Democrats Must Win on Immigration to Defeat MAGA
Once you understand that the immigration lie is the core of MAGA’s support, the answer becomes clear: We need Democrats to adopt a new rhetorical and policy framework on immigration.
MAGA is an insidious political “movement” that is the inevitable conclusion of the project started with the infamous Powell Memorandum in 1972. Formally titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Powell Memo is a call to arms for the oligarchy in the US to push for a set of policies that benefit the wealthy while waging a narrative battle designed to get the working class to support these policies to their own detriment. The Powell Memo is not hypothetical: it is the blueprint that the modern conservative movement has followed, and the result some 50 years later is MAGA.
The central narrative of MAGA is essentially this: Some other group of people is preventing you (typically white, Christian, straight, cisgender men) from having the basic things in life that you deserve. This outside group of oppressors can be whoever the Dear Leader Donald Trump says it is, although it can never be the wealthy elites and Republican lawmakers who are actually leading the oppression of the working class of the country, because the purpose of the narrative is to distract working and poor people away from the true source of their problems by keeping them fixated on a fictional boogeyman.
No group has been more frequently smeared and shoehorned into this narrative role by MAGA than immigrants. Donald Trump has famously said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the US; that Mexico is sending drugs, crime, and rapists into the US; and spread so many vile lies about Haitian immigrants (who were in the US legally through Temporary Protected Status) that Justice Elena Kagan insightfully pointed out that the conservative majority in Mullin v. Doe (the case that paved the way for the administration to end TPS for Haitians and other groups) couldn’t even stomach putting Trump’s racist statements into their opinion when she wrote, “The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially infected that the majority declines to put them in print.”
If the MAGA immigration narrative is not defeated, the soil will be fertile for a new right-wing fascist to come to power.
Immigration is therefore the core of the MAGA mythology. MAGA primarily exists under the narrative bargain of protecting white Americans from (Black and brown) immigrants, and in exchange, the base gives Trump power and condones his authoritarianism. It’s important to remember that even though some people are happy to support fascism no matter what, fascism does not get broad support unless people think that they have to support it because it is necessary to prevent some worse or existential harm from happening to them. If the choice is voting for a dictator or allowing the country to be destroyed by whatever the outside threat is, more people will choose the former than they would have otherwise, which can be enough to tip the scales and usher in a fascist regime.
Immigration served as one of the main selling points for Trump in 2024. The allure of this “You need me to protect you from marauding immigrants.” narrative was so powerful, that it even managed to sway members of the Latino community, who have subsequently turned away from him. When the rhetoric of good guys stopping bad guys to make the country better turns into your friends, family, and neighbors being menaced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while living under an even worse economic reality where nothing is affordable, the fascism bargain suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing. To be clear, I am not blaming the Latino community for the rise of Trump, as Trump is a creature of the overwhelmingly white male constituency that supports him. I merely point to Trump’s support with Latinos as evidence of the appeal that fascism can have for people and how people will vote against their own interest if they feel like they have to.
Despite the fact that immigration is the rhetorical center of MAGA, the Democrats have consistently failed to come up with a narrative and set of policies to counter it. In her presidential debate with Trump, former Vice President Kamala Harris infamously touted her “tough on border enforcement” credentials, effectively ceding the ground to Trump and adopting his framework that immigrants are dangerous and that immigration is a bad thing. In The Art of War, Sun-Tzu wrote, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” He also wrote, “Sow the seeds of success in fertile ground.” If you are playing by the enemy’s rules and trying to win under their terms, you are destined to lose, which is exactly what happened. If you are telling the public that immigrants are dangerous, then how can you be surprised when the candidate with the most hard-line approach on immigration gets the most support? It is truly political malpractice that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) spent untold millions of dollars on corporate consultants, but they still could not figure out this basic concept.
Even though Trump is now a historically unpopular president, the Democrats continue to largely coast on the issue of immigration. Instead of offering their own narrative framework and policy agenda, they are content to sit back and decry Trump’s immigration policies. This strategy fits perfectly into the DNC’s preferred tactic of having it both ways. They can label Trump’s policies as extreme (which they are), but when they get pressed on immigration issues, they can tack back to the center and try to say that they are actually the real immigration enforcers. It didn’t work for Kamala Harris in 2024, and even though Trump’s time will inevitably come to an end, if the MAGA immigration narrative is not defeated, the soil will be fertile for a new right-wing fascist to come to power.
