CHICAGO – When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she sought to strike a balanced stance on immigration, promising to dedicate herself to enforcement and security at the country’s southern border like her former prosecutor did, without sacrificing the country’s values.
“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” she said Thursday night. “We can create an earned path to citizenship and secure our border.”
It was the kind of balance on the issue that Democrats had been seeking all week: a balance between calls for more police and judges on the country’s southern border and a system that treats people humanely, between promises to uphold the law and rejection of the fear-mongering about “the other” that has permeated the national immigration debate.
But the Democratic Party’s overall message on immigration this past week — and since Harris’s candidacy last month — has been decidedly tougher than it has been in decades. The shift in policy reflects how politically sensitive the issue remains for Harris and the Democratic candidates on the lower ballot in November, with many voters considering problems at the southern border a top concern and a small but growing minority of Republicans and independents seeking to restrict routes into the country.
The most common refrain from the stage in Chicago was a condemnation of former President Donald Trump and Republicans for failing to pass a bipartisan border security deal this year that, former President Barack Obama said Tuesday, was “written in part by one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress.”
There was little to no criticism of Trump’s immigration policies or promises to reverse them. There were vague calls to expand legal pathways to citizenship, but no mention of the roughly 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally who would benefit from the measure. Many of them have been working and raising families in the United States for years. The immigrants known as “Dreamers,” who were brought to the country illegally as children and have become leaders of a national campaign for legal status, were absent from the podium.
When Democrats weren’t trying to neutralize the issue with remarks about border security, they were downplaying it. The party relegated immigration to the bottom of its platform’s priority list. Few panels, either nationally or among its affiliated groups, were on the issue. One of the most eagerly anticipated – billed as a discussion on the future of comprehensive immigration reform – drew fewer than two dozen participants, who sat in rows of empty chairs in a dreary ballroom.
Andrea Flores, a former Biden administration official who is now an immigration critic and moderated the session, said she found it difficult to see any difference between Trump and Democrats on border policy, warning that the lack of contrast allows Trump to exploit voter discontent.
“You see growing support for mass deportations, you see growing support for abolishing the right to asylum, you see growing support for his policies,” she said.
Last month, Republicans made the border and immigration the central theme of their convention. A number of speakers accused migrants of taking jobs and stealing votes, and red, white and blue signs blared the words “Mass Deportation Now!” Before Harris took the podium on Thursday, Trump stood at the border fence in Cochise County, Arizona, and falsely claimed that she and her Democratic colleagues had “unleashed a plague of migrant crime.”
Harris has not yet released her full immigration agenda, but that is expected in the coming weeks. Her approach so far is similar to that of President Joe Biden, who in recent months – as the bipartisan deal in Congress collapsed – took a harder line on the southern border while promising to clear a path to citizenship for law-abiding immigrants who have long been in the United States without legal permission. In June, he signed an executive order denying most migrants the opportunity to seek asylum and another expanding legal protections for immigrants married to U.S. citizens but in the country illegally.
On stage Thursday, Harris vowed, as she has done at her campaign rallies, to sign the bipartisan bill, which would have expanded detention, denied asylum to most migrants as border crossings soared, funded thousands of new border patrol agents and staff, and invested in new technology to catch drug smugglers.
In an interview, Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) said his party’s support of the border security bill represents “a significant shift in border security, asylum law and the treatment of those who cross our border.”
“It’s important that the Democratic Party continues to take a clear stance on this: We are ready to do this,” Coons said.
Some Democrats and pollsters believe the tougher stance will help Harris in key swing states like Arizona and Michigan, where the immigration issue is a focus for many independent voters.
“She’s a prosecutor in a border state and I think Democrats would do well to remind their voters of that,” said Matt Bennett, vice chairman of public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic advocacy group.
Other Democratic candidates are taking a hard-line stance in closely watched races for House and Senate seats across the country.
Michelle Vallejo, a Democrat running for a House seat in South Texas, has been criticized by progressives and immigrant rights groups for promising to increase border patrol agents in a commercial and describing her region as “overwhelmed by chaos at the border.”
Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York gave Democrats new hope that they could neutralize the immigration issue after taking his seat from Republicans this year, despite their attempts to portray him as far left on the issue. During his campaign, Suozzi had called for a temporary closure of the border and the deportation of migrants who attack police. In a notable speech in Chicago, he reserved his harshest words for Republicans.
“Sometimes it’s hard being a nation of immigrants – you have to work for it,” Suozzi said, adding: “We reject the division. We reject the dysfunction.”
Four years ago, in 2020, Democrats largely avoided talking about policy proposals, focusing instead on rolling back Trump-era policies. Back then, more Americans took a more liberal stance on the issue as they struggled with some of the Trump administration’s most extreme measures, including a travel ban on certain Muslim-majority countries and the separation of thousands of families at the U.S. southern border.
Now some Democrats fear that their party’s response is not substantive enough and focuses too much on the 3,000-kilometer-long dividing line between Mexico and the United States.
As Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, a group that mobilizes Latino voters, entered the Chicago arena last week, she said she wanted to learn more about how to help workers and immigrants who were living in the country illegally and had a long history of working and paying taxes.
“If we don’t define the message,” she said, “the Republicans will define it for us.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
