The 2020 Democratic immigration debate, explained

Not a single Democrat running for president in 2020 says the current immigration system is working.

There are more than 2,000 children being held in custody without their parents at the southern border daily; migrant adults and children are facing overcrowded facilities; since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, two dozen migrants have died in custody with US Border Patrol, including six children.

There is a backlog of 850,000 asylum cases waiting for a day in court and fewer than 450 judges to handle them. Roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants are living under fear of deportation; 3.6 million were brought to the United States as children. As of last November, more than 3 million people were waiting for family-based visas, and more are in line for employment-based visas. Trump’s administration has cut the number of refugees the United States admits by 60 percent, even as a global refugee crisis rages on.

Six 2020 Democratic candidates — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Sen. Kamala Harris, and Sen. Cory Booker — have proposed changes to some or all of this. Those who haven’t put out a full plan are nonetheless positioning themselves in interviews and at Democratic debates.

Democrats are unified on the broad-strokes message they want to send on immigration, and on the fact that some kind of “comprehensive immigration reform” is necessary. In Congress, House Democrats have rallied around the Dream and Promise Act, a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children and those with temporary humanitarian protections.

Still, immigration remains one of the most contentious policy issues in the United States. And Democrats’ plans so far aren’t addressing the most divisive issues, including whom to deport and whom to let in.

For now, they have an out: Trump’s immigration agenda is so extreme, they simply want to undo it.

“My first executive orders will be to reverse every single thing President Trump has done to demonize and harm immigrants,” Sanders said.

For two decades, the Democratic position on immigration mostly consisted of the DREAM Act, a piece of legislation first introduced in 2001 that was designed to give undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children a path to citizenship.

The DREAM Act, which has long had broad bipartisan support, has never made it to a president’s desk — and Democrats have been less willing to trust Republicans to negotiate in good faith. The result is the liberal consensus on immigration has also moved further left, from legalizing sympathetic undocumented immigrants, often with additional border security as the trade-off, to broadly rethinking how the United States enforces immigration laws.

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary has brought that shift to the forefront.

Every candidate supports a path to citizenship for the people currently living in the United States without papers — not just those who came in as children. Sanders, Harris, and Castro have publicly said they would pursue legislation to provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently living the United States in their first 100 days in office.

And candidates’ first priority is to stop Trump’s immigration agenda. Inslee said his immediate actions include stopping the construction of Trump’s border wall, reinstating the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which the Trump administration decided to sunset, and which remains tied up in courts — and increasing the number of refugees the United States admits.

But some candidates are taking the debate further. Castro, the only Latino candidate in the Democratic primary, was first to propose a radical reshaping of immigration enforcement by calling to repeal the provision that makes “illegal entry” into the US a federal crime. The law has been on the books for decades but was rarely enforced until the George W. Bush administration, when criminal prosecution of unauthorized immigrants for illegal entry became increasingly common.

Many candidates have followed suit: Sanders, Warren, Harris, Booker, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Inslee, Rep. Seth Moulton, Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang, and Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam have all support repealing the provision that makes being apprehended at the border a criminal offense.

Warren’s plan, she admits, “has a lot of Castro” in it. It not only decriminalizes crossing the border without papers but also includes reductions in immigration detention, the elimination of private detention facilities, and protecting schools, medical facilities, and courthouses from immigration enforcement.

Warren also called for ending programs that allow local law enforcement to be deputized as federal immigration officers, pledged to admit six to eight times as many refugees as Trump has in her first years as president, and to implement proposals that would make it easier for asylum seekers to get a day in court. Almost all the candidates support alternatives to detention facilities, including electronic monitoring and social work monitoring.

The candidates acknowledge this is all going to be an uphill battle in Congress, which has repeatedly failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform — especially when one chamber remains in Republican hands.

Some candidates have proposals to get around that, too. Harris has called for using executive action to expand deferred action immigration programs, and to change the immigration status of DREAMers to “lawful immigrants” and retroactively allow them to be permitted to work, which she said would put 2 million DREAMers on the path to citizenship.

