”
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“It’s important for the Democratic Party to continue to maintain a clear position that we are willing to do this,” Coons said.
Some Democrats and pollsters believe the tougher stance will help Harris in key swing states like Arizona and Michigan, where immigration has been front and center for many independent voters.
“She’s a prosecutor from a border state, and I think Democrats would do well to remind voters of that,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president of public affairs for Third Way, a centrist Democratic advocacy group.
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