By Conor Friedersdorf
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
“If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”
So warned my colleague David Frum in the headline of an
April 2019 article
about America’s failure to control mass immigration. “Demagogues rise by
talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders
appear unwilling or unable to address,” he wrote. “If difficult issues go
unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible
ones.”
That thesis looked shaky in 2020. Voters declined to
reelect Donald Trump; for the first time in more than 50 years, Gallup found
that Americans who wanted immigration to increase outnumbered
those who wanted it to decrease––a seeming rebuke of Trump’s cruel
family-separation policy and attacks on Mexicans and Muslims––and that 77
percent said
immigration is a good thing for the United States. Then Joe Biden failed to
control the southern border and presided over record surges in unlawful
entries. By 2024, a majority wanted less immigration, Trump won the presidency
while promising the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, and an analysis
of why voters rejected Kamala Harris found that
“too many immigrants crossed the border” was nearly tied for the top reason.
Today, Frum’s warning seems prescient: The Trump
administration has deployed a force of aggressive masked officers onto American
streets while promising “retribution.” They’ve detained, pepper-sprayed,
assaulted, shot, and killed Americans. And high-ranking officials have
repeatedly gotten caught lying about events captured by citizen video footage.
A majority now disapproves
of Trump’s handling of immigration. Perhaps Democrats will prevail in their current
efforts to force ICE officers to take off their masks and get warrants, or
even win back Congress as a result––the MAGA coalition is no less vulnerable
than the left to voter backlash. But a Democratic victory in 2026 is not likely
to end this cycle, in which majorities hate how both parties handle immigration
and ping-pong unhappily between them.
I have covered immigration politics and policy for 25
years; here’s my sense of five basic truths that lawmakers need to acknowledge
if they want to implement immigration policy that is both popular and in the
nation’s best interest.
1. Even many of those Americans who say that they want
to deport all immigrants who are here illegally would likely not stand by that
position in practice.
Lots of MAGA supporters insist that deporting all immigrants in the U.S.
illegally is a prudent goal. Some argue that conserving the rule of law requires
doing so. “I don’t care if it’s a grandma who’s been here for 23 years and sits
quietly on her porch all day long,” the populist-right pundit Walter Curt wrote. “We
either have laws or we don’t, we either have borders or we don’t, there is no
middle ground.”
Although superficially seductive, that logic is monomaniacal. In the real
world, federal laws are enforced by presidents in a manner that predictably
fails to catch anything close to 100 percent of lawbreakers, because resources
are scarce, trade-offs are real, and maximalist outcomes are simply
incompatible with limited government.
Consider the example of tax law. Most Americans abhor tax
cheats. But they, and especially most conservatives, would oppose deploying
thousands of masked, armed IRS agents into whatever American neighborhoods the
president fancies and allowing them to search houses, workplaces, and private
papers to catch all the tax cheats.
Yes, lots of Americans tell pollsters that they want
every immigrant who came here illegally deported, but how many would stick to
that position if told that it would require house-to-house raids, or that the
federal government must choose between spending limited funds on apprehending
undocumented grandmothers who stayed after their work visas and spending on
other societal needs, such as finding a cure for cancer or paying down the
national debt?
2. A majority of Americans support some level of
immigration enforcement, particularly for unauthorized immigrants who commit
violent crimes.
If excessive immigration enforcement is incompatible with
liberty, insufficient immigration enforcement is incompatible with
representative democracy––Republicans are correct that our immigration laws
were duly enacted, and every plausible read of election results and polling
data confirms that Americans favor some meaningful level of immigration
enforcement.
Americans’ preferences are clearest on the question of
immigrants in the country illegally who have been convicted of violent crimes:
According to an Associated Press poll,
83 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat favor deporting them, a position
that is also held by 79 percent of Democrats. The persistence of contrary
policies in some Democrat-controlled jurisdictions is harmful to public safety
and the political interests of that coalition.
I support sanctuary cities insofar as that means that
local police don’t enforce immigration law, because they want residents to
cooperate with law enforcement. But it doesn’t follow that jailers should
refuse all cooperation with deportations. If you favor any immigration
enforcement at all, who better to focus on than incarcerated bad actors, who
can be found without spending any money on searches or deploying federal
officers among the public?
