An excerpt from “The Bankruptcy of the Democrats’ Elvis Presley Approach to Immigration” by Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot:
Of course, there is much not to like about how ICE has gone about their business, all of which has been copiously documented. This has been red meat to those sectors of blue America and their political representatives whose revealed preference is not to deport anyone.
The ICE/interior enforcement issue hits the Daily Double for the “In This House, We Believe” crowd. No human is illegal. Check. Kindness is everything. Check. These may be utterly useless as guides to effective, sustainable immigration policy but they sure do get the juices flowing.
That’s why, from Los Angles to Minneapolis, Democratic activists have felt completely justified in interfering with ICE activities and Democratic politicians in refusing to cooperate with a duly constituted federal law enforcement agency. And that’s why, especially with the tragic recent death of Renee Good, calls of “Abolish ICE!” are beginning to ring out across wide sectors of the Democratic Party. There is no good ICE, only bad ICE. There is no legitimate ICE, only illegitimate ICE.
This is the logical terminus of an attitude that starts with no human being is illegal and kindness is everything. Since ICE’s remit is that illegal immigrants are, in fact, illegal and that the law must be followed, even if the outcome is not particularly kind, it only makes sense to get rid of the agency.
This is a terrible idea in so many different ways. As a very useful new memo from the reform Democratic group Searchlight points out:
[S]aying you want to “Abolish ICE”…means that you support getting rid of the agency responsible for enforcing immigration and customs laws, creating a lawless system where people who enter the country illegally can stay here indefinitely, leaving no agency charged with finding and removing them. This will, inevitably, incentivize others to come to the United States illegally. “Abolish ICE” is not some proxy for more humane immigration enforcement, or to change ICE’s culture to adhere to due process, or to impose accountability on rogue officers. It’s advocating for an extreme.Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE…[W]e will always need a federal agency charged with deporting people who are in the United States illegally.
That’s clearly correct as a matter of policy. Democrats need to reflect that in how they talk about ICE or the momentum will continue to shift toward those in the party who simply want to get rid of the agency entirely.
And that would be a disaster. The reasonable—and popular—desire to reform ICE practices would inevitably be subsumed in a contentious debate about abolishing the agency. This is not likely to turn out well for the Democrats despite the solid basis in public opinion for some reform and pullback of ICE activities. Abolishing ICE will likely never be generally popular, despite its sky-high popularity with Democrats where there has been a recent spike in support.
Instead, as the Searchlight memo points out, Democrats will be setting themselves up for a rerun of the “Defund the Police” debacle, also driven by a viral incident (and also in Minneapolis!). A maximalist demand like “Abolish ICE” will serve only to signal a lack of Democratic commitment to immigration enforcement, just as defund the police signaled a lack of Democratic commitment to public safety. This is highly undesirable both for the Democrats politically and for the general cause of reforming ICE practices.
Trump’s border crackdowns in his first administration. Seizing on some well-publicized excesses, Democrats pilloried Trump for being cruel and inhumane and promised to be different. And they were! They were kind and humane—and also completely ineffective at controlling the border and preventing abuse of the asylum system once they got back in power, producing the huge wave of illegal and irregular immigration that discredited the Democrats and helped Trump win the 2024 election….
Democrats instead need to get beyond mindless slogans like “Abolish ICE” and blanket opposition to everything ICE does and embrace what I have termed immigration realism. That approach means taking on board the following realities of immigration into this rich country of ours:
- Many more people want to come to a rich country like the United States than an orderly immigration system can allow.
- Therefore, many people are willing to break the laws of our country to gain entry.
- If you do not enforce the law, you will get more law-breakers and therefore more illegal immigrants.
- If you provide procedural loopholes to gain entry into the country (e.g., by claiming asylum), many people will abuse these loopholes.
- Once these illegal and irregular immigrants gain entry to the country, they will seek to stay indefinitely regardless of their immigration status.
- If interior immigration enforcement is lax, such that these illegal and irregular immigrants do mostly get to stay forever, that provides a tremendous incentive for others to try to gain entry to the country via the same means.
- If you provide benefits and dispensations to all immigrants in the country, regardless of their immigration status, this further incentivizes aspiring immigrants to gain entry to the country by any means necessary.
