How Did Immigration Politics Get So Toxic?

In April 1980, two candidates were leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination—Ronald Reagan, who went on to win the election, and George H.W. Bush, who became his vice president. They participated in a presidential forum that month in Houston, and the very first question from the border-state audience touched on the topic of illegal immigration.

"Do you think the children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend the Texas public schools free," asked the questioner, "or do you think that their parents should pay for their education?"

The problem of illegal immigration "has to be solved," Bush replied. But because "we have kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd like to see legal," he continued, "we are creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law."

"Why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems [with Mexico], make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here?" Reagan pitched. "And when they want to go back, they can go back. And they can cross. And open the border both ways by understanding their problems."

Compare that exchange to the current state of America's border politics. The Republican Party's official platform calls for the deportation of "millions" of illegal migrants and the implementation of "strict vetting" to "keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America." It refers to an ongoing "migrant invasion" that must be stopped, including through means as drastic as stationing troops along the southern border.

Democrats, never consistent doves on the border, have also warmed to more restrictionist policies in the lead-up to the 2024 election. They rallied behind a bill that would have significantly restricted access to the asylum process and given the president the power to "shut down" the border when crossings hit a certain number. Before dropping out of the race, President Joe Biden touted executive actions he took to button up the border—a stark contrast to his more humane-sounding promises as the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

Many of the loudest voices in the conversation defend their volume by saying the border has never been this chaotic, insecure, or porous. It's true that border apprehensions (arrests of migrants crossing into the country illegally) are shattering records. It's also true that asylum courts are severely backlogged, cities and states are struggling to accommodate newcomers, and the media paint the borderlands as a region in crisis. It's easy to simply blame the most recent president for whatever is going wrong at the border.

But none of that fully explains why the U.S. is so bad at handling this issue at this specific moment, and why it seems like border politics have never been more toxic.

Border management and border rhetoric have hit crisis levels because the nation's policy tools were designed to handle completely different migration patterns than we see today. Congress hasn't meaningfully updated the nation's immigration system in more than 40 years. During that time, border crossers have shifted from being mostly single adult Mexican male laborers to a patchwork of children, adults, and families coming from more than 150 countries for a variety of reasons. The situation has changed dramatically, but politicians keep using 1980s tools to address 2020s problems without considering why they're not working.

Border crackdowns feel like an easy solution to something that touches so many complex policy issues, from drug overdoses to national security to economic worries. It's no wonder that the 2024 presidential election has increasingly turned into a referendum on who has the most hawkish bona fides. But as voters and politicians become more and more inflexible in their views on what can and should happen at the border, the situation there—and the debate around it—will only get worse.

A Different Era

In the years following Bush and Reagan's 1980 exchange, unauthorized migration along the U.S.-Mexico border grew more common and visible. By the middle of the decade, apprehensions there exceeded 1 million every year.

The first of two modern eras of unauthorized migration was underway. According to a January paper by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), this period extended from the 1980s to the early 2010s, and "the border security approach that emerged during this period reflected the characteristics of migrants crossing the border at the time."

Back then, "the Southwest border was a question of Mexican migrants coming from a contiguous country, typically single young males looking to work in the United States and looking to avoid being arrested or being apprehended by the Border Patrol," says Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the MPI who served as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under President Bill Clinton. "Up until probably 2014, 97 to 98 percent of crossings at the southwest border were from Mexico."

By 1984, Reagan agreed that "our borders are out of control." The perception of violence and disorder in the border region in the '70s and '80s led Congress and the executive branch to reconsider how the U.S. should handle border enforcement and the country's unauthorized migrant population, culminating in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).

Like many of today's border bills, the IRCA focused primarily on illegal immigration. Unlike many of today's border bills, it was a bipartisan compromise. It punished U.S. employers for hiring undocumented immigrants and it increased Border Patrol staffing, but it also legalized nearly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. It passed the House 238–173 and the Senate 63–24. Support and opposition didn't fall cleanly along partisan lines: Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) backed the bill, but then-Reps. Barbara Boxer (D–Calif.) and Harry Reid (D–Nev.) didn't.

The law's effects were mixed. The hiring provisions proved difficult to enforce and the border security measures weren't funded until years later. Broadly taken to be a one-time measure, the amnesty was especially controversial: "The five-year gap between the qualifying date and the date of the law's enactment left many settled immigrants in the country without status, and critics charged that the law increased the incentive for people to migrate in hopes of future amnesties," the MPI noted in 2011.

