Immigration

America’s love-hate relationship with immigrants is as old as our nation.

“Give me your tired, your poor” is a national value, but skepticism about foreign immigrants is just as deep-seated. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson feared that incoming Germans would ruin the country. Yet not only did that not happen, but former President Trump himself is a descendant of German immigrants. The U.S. is in fact a nation formed, expanded, and populated today by immigrants and their descendents.

Though every generation struggles to accept new neighbors, America without question has benefitted from their infusions of entrepreneurship, cultural capital and labor. Immigrants are willing to take on jobs that many Americans will not, and important sectors of our economy (including child-care, tourism, and hospitality) depend on them. 

In Trump and Harris, voters find a stark choice in attitudes.  Trump fans the flames of popular fears that foreigners bring crime and economic problems – fears that are very clearly not supported by the data. (In fact: the reverse is actually true. Crime rates among immigrants are substantially lower than they are for Americans who were born here.) Harris advocates for policies that emphasize increased border security while valuing immigrants’ contribution to American economic strength. 

Their Positions:

Harris

Vice President Harris has declared that the US immigration system is broken and requires a legislative fix. She supported the bipartisan bill brokered by the White House and very conservative Senate Republicans to provide more funding to the Border Patrol, detention facilities, and fentanyl detection technology. Republicans, encouraged by former President Trump, blocked that bill from passing earlier this year. The Biden/Harris executive orders that followed have largely stemmed the tide of immigrants seeking asylum at our southern border; those numbers today are lower than at the end of Trump’s Presidency. 

Harris has proposed going much farther: a higher standard for obtaining asylum status in the U.S., increased capacity to detect illegal drugs at the border, and increased funding for the immigration system to handle the number of people seeking to move to the U.S. from increasingly troubled countries in Latin America. 

Trump

Trump has reiterated plans to build a wall along the US southern border, restrict both legal and illegal immigration, and subject visa applicants to “extreme vetting,” among other policies. He has proposed the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, although it is unclear how or even if such a plan could be deployed. Many of these policies are opposed by business groups worried about their impact on the U.S. economy.

Trump also supports ending birthright citizenship – a right as old as the U.S. Constitution; ending temporary protected status for foreign nationals of certain countries, and deporting pro-Palestinian student protestors.