- Tolerance of flagrant law-breaking on a mass scale contributes to a sense of social disorder and loss of control among a country’s citizens, who believe a nation’s borders are meaningful and that the welfare of a nation’s citizens should come first.
- There is, in fact, such a thing as too much immigration, particularly low-skill immigration, and negative effects on communities and workers are real, not just in the imaginations of xenophobes.
- If more immigration is desired by parties or policymakers, from whichever countries and at whatever skill levels, then immigration should be regular, legal immigration and approved by the American people through the democratic process. Backdooring mass immigration over the wishes of voters because it is “kind” or “reflects our values” or is deemed “economically necessary” leads inevitably to backlash. Wheelbarrows full of econometric studies on immigration’s aggregate benefits will not save you.
Obviously, the current Democratic vogue for treating all ICE activities as illegitimate and susceptibility to dumb maximalist slogans like “Abolish ICE” points them in precisely the wrong direction for dealing with the thorny and complex realities of the immigration issue. They’re just setting themselves up for future failure.
In short, it’s time to stop coddling the “In This House, We Believe” crowd and adopt a serious, grown-up approach to immigration and immigrants…
“Defund the Police” was never a Democratic slogan. It was thrown out by a few progressives, and in typical Republican fashion they unfairly tied it to all Democrats. The idea behind it was good, but the slogan was bad and too general. Now, “Abolish ICE” is more targeted and not in the same league. Apples and oranges.
Translation: Using a simplistic slogan was a mistake for the 2nd/3rd most important issue for many voters, but it is ok for the 1st most important issue for many voters.
How is abolish ICE more targeted? Because it is a single federal agency? Then why not use “replace”?
Mainstream Democrats are constantly making the mistake of giving cover to radical leftists and trying to normalize their slogans. This simply doesn’t work.
It hasn’t worked for any of the slogans of the left for the past two decades, not a single one. All of them have brought backlashes because policymaking can’t be reduced to slogans and enough voters recognize this.
It makes mainstream Democrats look weak, unfocused and unserious.
Searchlight!!! Yeah, we should take advice from them
“The author of a controversial memo telling Democrats to abandon the slogan “Abolish ICE” and instead focus on reform and retraining is a former Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection official who for the last seven months has worked for WestExec Advisors, a secretive Washington, D.C., shadow lobbyist that counts as clients major government contractors in the defense and surveillance industry.
In an interview with the Prospect, Blas Nuñez-Neto would not say who his clients are at WestExec Advisors, where he is a senior adviser, only that he has consulted in recent years on immigration, customs, and trade. He said casting his memo as serving the interests of those clients would be “a little disingenuous,” while again declining to say who those clients are.”
Sen. Gallego has it right. ICE needs to be disbanded. That’s not to say we need no organization to handle immigration, but ICE is so corrupted, abolish it and start over.
“Sixty-one percent of respondents in a new CBS News/YouGov poll said the manner in which ICE is conducting its operations during the detainment or stopping of people is “too tough,” with 15 percent saying it is “not tough enough.”
Actually, Democrats used to have a significant anti-immigrant wing. In no way, despite what some advocates of this policy say, is this a special issue on which Dems have never tolerated any dissent.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1101/vote_110_1_00206.htm
As you can see, a bill that would have given unlawful residents a chance to earn citizenship was voted down in 2007 in a Democratic Congress despite a Republican President supporting it. The reason is that over a dozen Dems in the Senate voted against it. And that being the case, the House with its lower number of moderate Republicans and peaking Blue Dogs wasn’t voting for it either.
What happened to those dissidents? They would either fall victim to the great moderate Democratic wipeout of the 2010’s or retired before they would have. Red America stopped caring all that much about what kind of Dem was on the ballot.
This is my question. Since red America did not accept anti-immigrant Dems in the first half of the 2010’s, why would it now that Trump has even further polarized politics?
Democrats are making the same mistake as European leftists in thinking that the immigration issue will go away on its own or that you can base your position on not ruffling any feathers.
There is currently a fundamental misreading of the issue. The right cares deeply about the issue and will forgive transgressions on any other policies, while the rest of the population cares about the economy and will not reward Democrats for open borders.
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To top it all off, Democrats’ de facto main spokespeople are still artists like Kimmel.