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HOW IMMIGRATION BECAME A LIGHTNING ROD IN AMERICAN POLITICS  
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Gaby Del Valle
September 25, 2024
The Nation
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_ Anti-immigrant think tanks and advocacy groups operated on the
margins until Trump became president. Now they have molded not only
the GOP but also Democrats in their image. _

Photomontage by The Nation.,

 

On one of his few lucid moments during the only debate of the 2024
election cycle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the sitting
president suggested he would be tougher on the border than his
predecessor, blaming the former president for the demise of a
“bipartisan border deal” that would have boosted the Border
Patrol’s funding and significantly reduced access to asylum. Biden
and top congressional Democrats had spent months negotiating its
provisions, granting more and more concessions to conservatives in the
hopes that they’d stop claiming that Biden had lost control of the
southern border. But “when we had that deal done,” Biden said,
Trump “called his Republican colleagues and said, ‘Don’t do it.
It’s going to hurt me politically.’” The far right had refused
to grant Biden a “win” on immigration, even if it meant forgoing
exactly what they claimed they wanted.

This was a very different Biden than the one who had gone up against
Trump four years earlier. When the two shared a debate stage in 2020,
Biden accused Trump of presiding over unimaginable cruelty toward
migrants: babies torn from their mothers’ arms at the border, some
never to be reunited; undocumented workers rounded up on the job;
asylum seekers shunted back to Mexico without a hearing. But there
Biden was, a little over three months ago, saying in effect that
he’d tried to finish the job Trump had begun, only to be stymied by
Trump himself.

Biden’s pronouncements would soon take a backseat to the flurry of
concern over his pitiful debate performance and his visibly declining
health. He soon dropped out of the race, passing the torch to Vice
President Kamala Harris, whom he’d once tasked with addressing the
“root causes” of migration from Central America. But Biden’s
pivot in the debate and the months preceding it symbolized a rightward
lurch on immigration that may have been initiated by the GOP but has
since become the dominant position of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile,
in his campaign to get back to the White House, Trump has tacked even
further to the right. Immigrants, Trump has said, are “poisoning the
blood of our country.” If elected, he’s declared to thunderous
applause, he’ll begin “mass deportations” on day one. “Send
them back!” the crowd chanted when “illegal aliens” were
mentioned
[[link removed]] at
the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, holding signs that
read “Mass Deportation Now!”

This shift came stunningly fast. Just three election cycles ago, in
the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election,
a postmortem by the Republican National Committee
[[link removed]] (RNC)
attributed Romney’s defeat to his poor performance among Latino
voters and recommended that the party should become more inclusive,
perhaps softer on immigration. Even Trump—at the time an outspoken
businessman with no public political ambitions—said that Romney’s
stance on immigration was ridiculous. “He had a crazy policy of
self-deportation, which was maniacal,” Trump said in 2012
[[link removed]].
“It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He
lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into
this country.” Three years later, announcing his own run for
president, Trump descended a gilded escalator at Trump Tower on Fifth
Avenue and promised to build an impenetrable border wall. Throughout
his 2016 campaign, Trump ignored the RNC’s recommendations and
embraced the ethos of the Tea Party, channeling incoherent populist
rage into a nativist platform.

The promises of mass deportations and a “big, beautiful wall” were
all Trump, but a policy wonk he was not. Trump’s immigration policy
was devised by the alumni and allies of a single ecosystem of
intertwined think tanks, nonprofits, and advocacy groups—one that
once operated largely on the margins but that, beginning with
Trump’s ascension to the presidency, has set the tone of the
national immigration debate. Few of Trump’s immigration policies
survived legal challenge, and even fewer are still in place today.
Congress didn’t pass a single immigration bill during Trump’s
term, nor has it under Biden. But immigration restriction is now dogma
among Republicans and Democrats alike. The choice is no longer between
a party that wants to turn away migrants and one that claims to
welcome them, but rather between opposing sides that, despite their
broader differences, disagree only on the best way to “secure” the
border at any cost.

