Why is Biden Trying to Out-Trump Trump?
Last week, President Joe Biden announced one of the most conservative immigration policies in American history. After congressional Democrats negotiated a restrictive immigration bill with Republicans earlier this year, Trump lobbied Republican senators to oppose it so that he could deprive Biden and Democrats of a political “victory” on immigration. A few months later, Biden issued an even more restrictive executive order that would bar migrants from being granted asylum until the average amount of daily border crossings dramatically decreases.
If this is an issue you’ve paid attention to, you may notice Biden’s new policy is the opposite of what Democrats ran on when he was elected. In their party platform, they claim the following: “Democrats believe the United States should be a beacon of hope for those who are suffering violence and injustice, which is why we will protect and expand the existing asylum system and other humanitarian protections.”
Despite promising to end Trump’s inhumane treatment of suffering migrants, Biden has continued to uphold Trump administration policies, including keeping Title 42, which used the pandemic as a justification to prevent migrants from seeking asylum, in place until May 2023. Biden oversaw the deportations of over 140,000 immigrants last year. This comes when public opinion has shifted significantly away from openness to immigrants and toward restrictions.
Today, we’ll talk about how public opinion on immigration shifted, why Biden and Democrats think they’re better off abandoning their stated values, and what we can learn from this case.
Let’s Get Theoretical for a Second
What’s popular or normal at one political moment can be unthinkable in another. There’s a term for this, which is called…
THE OVERTON WINDOW
In the early 90s, political scientist Joseph Overton observed that politicians typically only support ideas that they think are broadly acceptable to the public. After he died, his colleague Joseph Lehman, from a well-known libertarian think tank called the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, named a theory after him, The Overton Window. Lehman proposed that policy proposals exist on a spectrum, and only the ones within a particular part of that spectrum will be acceptable at any given time for politicians to support without losing re-election. You can watch him explain it in video form below:
The Mackinac Center has a good example of this pictured below: education. Almost no politicians (yet) endorse eliminating all requirements for school attendance or mandating that students attend federally controlled schools. However, school choice groups and the elected officials they back are actively fighting to promote and deregulate private schools. The more successful they are at this, the more the “window” on education will move to the right.
It’s important to note that the window can (and will) shrink or expand in either direction at any time and may not do so symmetrically. With enough of a shift in popular sentiment or political will, positions on any given issue move in and out of the acceptable spectrum that elected officials can take.
Now, let’s see how this is playing out in real-time…
How Did the Window Shift on Immigration?
TW: Violent and racist language used by a former President
Biden’s opponent, former President Donald Trump, called Mexicans rapists in his 2016 campaign launch speech, ran on promises of building a border wall and banning Muslims from entering the U.S., and continues to falsely claim that immigrants commit more crimes than the general population. While his positions were well to the right of the median American voter, they got Republican primary voters to flock to him and won over enough voters in swing states to snag the presidency.
While voters with strong anti-immigrant sentiment backed Trump in 2016, they’re backing him even more strongly now in 2024. Emboldened by a public that is used to his rhetoric, Trump has explicitly promised to launch the “Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History” if elected again. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (which the conservative movement hopes to enact if Trump wins) promises to cripple the legal immigration system and programs like DACA. While dismantling our immigration system wasn’t popular before, it is now an expectation held by mainstream voters.
Since it works in Republican primaries and sometimes works in general elections, candidates are doubling down on anti-immigrant rhetoric. Pro-immigration groups America’s Voice and Immigration Hub found an increase in 2021 in mentions of the terms “Biden-Harris border crisis” and “mass amnesty” in paid advertising, as well as increased anti-immigrant discourse online.
We’re so desensitized to this that we don’t even bat an eye anymore when Trump says immigrants “poison the blood” of America. Despite America being more racially diverse than ever before, we’re still entertaining electing a president who campaigns on racial purity and eugenics. The question is, why do more Americans believe him now? In a recent Vox article, Christian Paz proposes two other theories that could further explain why the MAGA immigration message resonates with more voters now than it did four years ago.
While many economic indicators now are in a similar place as in 2018 and 2019 under Trump, people feel worse about the economy and more anxious about their financial situations than they did then. During previous times of economic uncertainty, popular support for immigration has gone down. Paz calls this the “scarcity mindset” — Americans (erroneously) think that welcoming immigrants requires them to share their wealth with outsiders and are hesitant to do so.
Because border crossings are up, Paz also attributes the rightward shift in immigration politics to a “law & order” mindset among the public. Matthew Wright, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia suggests that many Americans feel conflicting emotions that conflate illegal immigration, asylum seekers, and immigration in general with a sense of public disorder. These people may be sympathetic to immigrants in general, but their worry about order and safety may override their compassion when right-wing politicians exploit it. This thinking allows Republicans to animate the bigotry and nativism among base voters while also capturing persuadable, moderate voters.