"Thus," says the more recent MPI report, "the act ultimately came to generate political controversy for granting immigration benefits to large numbers of people who had entered the United States illegally, while not achieving the 'border control' it promised."

Border talk got tougher in the 1990s. "All Americans," Clinton argued in his 1995 State of the Union address, "are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country." The administration, he continued, had "moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens."

Those talking points sound just like the ones we hear today, but this was all happening against the backdrop of a more manageable migration pattern: By and large, young single men were coming from Mexico to look for work in the United States. That made enforcement pretty straightforward in the government's eyes. Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. and Mexico began to collaborate more on border security. The Clinton administration surged personnel and resources to the border, spent billions on migrant detection and removal efforts, and ushered in a 1996 law that created the modern deportation apparatus. That law passed both chambers of Congress by wide margins.

"The '96 bill was mostly a partisan bill, that in its final form dealt only with illegal immigration," says National Foundation for American Policy Executive Director Stuart Anderson, who served as executive associate commissioner for policy and planning and counselor to the commissioner at the INS under President George W. Bush. "Supporters of that bill had tried to also cut legal immigration, but there had been a strong pushback and a coalition…prevented the cuts in legal immigration."

Border enforcement began to change dramatically in the new millennium. In FY 2000, border apprehensions hit a then-historic high of 1.6 million. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks of 2001, Bush temporarily closed U.S. borders. The investigations that followed the attacks revealed gaps in the government's border management apparatus and raised questions about who, exactly, was crossing the border. "Border security," says the MPI, "became a key focus of the domestic policy response to 9/11."

That response produced many tools and practices that politicians now see as essential pieces of border management. "It became impossible to have a liberalizing immigration legislation go through Congress," says Anderson. "Everything became focused on more anti-terrorism and more security." Lawmakers laid the groundwork for the Border Patrol staff and budget to become huge. The Bush administration deployed the National Guard to the border. Federal agencies began to use militaristic surveillance tools, including drones and aerostats (tethered airships), to monitor the borderlands.

In 2006, the Secure Fence Act authorized and partially funded the construction of border fencing. It also set a standard that continues to distort expectations for border management: It defined "operational control" of the border as "the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States."

The bill was unlike today's efforts in two key ways. First, it had strong bipartisan support. It passed the Senate 80–19, with 25 Democratic senators—including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton—voting yes. Second, it passed with that Mexico-focused enforcement goal in mind.

Both factors help explain why lawmakers were willing to tackle immigration reform at the same time. Those reform efforts "reflected a centrist consensus around addressing three main elements of the immigration enterprise: further growth of border security resources, a path to citizenship for unauthorized migrants already in the country, and the establishment of a guest worker program for Mexican seasonal workers," according to the MPI. A reform bill introduced by Sens. John McCain (R–Ariz.) and Ted Kennedy (D–Mass.) died; so did one from Sens. John Cornyn (R–Texas) and Jon Kyl (R–Ariz.).

The government never fully stopped migration during the first era of border enforcement, but it developed partially effective tactics. Most border crossers were single adults from Mexico without asylum claims to adjudicate, so it was easy simply to send them home.

That all began to change in the 2010s.

Changing Flows, Changing Narratives

In 2014, Meissner notes, the number of Central Americans started to overtake the number of Mexicans. While the border was once an issue of "single males trying to work in the United States," she continues, in the 2010s migrants were "more likely unaccompanied minors and family groups and people seeking asylum." That meant they were looking for "a Border Patrol agent so that they could file a claim for relief in the United States."

In other words, we moved from a period when border crossers were predominantly people trying to avoid detection to one where most were actively trying to encounter authorities. Border crossings weren't necessarily up, but arriving migrants were suddenly coming from a larger number of countries and presenting claims for humanitarian protection, which required different legal and logistical approaches than the prior migration waves. In the MPI's framework, this was the second—and current—era of modern border enforcement.

"How could the U.S. border security enterprise, by then the most advanced and well-resourced in the world, face such deep difficulties with these migrants, the vast majority of whom were not seeking to evade apprehension?" asks the MPI. "The answer resides in the profound mismatch that has developed between the border apparatus the United States had built and this new form of mass migration."

Rampant violence, gang activity, and political instability drove migrants to leave the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala en masse. In just three months in summer 2014, the Obama administration apprehended more than 40,000 unaccompanied children and adults traveling with kids. Many came to the U.S. to seek asylum or other protections based on persecution or other negative conditions back home.