 
Turning point: Launching his 2016 presidential run, Trump pledged to
“build a great wall” between the US and Mexico, signaling his
dramatic shift on immigration.  (Christopher Gregory  //  The
Nation)
It’s not an overstatement to say that the modern immigration
restriction movement owes its existence to one man: a charismatic eye
doctor from rural Michigan named John Tanton. Once described by a
former ally as “the most influential unknown man in America,”
Tanton spent decades building a network of anti-immigration groups
from the ground up, transforming post–World War II nativism from a
fringe view held by a small group of white supremacists into a
mainstream political movement. Tanton, a veteran of the mid-century
conservationist and population control movements, saw population
growth as a major hurdle to long-term sustainability. Trying to
convince his fellow nature lovers of the connection between
international migration and environmental ruin, Tanton founded the
Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, in 1979,
dedicating himself to reversing the demographic changes that had taken
hold in America in his lifetime. Over the next three decades, Tanton
would found and help provide funding for a constellation of
anti-immigration advocacy groups, including the Center for Immigration
Studies (CIS), U.S. English, and NumbersUSA.

Tanton was born in Detroit in 1934, a decade after the Immigration Act
of 1924 put the first permanent numerical limits on immigration in US
history. The legislation capped immigration from Europe and allocated
slots using a quota based on the composition of Americans’ national
origins as of the 1890 census. The effect was an immediate and drastic
reduction in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe: More than a
million European immigrants arrived in the United States in 1907; in
1925, that figure was just over 160,000. As a result of the act,
Southern and Eastern Europe were no longer the main source of
immigrants to the US. (African and Asian migration were effectively
banned; no restrictions were implemented on migration from Latin
America.)

The 1924 law kept America overwhelmingly white and Western European
through Tanton’s young adulthood. But in 1965, a year after he
graduated medical school, the country changed forever. The Immigration
Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, overturned the
national-origins quota system, replacing it with one that prioritized
family reunification. The new law more than doubled the number of
immigrant visas issued each year and didn’t count the immediate
relatives of US citizens against these quotas. At the same time,
Hart-Celler imposed numerical limits on Latin American and Caribbean
migration for the first time in US history, unwittingly creating the
conditions for a rise in unauthorized migration decades later. The law
led to new patterns of immigration that slowly shifted America’s
racial composition. The descendants of the Southern and Eastern
European immigrants who had been considered unassimilable decades
earlier were, after a rocky start, incorporated into the American
melting pot; the newcomers, meanwhile, were regarded with hostility,
accused of being inferior to the generation of immigrants who had come
before them.

As was the case at the turn of the 20th century, the wave of
immigrants who arrived after 1965 were met with hostility. In 1977,
David Duke, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said that he and his
followers would be patrolling the US-Mexico border
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search of migrants. Two years later, Klan members descended on a Texas
fishing village that had recently become home to Vietnamese refugees.

Tanton and his wife were mostly insulated from these changes in
Petoskey, the tiny northern Michigan town where he found work as an
ophthalmologist. A decade earlier, at the end of the 1960s, Tanton had
read _The Population Bomb_, the biologist Paul Ehrlich’s polemic on
overpopulation. For Tanton, each refugee who resettled in America
meant another drain on resources, another blight on the environment.
He conceived of FAIR as a liberal anti-immigration group, and its
early talking points were about how unfettered immigration hurt
working-class people of color at home and contributed to a brain drain
abroad, not to mention its effects on population growth.

All these decades later, it’s hard to grasp how out of step this
was. After Hart-Celler and before FAIR’s emergence as a major
political player, immigration restriction was the domain of Klansmen
and white separatists. It wasn’t, as Tanton wrote in his 1978
funding request to Cordelia Scaife May—the reclusive Mellon heiress
who would go on to bankroll his movement—“a legitimate position
for thinking people.”

