John Kerry joins Democratic voices calling for limits: “without a border protected, you don’t have a nation.”

In an interview this week with the BBC, former Secretary of State, Senator, and 2004 Democratic candidate for president John Kerry criticized his party for its embrace of loose borders, particularly during the Biden Administration.

“The first thing any president should say – or anybody in public life – is without a border protected, you don’t have a nation,” Kerry said. “I wish President Biden had been heard more often saying, I’m going to enforce the law.”

How to Lose Working-Class Voters

Total illegal immigration spiked to over 10 million from 2021-2025. A quarter of Democrats believe the Biden Administration deliberately opened the border. Democratic post-election analysis identified immigration – both the border crisis and overall levels – as the decisive issue in the 2024 presidential election. It remains President Trump’s most popular issue and one of the Democratic party’s greatest liabilities.

Running from the working class

“[T]entire Democratic Party and Brand has gotten to a place where the way it talks about immigration in general is as far away from working class America as one can imagine,” warned David Barbaro of the New York Times last fall.

Slow to act

“We were slow to act as an administration and a party on the Southern Border Crisis,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries acknowledged after the election. “And it hurt us not simply with traditional Republican voters or swing voters, but in some segments of our own base communities and communities of color.”

Celebrate cheap labor

“Democrats have steadily lost the allegiance of ‘everyday Americans’ — the working- and middle-class voters that were at the core of the New Deal coalition,” wrote Ruy Teixeira and John Judis in Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

They cite the party’s “enthusiasm for immigration of unskilled workers” as a leading cause of that erosion. Initially, Democrats lost white working-class voters. Now they’re losing Latino and Asian working-class voters as well.

Alienate working-class immigrants

“Rapid immigration can strain schools, social services, welfare programs and the housing market,” wrote David Leonhardt of the New York Times this winter, “especially in the working-class communities where immigrants usually settle (as happened in Chicago, Denver, El Paso, New York and elsewhere over the past four years).”

Immigrants are among the first to feel the impact of unsustainably-high immigration levels. And no group in America has shifted more towards a pro-enforcement position than immigrant voters.

Democrats missed concerns; Trump and Vance gave voice to them

According to Kerry, he told President Biden that the Democratic Party had “missed” on the immigration issue for years.

Trump campaigned heavily on immigration’s impact on working-class Americans of all backgrounds. Since the election, Vice President J.D. Vance has drawn attention to the effects on housing and labor:

“If you allow 20 million people to compete with American citizens for the cost of homes, you are going to have a large and, frankly, completely preventable spike in the demand for housing.”

On investment and labor:

“Our goal is to incentivize investment in our own borders — in our own businesses, our own workers, and our own innovation. We don’t want people seeking cheap labor. We want them investing and building right here in the United States of America.”

E-Verify: An ICE alternative that helps the working class

Senator John Fetterman has spoken candidly about the “chaos” of immigration policy under the Biden Administration. He was a leader in securing the bi-partisan votes to pass the Laken Riley Act. And this week, he defended ICE agents, criticizing people in his own party who “treat them as criminals.”

ICE agents are carrying out a monumental task in enforcing immigration laws after the historic wave of illegal immigration under the Biden Administration. Rather than demonizing them or calling for the agency’s abolishment, politicians who object to ICE enforcement actions could limit the need for them by supporting H.R. 251 or S. 1151, Great Immigration Solutions bills that would mandate E-Verify and crack down on identity theft.

By removing the job magnet, millions of illegal workers could return home voluntarily — reducing the burden on ICE and realigning immigration policy with the interests of working-class Americans.

As of this writing, only one Democrat in Congress, Rep. Ed Case (HI-01), has cosponsored either of those bills.