Migrants can make an asylum claim only on U.S. soil or at a port of entry, and they need to pass a "credible fear" test before their case can progress to an immigration court. (The "vast majority" of Central American migrants who came to the U.S. since 2014 have "met the standard," notes the MPI.) While applicants wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated, they're generally released into the country and allowed to attend school and find jobs.

Immigration courts were already extremely backlogged before the 2014 migrant wave, but wait times became years longer as thousands of new cases joined the queue. This meant asylum seekers could spend ages building lives in the U.S. without knowing if they could stay.

Meanwhile, members of Congress were giving up on the most recent meaningful effort to overhaul the nation's immigration system. The bipartisan bill produced in 2013 by the "Gang of Eight"—four Republican and four Democratic senators—was ambitious, offering a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, expanding employment-verification measures, building out work visa programs, and bolstering border security.

It's hard to say which was more representative of the long-gone mood—a quote from one of the bill's sponsors that proclaimed 2013 "the year of immigration reform," or the fact that the senator who said it was the South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham.

The Gang of Eight's bill passed the Senate by a margin of 68–32, with 14 Republicans joining all 52 Democrats in voting yes. But then–House Speaker John Boehner (R–Ohio) refused to take it up in his chamber. "Border security and interior enforcement must come first," congressional Republicans wrote in a January 2014 statement, pushing for a "step-by-step, common-sense approach" instead of "a single, massive piece of legislation." Sen. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), one of the Gang of Eight, rejected the idea that Democrats would support piecemeal bills that didn't offer a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

The room for compromise began to shrink. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R–Va.) lost his primary race in 2014, and his willingness to embrace immigration reform had been one point of attack for his Tea Party opponent. "Having a compromise position doesn't necessarily benefit someone politically if they're in a district or state where their only risk is that someone can attack them for being a compromiser or not being harsh enough on immigration," says Anderson. "The polarization has made compromise less likely." In mirror-image political obituaries, NBC called Cantor "a casualty of immigration reform" and Politico said Cantor's loss "kill[ed] immigration reform."

By the time Obama left office, border apprehensions were hovering around two-decade lows. But two things were clear: The border apparatus was faltering and political interest in fixing it was waning.

'A Dumping Ground for Everybody Else's Problems'

Border discourse was already falling apart at the seams, but the rise of Donald Trump ripped it apart completely.

To a huge extent, Trump's political stardom was powered by the perception he helped create of a chaotic southern border. "The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems," he warned in his June 2015 presidential announcement speech before offering his infamous assessment of border crossers: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

"That difference in 'Is immigration, if we can manage it effectively, a good thing for the country or is immigration a threat to the country'—that was a very important dividing line," Meissner notes.

"Whether his anti-immigration rhetoric, etc., was the reason he won is debatable," Anderson adds. But "it certainly led to people feeling that it was fine to engage in that rhetoric, and that maybe it even makes you more successful."

Once Trump became president, he did things at the border that others had long rejected because they weren't practical or legal. His administration ran with the ideas that the border was best ruled with an iron fist and that it could be tamed through brute force. The most visible example of that was the "big, beautiful wall" he promised on the campaign trail, which rested on the harebrained idea that it would be possible to fully barricade the rugged and hazardous 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. The most tragic example, though, was the cruel policy to deter migration by forcibly separating thousands of children from their parents at the border.

Congressional inaction on immigration helped create this situation. "I think the fact that there hasn't been legislation has made more presidents turn to using executive authority," Anderson says. "It makes sense that voters end up turning to see presidents being responsible for more things."

Unauthorized border crossings were low early in Trump's presidency, but they began to rise again in late 2017. Like the 2014 wave, these newcomers didn't fit into the demographics that the existing border management tools had been designed for. Unaccompanied children and families arrived, as did "caravans" of thousands of people at a time. The challenge pushed the administration only further toward old-school methods. It "sought to reinstate mass prosecution as a response to unauthorized migration," a tactic used and abandoned decades prior, reports the MPI. The result was the "zero-tolerance" program, "in which all adults caught crossing the border illegally would be criminally prosecuted."

Zero tolerance and family separations didn't change why Central Americans were fleeing, and they continued to arrive at the border. "Paradoxically," the MPI observes, by 2019, "the most border-security-focused administration in history was facing record numbers of border apprehensions."