The first test arrived quickly. Months after FAIR’s founding,
Congress began working on the Refugee Act of 1980, an effort to
streamline the ad hoc system that allowed people fleeing their
countries to find protection in the United States. FAIR hired a
lobbyist to push for a provision that would cap the number of refugees
admitted each year at 50,000. Instead, the bill that President Jimmy
Carter signed into law allowed the sitting president to choose the
annual limit in consultation with Congress. That year, more than
207,000 refugees were resettled in the United States. Six years later,
FAIR once again got caught up in—and lost—a legislative battle,
this time over the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which
provided a path to citizenship for nearly 3 million undocumented
immigrants living in the US. The bill passed with bipartisan
consensus, and President Ronald Reagan signed it into law. Few in
Congress were swayed by FAIR’s arguments for deporting unauthorized
immigrants. “We didn’t convince anybody,” founding member Otis
Graham told _The New York Times_ in 2011. FAIR had built a
membership base of 4,000 by 1982, but it wasn’t enough for Tanton,
who, according to notes taken during a board meeting that year,
believed it was “time to change our methods.” Tanton was realizing
that environmental issues didn’t appeal to most Americans; what did
was watching their communities change and feeling powerless to stop
it. In a 1986 memo, Tanton wrote that FAIR had been too reliant on
large donors and too focused on lobbying members of Congress, with
little to show for it. Instead, he outlined a “long-range project”
to “infiltrate” congressional immigration committees. “Think how
much different our prospects would be if someone espousing our ideas
had the chairmanship!” he wrote. Until then, it would be difficult
to influence national politics. Tanton decided to start small.

 
About face: In the 2020 presidential debates, Joe Biden decried
Trump’s immigration policies. By 2024, that had changed.  (Morry
Gash / AP  //  The Nation)
Tanton got his first chance to test his new theory of the power of a
grassroots immigration restriction movement in 1988, when another
organization he’d founded earlier that decade, U.S. English, placed
the question of language on the ballot. Tanton had created U.S.
English to help organize campaigns to make English the official
language of several states, some of which had large and steadily
growing Latino populations. The crusade began in California, where
U.S. English bankrolled a local group’s efforts in support of an
English-only ballot initiative. After the California measure
succeeded, U.S. English led similar campaigns in a far-flung mix of
states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota,
and South Dakota in 1987, and Arizona, Colorado, and Florida the
following year. Some were states where the demographics were shifting,
while others, like North Dakota, were trying to preempt these changes.
In all, however, the question was about more than language; it was
about who belonged in America—and to whom it should belong in the
future.

The English-only campaigns were marred by allegations of racism from
the outset. Opponents criticized Tanton’s groups for taking money
from the Pioneer Fund, a New York–based eugenicist organization. But
it wasn’t until someone leaked a memo from Tanton written two years
earlier that the Arizona campaign seemed doomed. “Can _homo
contraceptivus_ compete with _homo progenitiva_ if borders aren’t
controlled?” he mused in the 1986 memo
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which was distributed to attendees of the annual anti-immigration
retreat he had begun hosting a year earlier. “Or is advice to limit
one’s family simply advice to move over and let someone else with
greater reproductive powers occupy the space?” He posed other
troubling questions in the memo: Will Latino Catholics be able to
assimilate to American culture? Will they bring their customs of
bribery, violence, and disregard for authority to the United States?
And why do they have so many kids in the first place?

The people who attended Tanton’s retreat—including Jared Taylor,
the publisher of the white nationalist journal _American
Renaissance_—must have welcomed these questions, but the public
didn’t. Despite U.S. English’s bipartisan background and
high-profile endorsements—its first director was former Reagan aide
and prominent Latina activist Linda Chavez, and Walter Cronkite was on
the board—it could no longer claim plausible deniability regarding
allegations of racism. Chavez resigned after the memo leaked and
disavowed the organization; Cronkite, too, bailed. But with the help
of a last-minute canvassing push funded by May, U.S. English eked out
a victory, with 50.5 percent of Arizona voters supporting the measure.
The elections weren’t as close elsewhere in the country: More than
60 percent of Colorado’s voters supported the amendment, as did 84
percent of Florida’s.

