As Democrats have coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, Republicans have, in turn, coalesced around their main issue to attack: immigration. President Joe Biden had struggled to respond to immigration criticism. Harris can do better, and she should start by doing the one thing that Biden failed to do: defending immigrants.
Biden’s strategy was simply to ignore immigration. When pressed, he’d say, “They should all be going back.” During his debate with former President Donald Trump, he touted his recent “total ban” on asylum. It’s no surprise that with both parties’ nominees arguing in favor of restriction, more voters are shifting to the Trump position.
But elevating the Trump position hurt Biden and will hurt Harris. If voters want Trump policies, they will elect Trump. At this point, it’s worse than wasted breath to talk about how Biden’s team tried to deport as many people as it could. Defending immigrants would be the most unexpected way to turn the tide in her favor.
Trump’s efforts to demonize immigrants work when his opponents don’t bother countering his attacks.
The only speech Trump knows how to give is: “Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you.” But the facts about crime are devastating to Trump: When he was president, homicides spiked in the second half of 2020, and as immigrants have come in under the Biden administration, the violent crime and homicide rates have fallen by historic amounts.
Do immigrants deserve any credit? Probably! Immigrants commit fewer serious crimes that put them in prison, including fewer criminal homicides, than U.S.-born Americans. At the same time, by buying vacant homes and starting businesses at higher rates, they revitalize distressed neighborhoods hollowed out by pandemic-induced population loss. This indirectly lowers the crime rate.
Harris should ask Trump directly: So why do you want less safe, shrinking communities with higher crime rates?
Trump would no doubt also say, as he did during his convention speech, that the Biden immigration surge has brought “poverty” and “destruction to communities all across our land.” Harris should be ready.
Destruction? The Congressional Budget Office finds that the surge will boost the economy by $7 trillion and reduce the federal debt by nearly $1 trillion by 2034.
With America’s aging population, the country is millions of workers short of what Social Security needs for revenues to meet expenses by 2034, and the Social Security trustees say immigration will help close the gap. The Federal Reserve chair believes that new immigrants most likely helped stave off a recession by increasing economic growth.
Again, Harris should ask Trump: Why do you want a smaller economy with more debt? Why do you want to undermine Social Security? Do you want a recession?
Defending immigrants would be the most unexpected way to turn the tide in Harris’ favor.
Trump hates to talk about immigration as an economic phenomenon partly because, as a business owner who has hired undocumented workers, he knows that it is beneficial. Instead, he would deflect to something else, like fentanyl trafficking.
Once again, Harris has the facts: U.S. citizens are 89% of fentanyl traffickers, and when did fentanyl overdoses spike? In 2020, under Trump, when the border was supposedly closed. According to recent academic research, immigration is associated with fewer overdose deaths. This is most likely because immigrants are much less likely to be consumers of dangerous drugs, so they overdose much less than other people. Trump’s efforts to demonize immigrants work when his opponents don’t bother countering his attacks. Harris doesn’t have to lead with immigration. But she can’t simply let Trump spew lies about immigrants for hours and expect it not to hurt her chances. This confrontational approach may seem too risky politically, but it’s worth remembering that Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 against Trump’s harsh policies, and he won. In the general election debate, he criticized Trump for deporting asylum-seekers to “squalor.” His reversal hasn’t helped him. It has only validated Trump’s criticisms. Democrats’ instincts are right in one respect: Americans really don’t like chaos. Harris shouldn’t defend lawlessness. Instead, she should tout how the administration is quietly rebuilding the legal immigration system devastated by four years of President Trump and creating new legal ways for people to come, reducing illegal immigration. Much more work must be done to fix the system, but Harris can credibly say she wants people to come lawfully. How exactly does Trump think people should come? Well, Trump’s record shows that he only slashed legal immigration. He didn’t reduce illegal immigration. That’s the only answer that matters. Harris needs to see that Biden’s defensiveness about immigration failed badly. She must start from a position of strength. Immigrants — legal and illegal — are helping America solve its biggest challenges. Force Trump to explain why that’s bad. He can’t, but so far, he has never had to. Now is Harris’ chance to change that.
David J. Bier
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. 