O’Rourke’s plans also focus on executive action. As Dara Lind explained for Vox, O’Rourke’s proposed executive orders include ending “metering” — which is how US officials restrict the number of asylum seekers allowed to enter legally at ports of entry each day, ending family separation, and expanding DACA to also include the parents.

That said, while calls to “Abolish ICE” has become a rallying cry for activists, only New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio and Messam support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reallocating its duties to other departments.

Legalizing all unauthorized immigrants, not just DREAMers, was once considered the “third rail” in Democratic immigration politics; Republicans decried it as amnesty, and even moderate Democrats worried it would send the wrong message to people living unlawfully in the United States. Now it’s uncontroversial: Public opinion shows that conservatives have increasingly lost the fight on a path to citizenship.

Now there are new dividing lines emerging in the party, particularly on border security and deportation. Contrary to what Trump says about Democrats, none of them actually support an “open borders” policy. But so far, the candidates mostly haven’t gotten into details about who should be deported and who should be allowed into the US.

In 2014, Obama’s administration prioritized convicted criminals and national security threats — but Democrats still have to decide how to define those terms.

Another dilemma is the question posed by Castro’s proposal on whether crossing the border without papers should be considered a criminal offense, or just a civil one. This is a major leftward shift in how Democrats would approach migrants at the border. Migrants who enter the US without papers would still be committing a crime, and they could still be deported. But as Lind explained for Vox earlier this year, making crossing the border without papers a civil offense would have big ramifications, including ending the practice of family separation.

A survey conducted by the Washington Post found the idea has been adopted by half the Democratic candidates. Notably, however, the more moderate candidates haven’t lined up behind it. O’Rourke — who has tried to emphasize his history as a lawmaker from a border district — also would not commit to it during the first Democratic debates. Former Vice President Joe Biden is against it, telling CNN, “I think people should have to get in line, but if people are coming because they’re actually seeking asylum they should have a chance to make their case.”

Biden gets at one of the most controversial parts of any comprehensive immigration proposal, and one Democrats have hardly touched: What happens to the many of millions of people currently waiting in line to legally enter the United States? Immigration advocates say the future of legal immigration is often the most difficult, especially for Democrats, because there are so many different constituencies that have different needs.

“When comprehensive immigration reform measures have been worked out on Capitol Hill, [legal immigration] has been the toughest thing to get right,” Douglas Rivlin, with the liberal immigration reform group America’s Voice, said. “The bottom line is that we need wider legal immigration channels ... but do you move the people who have been waiting in line first and then establish wider channels?”

Questions about increases and preferences in legal immigration must balance organized labor interests, a call for family unification, and a demand for high-skilled labor. It’s a careful calculus.

In many ways, Trump has allowed Democrats to avoid the most difficult questions on immigration policy.

Details are tricky. Comprehensive immigration reform requires somehow prioritizing both the millions of people who have been waiting in legal immigration channels to come to the United States, and the legal status of millions of undocumented immigrants already living in the country. Democrats will eventually have to define what physical border security looks like after a Trump presidency that’s politicized a “wall,” and reconcile typically bipartisan proposals like E-Verify with the demands of the labor movement.

“The comprehensive immigration narrative really swallows up a lot of issues that were ignored for a long time,” said Salvador Sarmiento, an organizer with NDLON, an organization that mobilizes day laborers. “For 20 years, all the energy and resources has been focused on passing one omnibus bill. Outwardly, that was the strategy. Inwardly in the party, there was a division of whether they were trying to even pass a policy.”

But Trump, in many ways, has masked some of these divisions. Democrats are morally unified on immigration.

Being opposed to detaining children in cages is easy. Denouncing Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric is uncontroversial. So is calling Trump’s travel ban against Muslim-majority countries discriminatory.

And it’s no surprise that Democratic candidates are, so far, finding those options preferable to working out the details of a comprehensive immigration plan.