One out of four Democratic voters believe the Party deliberately opened the border

A majority of voters believe the worst border crisis in American history was deliberate, according to a new survey by The Harris Poll and Harris X for the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. Among voters who agreed that the Democratic Party deliberately brought “millions of immigrants into the country illegally” were 73% of Republicans, 45% of Independents, and even 24% of Democrats.

The worst border crisis in U.S. history overwhelmed schools, broke the asylum system, displaced vulnerable Americans, killed a record number of migrants, swamped local budgets, diluted Democracy, strained natural resources, exacerbated housing prices, drove working-age Americans to the economic sidelines, and created a new era of forced and child labor not seen since the 19th century. Most Americans believe this was deliberate.

Eric Ruark, NumbersUSA’s Director of Research, concurred in his comments last week while serving on a panel discussion about the weaponization of immigration:

“In June of 2021, [Secretary of Homeland Security under Biden, Alejandro] Mayorkas declared that he would decide who was and who was not subject to immigration law. And as it turned out, who wasn’t — who was exempt from immigration law basically turned out to be every foreign national in the world. In May of 2023, DHS finalized a rule which created, quote, “lawful, safe, and orderly pathways to enter the United States.” In the DHS press release, Mayorkas said, “This administration has led the largest expansion of legal pathways for protection in decades.” Now, Mayorkas knew that it was his job, acting on behalf of the president, to faithfully execute immigration laws, and he knew that the executive branch cannot create new lawful pathways to admission.”

At some point after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Ruark argued, “the interests of the American people were subsumed by our government’s battle to save the free world, to show that we were the good guys, which somehow also meant allowing U.S. businesses to hire illegal aliens to undercut American workers and drive down wages.”

Michael Lind describes this the transformation from the nation state to the post-modern charity state, where all U.S. policies – including immigration – are aimed at at improving the lives of the global community, even if members of the national community are disadvantaged in the process. As Ruark reminds us, Americans are disadvantaged, primarily in the form of lower wages.

Against this backdrop the Biden administration set off the largest wave of mass immigration in American history, a decision that determined the outcome of the election. After roughly 50 years of stagnant wages and four years of inflation, the idea that immigration is a limitless, universal good was soundly rejected by the rest of the country.

Americans didn’t become less welcoming, we simply rallied around limits.

“I want to welcome immigrants,” writes Carrie McKean in Christianity Today, “but I also want to be honest about the meaningful costs borne by our schools, hospitals, and small businesses and about the demographic shifts that make what was once familiar seem a bit foreign.”

McKean lists overcrowded schools (“the strain of trying to meet their needs without neglecting the students already here is pushing a precarious system over the edge”) and hospitals (“leaving US taxpayers to foot the bill”) among the downsides of a community trying to absorb too many people. Like Ruark, she does not miss the fact that “[migrants] this desperate are far too easy to exploit.” If you’re looking for a motive as to why the political class would accept so many harms to the national community just to continue mass immigration, there it is. Many among the managerial elite openly acknowledge that lower wages are the desired outcome of the mass immigration policies they support. The notion of a post-modern charity state designed to help the global poor is just a cover story. More Americans seemingly wake up to the ruse every day.

McKean offers this anecdote:

“Another one of my acquaintances owns an oil-field service company. His competitors often hire undocumented workers, paying them below market wages and leaving them unprotected in dangerous jobs by failing to properly train and outfit them with the necessary safety equipment, like monitors to alert them to deadly H2S gas. “The immigrants are expendable to them,” he told me.”

Something’s [not] rotten in Denmark

The conventional wisdom used to be that Republicans supported mass immigration for the cheap labor, and Democrats supported it for the votes. Things aren’t so simple in American politics now. The Republican Vice President explicitly makes the case for immigration limits on pro-worker grounds, while Democratic leaders embraced Biden’s border crisis as a way to keep the crops picked and the wages low. Republicans now control Congress and the White House, so they will have a chance to deliver results, or be held accountable by voters. Democrats, meanwhile, could do worse than taking a page out of the Denmark’s playbook. The Social Democrats there have been winning election after election and this is how their leader, Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, talks about immigration:

“There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society…Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working class or lower class in the society. It is not — let me be totally direct — it’s not the rich people. It is not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.”

Political parties, says Frederickson, should prioritize the most vulnerable members of their own national community. Democratic icon Barbara Jordan said much the same thing thirty years ago in America:

“Immigration policy must protect U.S. workers against unfair competition from foreign workers, with an appropriately higher level of protection to the most vulnerable in our society.”

Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the liberal candidate who knocked President Lyndon Johnson out of the primaries in 1968 shared the same point of view as Jordan and Frederickson. McCarthy voted for (and Johnson signed) the 1965 immigration bill that ushered in the era of mass immigration. Later, he would often admit that it was a terrible mistake. NumbersUSA’s Roy Beck describes one such instance in Back of the Hiring Line. Beck and McCarthy were both testifying before a Senate committee:

“The retired elder statesman explained in that 1993 appearance that the increase in immigration had been unintended. It was an accidental betrayal of the country’s working class. He acknowledged that the increases had been immensely harmful to the country — especially African Americans — and should be rolled back.

“A reporter challenged Senator McCarthy about whether reducing annual immigration would be an unethical action in violation of our principles as a nation of immigrants. The question seemed to be reflecting a globalist humanitarian ethic which is held by many Americans. Under this view, it would be unfortunate if immigration harmed Black Americans but, even if it did, restricting that immigration might be unethical if the arriving people were economically more disadvantaged than Black U.S. citizens.

“Senator McCarthy responded firmly from a very different humanitarian ethic rooted in the primary responsibilities of a national community to its own vulnerable members. “It’s a moral issue when it impinges on the poor in our country.” The moral priority for the United States, the senator said, remained that of addressing the descendants of two centuries of American slavery and another century of racial apartheid who remain in the underclass.”

“McCarthy believed that the United States should be an open society,” Ruark remarked. “He did not believe that it meant the United States should have open borders.”

McCarthy and Jordan are hardly the only Democrats to hold this view. In the long context of history, the results of the Harris poll are remarkable; to think that the party of Jordan and McCarthy is widely believed to have purposely left the border wide open!

There are some hopeful signs of a shift. And nothing would be better for Americans than Republicans and Democrats competing with each other to promote the most pro-worker immigration policies. A Democratic Party that embraced lower immigration with credible enforcement would not be adopting the politics of a foreign land. They would not be leaving their roots behind. They would be coming home.