There was a setback: A federal judge later blocked Arizona’s
English-only measure. Even so, grassroots activism, Tanton came to
understand, was the key to enacting policies that curtail immigration.
All Tanton had to do was help people realize what they already knew in
their hearts to be true: America was a nation of immigrants, yes, but
the newcomers were unlike those who came before. “I think there is
such a thing as an American culture, however difficult it may be to
define,” Tanton said in a 1989 oral history of his advocacy. Some
could argue that “hyphenated Americans” belong to this culture
just as much as people whose forebears date back to the colonial
period, Tanton said, but that was “an incorrect view.” In a 1986
interview with _The New York Times_, FAIR’s first executive
director, Roger Conner, a former environmental lawyer, described
previous waves of immigrants as “entrepreneurial,” while more
recent arrivals had little interest in working or assimilating. “For
some reason,” Conner said, “Mexican immigrants are not succeeding
as well as other groups.”

By 1990, FAIR claimed to have 50,000 members, and the organization was
finding other state-level initiatives to support. In 1994, the group
backed Proposition 187, a ballot initiative in California that banned
undocumented immigrants from using any government services in the
state, including public schools and non-emergency healthcare. In 1986,
Tanton had written that California’s system could do this, “but
the political will is lacking to implement it.” To build that will,
Tanton created and funded groups like Americans for Border Control
through his umbrella organization, U.S. Inc. Proposition 187’s
supporters claimed that not only were the undocumented overburdening
public services and contributing to overcrowding in the state, but
their presence in California would lead to long-term gains in
political power for Hispanic Americans.

Nearly 60 percent of Californians voted for Proposition 187, but a
federal judge blocked the initiative from going into effect. Still, as
with Arizona’s English-only measure, the defeat of Proposition 187
provided a valuable lesson for FAIR: Change happens when ordinary
people decide they’re fed up with something and come together to do
something about it. If the groups that allow people to do that don’t
exist, why not create them?

Everywhere they passed, anti-immigrant ordinances like Proposition 187
and the English-only measures granted a degree of legitimacy to
long-held racial animus. In Colorado, someone posted a sign reading
“_No Ingles, No Travato_“—an attempted translation of “No
English, No Job”—at the entrance to a construction site. “We
checked. Because of the English-only bill, we know it’s legal,” a
superintendent at the site told the _Los Angeles Times_. In
California, Proposition 187 proved to be just as effective a
recruitment tool as it would have been had it been implemented.
Tanton’s journal, _The Social Contract_, has published dozens of
articles about Proposition 187 in the decades since the referendum
passed. “When thousands of [people] marched to protest” the
measure, an article from _The Social Contract_’s 1996 issue on
so-called “anchor babies” declared, “they carried the flag of
Mexico, not the Stars and Stripes.”

anton’s organizations not only activated dormant anti-immigrant
feeling; they actively fomented it, often using the news media to
launder their talking points. FAIR, the Center for Immigration
Studies, and NumbersUSA—the latter founded in 1996 by Tanton’s
acolyte Roy Beck—became reporters’ go-to sources for all things
related to immigration restriction, largely because there were few
other groups to quote. Representatives of the three organizations
blamed nearly every problem, from littering in public parks to
gridlock on the highways, on immigration. At the height of the
tough-on-crime ’90s, immigration was being portrayed as a gangs and
quality-of-life issue; after the September 11 attacks, the
permeability of the border became a national security threat.