It is for all these reasons that more Americans want immigration (both legal and illegal) decreased and favor mass deportations now than four years ago. Trump’s messaging didn’t work on everyone, but it didn’t have to — enough people gradually shifted their mindsets and political circumstances shifted just enough for the Overton Window to move on immigration.
So…How Is Biden Responding?
Spoiler alert: not well.
Seeing poll numbers shift against him and knowing that Trump will attack him on the border again, Biden appears eager to undercut Trump at any cost. Biden’s executive order, which bars migrants from seeking asylum when there are more than 2,500 border crossings in a day, is even more restrictive than the bipartisan Senate bill (which would have set the limit at 4,000.)
Immigration law explicitly states that people have the right to seek asylum between ports of entry and after crossing the border. Denying people this right is illegal, end of story. When Trump tried to cut off asylum for people who enter between ports at the border, the ACLU sued him and won, and are now suing Biden for doing the same thing. I’ll say it out loud for those in the back: harmful and illegal policies are still harmful and illegal, even if you voted for the person who enacted them.
However, the law doesn’t appear popular, so neither side feels incentivized to follow it. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who was one of the negotiators for the right-wing immigration bill that failed, told his fellow Democrats to ride the anti-immigrant wave as political strategy. He argued: “We risk losing the 2024 election if we do not seize this opportunity to go on offense on the issue of the border and turn the tables on Republicans.”
While Trump did kill Murphy’s bill out of a desire to impose restrictions himself once elected, there’s no world in which doing what Republicans want is somehow turning the tables on them. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was correct to point out that, by negotiating the bill, he “followed the instructions of [his] conference…it’s actually [Republicans] that wanted to tackle the border issue.” In reality, Democrats are the ones being played here by adopting Republican policies.
In particular, the special election victory of Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) in February seemed to give Democrats permission to abandon their values. After former Rep. George Santos was expelled from this seat in Congress, Suozzi (who Santos replaced) ran against lesser-known Republican Mazi Pilip. While both Suozzi and Pilip campaigned on supporting the slaughter of Palestinians and restricting immigration, Suozzi supported the bipartisan immigration bill while Pilip opposed it. Again — both candidates campaigned on the same right-wing priorities but did so in the specific way that their party leaders likely told them to. Democrats now see this as their playbook and seem poised to use Suozzi’s rhetoric up and down the ticket.
What Do We Learn From This?
In a memo they released after the New York special election, the National Republican Congressional Committee said it well: “Republicans had one issue that consumed the race: immigration…the wall-to-wall coverage of the migrant crisis in New York forced Suozzi to compete on our turf. Even being outspent two-to-one, Republicans did significant damage to Suozzi’s image.”
Republicans didn’t get that House seat back (again, largely due to Suozzi’s name recognition and fundraising advantages) but I’d argue in a way, they still won the election. They moved the Overton Window on immigration so much that the Democrat who beat them is now enacting their agenda and inspiring other Dems (including the President) to do the same.
In a blog post on the website for Strong Towns (a group that advocates for more livable cities), activist Daniel Herriges points out the following about the Overton Window:
“One key insight about the Overton Window is that it’s most readily moved from outside it. No one is very threatened by tinkering within the mainstream, so such tinkering doesn’t provoke a dramatic response. It takes an effective, radical critique to shake up the public discourse on a subject. And when such a critique is successful, change is often breathtakingly rapid.”
It certainly appears that Trump’s extremist “critique” of American immigration has been effective, provoked a dramatic response, and rapidly changed the public discourse.
For progressives, hope need not be lost, though. In his 2017 book, Why Liberals Win (Even When They Lose Elections), Boston University scholar Stephen Prothero argues that while culture wars between progressive and regressive causes are as old as America, liberals generally win in the end. While Republicans currently utilize anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, and anti-trans sentiment to fire up their base, America lived through times when Catholics, Mormons, and alcohol drinkers were the ones being targeted by conservative crusades. In all those cases, both sides eventually accepted the new normal, and conservatives chose a new group to pick on down the line.
To win back the American people’s support, pro-immigration advocates (and progressive advocates on other causes) are going to have to make a better and louder critique than Trump’s. They will need to organize, they will need to demand equitable treatment through protest, they will need to share stories that inspire people’s compassion, and they will need to elect candidates who are movable (back to) their side. Remember, as of 2023, 68% of Americans polled still said immigration was overall a good thing. This battle is still winnable, but it’s going to be a tough fight.
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