3. Refugee crises will happen––and every response likely to satisfy the
public requires prior planning.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge on immigration is
what to do with large, sudden surges of people. The future will bring wars,
natural disasters, regime collapses, famines, and more. Barring entry to
desperate refugees seems cruel, but letting in large, unanticipated flows of
foreigners can cause voters in democracies to feel overwhelmed and empower
authoritarians. Escaping this dysfunctional cycle is in the interests of
restrictionists and inclusionists alike. All potential solutions come with challenges,
but none is more formidable than the status quo. The future will confront us
with many such crises. We need a plan.
4. Even many Americans who argue for a stricter
immigration policy find the demonization of immigrants concerning.
It is one thing to deport people and another thing to
vilify them while doing so. In my youth, the Republican Party was explicit
about the goodness and humanity of most immigrants––see, for example, the way
that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush talked about the issue in
1980. Bush noted that “honorable, decent, family-loving people” were in
violation of the law.
Today, in an America where there are many more immigrants, lawful and not, and
where violent crime is lower than it was for the entire 1980s and ’90s, data suggest that
unauthorized immigrants commit felonies at lower rates than U.S. citizens and
immigrants who are authorized to be here. Obviously, some do commit murders and
other serious crimes, but it is misleading and incendiary to talk about the
entire class as if a large share are violent criminals, or to treat particular
ethnic groups
as scapegoats
for citizens’ financial struggles. Many Americans find such talk unnerving and
distasteful.
That is not mere political correctness. It is rooted in
the fact that U.S. history is rife with examples of the demonization of
ethnic-minority groups preceding mob violence against them. I hope America is
beyond atrocities like the Los
Angeles Chinese massacre, the
World War I–era lynching of ethnic Germans, and the Zoot Suit Riots. But
humans today are no more evolved than the perpetrators of those atrocities.
Insofar as we’re less likely to participate in mob attacks, it’s because of the
existence of cultural guardrails—the very ones that the MAGA coalition is
dismantling.
5. Every high-immigration country has citizens who
fear immigration and immigrants. They are least likely to sow dysfunction when
their predispositions are understood and to some degree accommodated.
The United States has no choice but to tolerate people
who fear immigration and immigrants. Although many humans enjoy diversity, a
percentage of people in all countries and racial and demographic groups are
psychologically uncomfortable with difference. Their discomfort may be to
some degree innate, and they are either unable or unwilling to change.
America should never allow its xenophobes to persecute
immigrants or violate their rights. But people who hold anti-immigrant views
are fellow citizens who influence our culture, politics, and public policy––and
we can influence whether they do so in ways that are better or worse for
immigrants.
In The Authoritarian Dynamic, the social
psychologist Karen Stenner explains how people with a latent predisposition to
authoritarianism get triggered, and how best to respond to preserve a
pluralistic society. Her work suggests that liberals should stop framing
immigration as a celebration of multicultural difference and instead emphasize
ways in which immigrants are just like the rest of us: people who seek safety,
opportunity, and a better future for their family. These framings can better
assuage the fears of those with xenophobic tendencies, she argues. Stenner
suggests that countries implement practical assimilationist policies, such as
encouraging and assisting with English fluency. She argues that immigration is
most sustainable—and backlash against it least likely to succeed—when inflows
of new immigrants are controlled, and subject to known limits rather than
unlimited in a way that feels unpredictable.
As she puts it in her book, insisting on unconstrained
diversity “pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a
liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant
extremes.” And once a society’s authoritarians are activated, the outcome
depends in part on how
its conservatives react. If they side with authoritarians, repressive
policies follow. But under the right conditions, conservatives can be counted
on to rally behind pluralism and tolerance. One condition is that they feel
reassured “regarding established brakes on the pace of change, and the settled
rules of the game,” Stenner writes.
If Democrats or Republicans hope to create sustainable
immigration policy, that policy must roughly reflect the public will. Instead
of efforts to alter public opinion through persuasion, we’ve seen a succession
of fringe factions forcing extremist positions on majorities that hate them.
Politicians from both parties should moderate according to what voters actually
want. Otherwise, endless political failures risk causing many to lose faith in
all politics––which is an existential danger to our democracy.
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