FAIR and its allies were succeeding in changing public sentiment on
immigration. Soon FAIR, through its legal arm, the Immigration Law
Reform Institute, began offering its legal services to local
governments. In 2006, when the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, passed
a law fining landlords for renting apartments to undocumented
immigrants and employers for using them as workers, it hired Kris
Kobach, who would become one of the foremost attorneys pushing
immigration restriction. Not long after, the town council of Valley
Park, Missouri, unanimously voted to implement a similar policy.
Kobach defended Valley Park after a landlord sued over the measure,
then went on to draft legislation for other cities—and defended the
cities when those policies were challenged in court. The measures
faced years of lawsuits, and the cities had to pay Kobach hundreds of
thousands of dollars in legal fees. “It was a sham,” the mayor of
Farmers Branch, a Texas city that hired Kobach in 2007,
told ProPublica
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which reported that Kobach earned at least $800,000 for his legal and
advocacy work over a 13-year period. Ineffective and expensive as they
were, the ordinances helped cement Kobach’s status as the go-to
lawyer for local and state governments that wanted to take a hard line
on immigration. In 2010, Kobach drafted Arizona’s infamous SB 1070,
colloquially referred to as the “Show Me Your Papers” law. An
Arizona state senator later described it as “model legislation”
for dissemination through the American Legislative Exchange Council
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a right-wing “bill mill.” Copycat bills were soon introduced
around the country. By 2012, Kobach was informally advising the Romney
campaign on immigration.

Most of the bills that Kobach drafted or defended were blocked by the
courts, never implemented, or watered down to the point of
meaninglessness. But every city that passed or even debated an
anti-immigrant ordinance helped Tanton’s groups send a message to
Congress: Americans aren’t interested in immigration reform or
amnesty for the undocumented; they want those people out. “God
forbid he ever gets hit by a Mack truck or something,” the
Immigration Law Reform Institute’s general counsel said in 2012 of
Kobach, who by that point was working for the group on the side while
serving as Kansas’s secretary of state. “It would change the
course of history.”

Tanton’s “long-range project” to affect national politics by
starting at the local level was working. The organizations under the
umbrella of FAIR and U.S. Inc. had built a grassroots army and won
over small-town mayors. And some of those mayors were now entering
national politics. After three failed bids for a seat in Congress, Lou
Barletta, the Hazleton mayor who hired Kobach to defend the city’s
anti-immigrant ordinance, was elected to the House of Representatives
in 2010. Among Tanton’s other supporters were Colorado
Representative Tom Tancredo, who kicked off his first term in 1999 by
founding the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus; Iowa Senator
Chuck Grassley; and Jeff Sessions, the soft-spoken Alabama senator
whose diminutive presence belied his virulent racism. In 2000, FAIR
and its sister organizations helped defeat the Latino and Immigrant
Fairness Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for
qualifying undocumented immigrants. The following year, in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Congressional Immigration Reform
Caucus’s membership nearly doubled overnight, from 16 to 30 members.

FAIR would face its biggest tests yet beginning in 2006, when Congress
appeared poised to pass a bill granting green cards to more than 6
million undocumented immigrants. The legislation failed, but in 2007 a
group of senators once again attempted to persuade their
colleagues—and the nation—to support immigration reform. The bill
sponsored by the “Gang of 12,” including Lindsey Graham and John
McCain, had bipartisan support and was backed by President George W.
Bush. Its opponents had something stronger: a grassroots army,
hundreds of thousands strong, who threatened to withhold their votes
from politicians who put “illegals” ahead of Americans.

Most Americans, in fact, were in favor
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granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants who met certain
conditions—but they, too, were swayed by the campaign against the
bill. Polls found that many voters who agreed with the 2007 bill’s
provisions opposed the idea of “amnesty” and the bill
specifically. The discrepancy between what people said they wanted and
what they actually supported was the result of a coordinated effort by
FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA. Every day, as part of a campaign led by
NumbersUSA, lawmakers received thousands of calls, letters, and faxes
urging them to vote against the bill. “The fax machines would run
out of paper,” a Republican House staffer recalled years later
[[link removed]].
Most of the messages came from a familiar group of
people—“frequent fliers,” the staffer called them—but the
volume of calls swayed those who were undecided. The callers “lit up
the switchboard for weeks,” Senator Mitch McConnell, who voted
against the bill, said in 2011, when immigration reform was back on
the table. “And to every one of them I say today: Your voice was
heard.”