The Trump administration shifted the goalposts yet again in 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it started denying migrants the opportunity to apply for asylum at the border, instead expelling them to Mexico or their home countries. It carried out those expulsions by relying on a provision of public health law—Section 265 of Title 42—that had been seldom used until that point. Though the public justification for the order was that migrants risked spreading COVID-19, reporting on the administration's policy discussions has made it clear that the Title 42 order was implemented for political reasons, not medical ones. Millions of migrants were expelled under the order, which remained in place under Biden until 2022. Repeat border crossings spiked.

The basic expectations of what a president could and should do at the border had shifted. The bipartisan middle on the issue was fading away, as compromise became more of a political liability. Now, during times of high crossings, the general public could point to a time when the president simply "shut down the border" and it seemed to have worked.

'What a Paralyzed Place'

Given all his bluster, it's easy to forget that Trump oversaw his fair share of border chaos. The number of migrants who snuck into the country illegally without getting caught by the Border Patrol increased every year of his term, according to a Cato Institute analysis. "Sometimes you see people believe that you can just sort of 'close the border,'" says Anderson, "and politicians kind of lead to that notion by saying things implying that it's just a matter of political will. Well, Trump certainly had a lot of political will, yet illegal entry, if you measure apprehensions, actually doubled from FY 2016 to FY 2019."

The obvious lesson from the Trump years is that even the most hardcore enforcement can only go so far in the modern era. This has not been Biden's takeaway.

Biden maintained much of Trump's legacy at the border as crossings rose. He kept the pandemic-era Title 42 order in place well after it was proven ineffective. He allowed border wall construction to continue in South Texas. He revived many aspects of his predecessor's "transit ban," which barred migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they didn't do so in another country before reaching the border.

A major mistake the Biden administration made was not "explaining to people from the beginning that this was a refugee crisis across the region," says Anderson. "It basically said, 'We're going to be judged completely on the numbers.'" Administration officials, members of Congress, and the general public have graded Biden's performance on the border against the persistent, unrealistic standards set decades prior and reawakened during the Trump years. It's no wonder he went for the outdated playbook.

Earlier this year, Sens. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), James Lankford (R–Okla.), and Kyrsten Sinema (I–Ariz.) introduced a bipartisan border bill, the most ambitious compromise effort since the Gang of Eight's failed 2013 legislation. It was tough on migrants, aiming to raise the standard for who qualified for asylum and to provide an authority for the Department of Homeland Security to "shut down" the border if crossings reached a certain level.

When the Senate vote came, it was Democrats who rallied around the bill, in part because they wanted to gain some credibility on border security in an election year. And it was Republicans who killed it, heeding House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.), who promised that the bill would "be dead on arrival" in his chamber, and Trump, who called on Congress to reject the bill if it wasn't "perfect."

"That's really an example of…what a paralyzed place we're in," says Meissner. "It's the first time in 11 years that there has been a truly bipartisan effort to enact legislation and it foundered within hours of its being introduced. Over politics."

The no voters argued that Biden had the tools to close the border without Congress' help. Biden seemingly proved their point in June when he unveiled sweeping asylum restrictions at the Mexican border, including a measure similar to the bipartisan bill's border shutdown authority. It was Trumpian logic: Do something tough at the border regardless of the legality or sensibility. Biden's order rests on legal justifications that were rebuked when Trump used them to try to back up several immigration actions, and it's already being challenged in court.

There's a reason why "border czar Kamala Harris" has caught on as shorthand for criticizing the vice president's record now that she's the Democratic nominee for president. The phrase is rooted in the idea that we know what needs to be done to address the border and that certain politicians just lack the willpower to use the tools available to them. It's also rooted in the view that a small group of people have become the primary decision makers on the border. (Harris, for her part, has bought into this.)

That's correct, but it shouldn't be the case. As Congress fails to update the nation's border management tools, it's largely been up to the executive branch to handle things. It's filling a vacuum that shouldn't be there. Predictably, this has deepened the perception among presidents and voters that the border can and should be ruled by fiat, and it has given members of Congress cover for failing to do their jobs.

The situation is getting even more complicated: Last year, for the first time ever, more than half of people crossing the border illegally came from countries other than Mexico and the Northern Triangle. Until lawmakers adjust to this reality, the border will be a chaotic place—and politicians will be able to misrepresent and weaponize it.