The Democrats’ strategy of saying no and doing nothing is like trying to chop down a tree by picking off the leaves. As Bruce Lee wrote in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do: “We shall find the truth when we examine the problem. The problem is never apart from the answer. The problem is the answer—understanding the problem dissolves the problem.” The only way to get rid of the poisonous MAGA tree is to chop down its trunk and uproot it. Once you understand that the immigration lie is the core of MAGA’s support, the answer becomes clear: We need Democrats to adopt a new rhetorical and policy framework on immigration. The guiding principles for the pro-immigration rhetorical framework should be:
- Immigration is a good thing, not a bad thing. The benefits of immigration for our country are substantial, and reducing immigration is counterproductive and harmful to the interests of Americans.
- Immigrants (both documented and undocumented) commit crime at a lower rate than native born US citizens, and immigrants do not suppress the wages of American workers. Instead, crime and low wages are caused by right-wing policies such as unlimited guns on the streets, the war on drugs, austerity in the social safety net, failure to raise the minimum wage, union prevention and busting laws, failure to tax wealth, etc.
- Our immigration policy should be to increase the avenues of legal immigration instead of criminalizing and shutting down pathways for immigration. In fact, illegal immigration is largely caused by right-wing policies that: A) make it hard for people to come to the US and stay legally; and B) create disruption and chaos in Latin America and the Caribbean, which leads to people fleeing desperate situations and needing a place to seek refuge.
- Militarized immigration enforcement inevitably boomerangs back on US citizens and will become a tool used to strip people of their rights and oppress them.
Supporting progressive immigration policies is important, and I will outline a few progressive immigration reforms below, but I think getting the rhetorical framework right first is important for two reasons. First, the “immigrants are dangerous” lie has been pummeled into the minds of Americans for decades, and it absolutely needs to be countered. If people think immigrants are an existential threat, they will continue to be primed to support right-wing policies, even though those policies will make their lives worse. We have been subconsciously duped for generations into thinking that immigrants are dangerous and that taking them into the US is an act of charity. If we continue to think of immigration as a form of charity that requires sacrifice, we will always have right-wing politicians pushing regressive policies under the justification that Democrats are selling out the American population to foreigners, when the reality is that immigration is good for Americans. Immigration is therefore not an act of charity, but it is in our own best interest, and right-wing immigration policies are therefore harmful to America.
Second, immigration law is complex, and the problems with our immigration system are numerous. There is no easy, single policy fix for our immigration system in the same way that Medicare For All would be a single policy that would have a huge, positive impact on healthcare in America. Even though there is inherent complexity to the immigration system, Democrats need to push for progressive immigration policies such as:
- Abolish ICE and end militarized immigration enforcement. ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies in the Department of Homeland Security have become the personal brown shirt army of Donald Trump, as seen most recently in their raid of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) home and attempt to denaturalize her.
- Create a humane and fully legal system for people to claim asylum at the border, instead of the quasi-legal kangaroo court system we have now.
- Codify Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals into law through an act of Congress and give Dreamers a way to become Lawful Permanent Residents (green card holders).
- Create more visa categories and programs to allow people to come and stay legally more easily.
- Radically reform and properly fund US Citizenship and Immigration Services in order to make it a properly functioning agency and reduce processing times, which have become even worse under Trump, resulting in family separation, suffering, and depressed economic activity.
- Create more pathways for people who have status issues to rectify their status without having to leave or go through detention and removal proceedings (Immigration Court).
- End the outdated country quota system for green cards and greatly expand the number of green cards that can be issued each year.
- Strip the president of his authority to suspend visa issuance, entry, and TPS arbitrarily.
- Create a legal pathway for the largely Indian and Chinese H-1B workforce to get green cards without having to wait for decades in H-1B status where they can be exploited by employers and often have to watch their kids “age out” and become ineligible to stay permanently.
Congress has immense power under the Constitution to set immigration laws into place. We need Democratic candidates for Congress to adopt a pro-immigration, progressive narrative, or else we will continue to have MAGA and right-wing candidates win elections and implement regressive, oppressive, and counterproductive immigration policies, that ultimately harm both the American and foreign-born population.