The 2011 bill failed as well and was reintroduced in 2014, this time
by a “Gang of Eight”—a sign of waning support in Congress.
“The longer it stays in the sun, the more it smells, as they say
about the mackerel,” Sessions said of the reform bill in 2014.
Certain that it would pass in the Senate, Sessions—at the time still
a fringe member of his party—set his sights on tanking the bill in
the House. To ensure that the legislation failed, he enlisted his
young aide, a 29-year-old from California named Stephen Miller.

 
Sowing seeds: Jeff Sessions, left, one of the most prominent
anti-immigration voices in the Senate, with his aide Stephen Miller.
 (CQ Roll Call via AP  //  The Nation)
Miller—the son of Santa Monica liberals who would introduce himself
to college classmates by saying, “My name is Stephen Miller, I’m
from Los Angeles, and I like guns”—started his career as a press
secretary for Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann. After he
took a job with Sessions, Miller became close with researchers at CIS;
he used the group’s data to convince other Republicans of the harms
that immigrants posed. Sessions had long been close with FAIR and CIS,
but with Miller’s help, he became a leader of the
anti-immigration-reform movement within Congress and was instrumental
in defeating the bill in 2014. “The whole point was to taint the
bill in the eyes of Republicans in the House,” CIS president Mark
Krikorian told Miller’s biographer. “Sessions, with Miller’s
help, really did succeed in preventing that bill from passing.”

Miller, too, was influenced by Tanton, sometimes in obscure ways. In
1983, Tanton persuaded May, his billionaire patron, to cover the costs
of reprinting and distributing _The Camp of the Saints
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a French novel that depicts a dystopian future in which Europe and the
US are besieged by hordes of dark-skinned migrants. The book didn’t
receive much acclaim outside white supremacist circles when it was
first published in 1973. But Tanton acquired the rights and arranged
for it to be published through the Social Contract Press. It’s
unclear when Miller read the novel, but in September 2015, he
persuaded _Breitbart_ to run a story about it, according to e-mails
obtained
[[link removed]] by
the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I think it was growing up in
California, he saw the role that mass migration played in turning a
red state blue,” a former Senate colleague of Miller’s
told _Politico
[[link removed]]_.
“He was fearful that would happen to the rest of the country.”

After Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 by calling Mexican
immigrants “rapists,” Miller persuaded Sessions to become the
first sitting senator to endorse him. Miller offered his services as
an informal adviser to the campaign and then, after a few months,
demanded a job. Trump shared Miller’s instincts; in 2014, he’d
cautioned Republican legislators against supporting immigration reform
by implying that the beneficiaries of amnesty would vote for
Democrats. Miller wrote Trump’s speeches and helped turn his
xenophobic promises—a border wall, a Muslim ban—into policy
proposals. And when Trump took office, Miller and Sessions were
rewarded: Sessions was named attorney general, and Miller became a
senior policy adviser for Trump. With Miller’s help, Trump stocked
his agencies with alumni of the anti-immigration think tank ecosystem.
Trump appointed Francis Cissna, a former employee of FAIR ally Chuck
Grassley, to head US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency
that oversees legal migration. Julie Kirchner, the executive director
of FAIR from 2007 to 2015, was hired to advise the acting director of
Customs and Border Protection in April 2017, before moving to USCIS a
month later. During his first few months in office, Trump implemented
dozens of policies—including expanding immigrant detention, reviving
partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law
enforcement agencies, and expediting certain deportation
proceedings—that seemed to have been lifted
[[link removed]] from
a 2016 wish list that CIS had published before Trump secured the
nomination. In 2017, for the first time, CIS was invited to ICE’s
semiannual stakeholder meeting. Representatives from FAIR and
NumbersUSA also attended.

