This is part of an ongoing series about the likely concrete policy outcomes of a second Trump presidency. This piece argues that Trump isn’t actually interested in alleviating the crisis at the southern border. In an earlier article, I wrote about how Trump’s trade policy is unrealistic and unlikely to ever be implemented. Subscribe to make sure you never miss one of these posts.
For months, negotiators in the Senate have been trying to reach agreement on an immigration reform package designed to address the crisis at the southern border, where crossings have reached a high point not seen for decades. There is a genuine humanitarian crisis unfolding both at the border and across the country as the number of arrivals far outstrips the capacity of authorities to receive them. The asylum system is grossly underfunded and understaffed, and Congress has shown little willingness to do anything about that, even under unified Democratic control. Instead, the focus of these talks is restriction.
The talks initially made headlines because progressives were alarmed that Senate Democrats - with the support of the Biden administration - were willing to contemplate a big rightward shift in refugee policy. These concerns have been realized as the final deal has come into focus, with Democrats accepting a slate of policies which they surely would have denounced if Trump had proposed them in 2018. Now, though, it’s Republicans, led by Trump, who are having second thoughts - seemingly purely because they think that continued chaos at the border will help their electoral prospects later this year.
Biden and the border
Biden’s border policy has defied easy categorization. His most important early decision was to keep in place Title 42, the Trump-era policy which used the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to almost completely stop asylum claims. The administration tried to use the time the order was still in place - it was only lifted in May 2023 - to create alternative ways for refugees to apply for asylum from abroad rather than walking over the U.S. border and surrendering to a Border Patrol agent. The idea was to maintain asylum pathways while discouraging people from crossing the border, both because “chaos” at the southern border is a reliable political cudgel but also because of the genuine humanitarian crisis which has resulted from the Border Patrol being overwhelmed.
The flipside of this was that Biden’s policy regarding the southern border itself has been, in some ways, similar to Trump’s. He didn’t implement anything as barbarous as “family separation”, but he did tweak Title 42 in a way which perversely encouraged families to separate themselves. And around about the time it revoked Title 42, the administration introduced a policy which ruled as ineligible for asylum anyone who had crossed through a safe country (which includes Mexico) or had failed to pursue a legal pathway to asylum. This policy was blocked by the courts and remains on hold pending an appeal - just as it had been when Trump tried to introduce almost the exact same policy several years earlier.
All of this has made for weird border politics. While the right likes to trot out its usual lines about “open borders Democrats”, Biden’s approach to the border has actually been way to the right of any previous Democratic administration, and not a million miles away from Trump’s policies of 2019 and 2020. He hasn’t pursued the favored progressive approach of massively increasing funding for the asylum system, and instead has approached this issue like the person he is - an old-school white northern Democrat who is much more attuned to the views of swing voters in Pennsylvania than his party’s progressive base. As liberal cities like New York have become overwhelmed by arrivals in recent months, even progressive criticism of Biden’s approach has been fairly muted.
As we enter an election year, Biden is leaning into this even further. The deal been negotiated in the Senate includes a huge new amount of money for border security and would introduce policy changes that make it much tougher to qualify for asylum. It also creates a presidential authority to stop new asylum claims entirely in the event that it becomes overwhelmed, as it is now. As the outcome of the negotiations looms in doubt, Biden is busy tweeting out statements vowing to “close the border” if only Congress will give him the authority to do so.
But giving him that authority is the last thing that many Republicans in Congress - and particularly Donald Trump - actually want to do.
Trump and the border talks
Many Republicans consider the current talks their best opportunity in decades to enact a big slate of restrictions on the southern border. One guy who you might think would be interested in this as Donald Trump. After all, as I think everyone well remembers, the border was his signature issue in 2016.
But if you look at the record, Trump has actually been more interested in using the border as a wedge issue when it suited him rather than trying to actually change the situation there. For instance, people tend to forget is that Trump didn’t make the border or immigration a big issue in 2020. There were a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that he made a genuine attempt to court Hispanics that year, and “talk about the border less” was a part of that. But the most obvious reason why Trump didn’t really want to talk about the border in 2020 was because the situation there was pretty terrible, and his policies had manifestly failed to make it better. After a brief dip in 2017, arrivals approached pre-Trump levels in 2018 and then spiked above them in 2019 and late 2020.
Compared to his previous two runs for the presidency, 2024 is much closer to 2016 than 2020. Running as an incumbent in 2020, it would only have backfired for Trump to highlight problems at the border - after all, who had been in charge of it for the last four years? But this time around he wants to make immigration a major issue - in fact, it was pretty much the only substantive policy area that he mentioned in his victory speech after winning the Iowa caucuses. And in order to make that issue more impactful, Trump wants the border to be as big of a mess as possible. He’s hence been pressuring Congressional Republicans to refuse to make any deal with the Biden administration. This isn’t some weird conspiracy theory - it’s what many leading Republican say is happening.
There’s a very good chance that this pressure campaign is going to succeed, setting the scene for an ongoing humanitarian crisis throughout 2024. The Biden administration probably hopes it will get credit for at least trying to negotiate seriously with Congressional Republicans, even if it has meant swallowing all sorts of ideas that progressives abhor. Each side will try to blame the other if and when the talks eventually collapse.
On the one hand, this is just politics as usual. But on the other, it reveals something profound about the nature of Trumpism. When he was president, Trump failed to get a border security package through Congress even when it was under unified Republican control. For him, the border was a potent source of political theater, not a problem he actually tried to solve. He promised to build a wall which had no chance of becoming reality, drummed up fear about “caravans” of migrants in the run-up to the 2018 elections, and made a song and dance about sending troops to keep asylum seekers out (even though the troops had no authority to do so). Actual diehard restrictionists started to notice that Trump didn’t really care about doing anything, leading to amusing things like Ann Coulter impugning his manhood.
Trying to kill a border deal that contains many Republican ideas is another example of the “let them eat tweets” mentality of Trumpism. Ginning up culture war, not changing policy, is the movement’s primary goal. That’s something worth pointing out to anybody who is considering voting for Trump because they think he’s seriously interested in addressing America’s problems.
This post was part of an ongoing series about the likely policy implications of a Trump victory in 2024. Read the first part, on trade, here.