But Trump’s Department of Homeland Security was tumultuous. Staffers
resigned with an alarming frequency, often after Miller pressured them
to implement increasingly hard-line policies. Miller and a key ally,
Gene Hamilton, senior counsel for Trump’s first DHS secretary, spent
months pushing for a family separation policy
[[link removed]] at
the US-Mexico border. Elaine Duke, Trump’s second DHS secretary,
balked; Kirstjen Nielsen, her successor, eventually gave in to the
pressure. It didn’t fare well for her: After mass protests and calls
for congressional inquiries, Trump ended the family separation policy
and Nielsen handed in her resignation.

Miller’s position as an adviser to the president gave him wide
latitude in the White House. “The process for making decisions
didn’t exist when we came in,” an immigration official in the
Biden administration recently told _The New Yorker
[[link removed]]_.
“It was calls with Stephen Miller in which he yelled at the career
officials, and they went off to do what he said, or to try.”

For a brief moment in the wake of Biden’s 2020 victory against
Trump, immigrant advocacy groups felt relief. The nation had voted
against separating migrant families and banning Muslims. This optimism
was cut short by Republicans, who started to spout
immigrants-are-invading rhetoric almost as soon as Biden took office.
Two months into Biden’s term, the Heritage Foundation accused him
[[link removed]] of
causing a “crisis” at the southern border. Miller and his crew
seized the narrative early, pushing the Biden administration into a
defensive posture. Biden’s team quickly abandoned the promises they
had made during the 2020 campaign to undo the harms that had been
perpetrated by Trump’s DHS and to build a new, humane immigration
system in its place. While Biden has rolled back some of Trump’s
harshest policies at the border and created pathways for migrants from
certain countries to lawfully enter and work in the United States on a
temporary basis, these are half-measures at best.

Public sentiment on immigration has shifted significantly since Biden
took office—and now, with Kamala Harris as the nominee, the
Democrats are sending a far different message than they did in 2020.
One of Harris’s first campaign ads touts her experience as a
“border state prosecutor” who “took on drug cartels and jailed
gang members” and reminds voters that as vice president, she backed
the “toughest border control bill in decades.” Harris’s warning
to would-be migrants in 2021—“Do not come”—is now the kind of
thing a growing number of Democratic voters seems eager to hear. In
February, a Gallup poll found that immigration was the most important
issue for voters. And in July, a poll found that 55 percent of
American adults want to see immigration to the United States go
down—the first time in more than 20 years that a majority of voters
have said they want fewer immigrants in the country.

Having convinced the public that illegal immigration is out of
control, the nativist right is now shifting its efforts toward
limiting legal migration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to
remake the federal government under a Trump presidency includes a
chapter on the DHS that recommends reducing or outright eliminating
visas issued to foreign students “from enemy nations”;
reimplementing USCIS’s denaturalization unit to strip certain
naturalized citizens of their status; retraining USCIS officers to
focus on “fraud detection”; eliminating the diversity visa
lottery; ending so-called “chain migration”; and creating a
“merit-based system that rewards high-skilled aliens instead of the
current system that favors extended family-based and luck-of-the-draw
immigration.”

John Tanton, more than anyone else, understood the power of harnessing
the public’s fears and anxieties in the service of a broader
political project. FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA’s public campaigns may
have focused on illegal immigration, but the organizations were
founded to undo the harms that Tanton believed stemmed from
the _legal_ immigration facilitated by the Immigration Act of 1965.
Project 2025, if it comes to fruition, may be what he and his
disciples have long been waiting for. The indefatigable Tanton, who
died in 2019 after a long battle with Parkinson’s, did not live to
see the very Democrats who once chanted “Immigrants are welcome
here” embrace policies of restriction. If he had, it’s hard to
imagine that he would’ve been surprised. In the 1989 oral history,
Tanton said that those who “deal in the world of ideas” come to
expect a common trajectory: “The first response of many people is to
say, ‘I never heard of it before.’ And the second response after
they thought about it for a bit was to say, ‘It’s anti-God.’ And
the third response after they’d realized the idea was right was to
come around and say, ‘I knew it all along.’”

_[GABY DEL VALLE is a freelance immigration reporter who is based in
Brooklyn.]_

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
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