Transcription
Pretty much no one wanted millions of undocumented migrants rushing the American border. Republicans didn't vote for it. Democrats didn't vote for it. Yet, in four years, nearly 10 million migrants crossed America's southern border. That's the entire population of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston combined. And it wasn't some accident caused by outside of events like a war or a natural disaster. The surge happened because of deliberate choices made by American politicians. But why politicians survive by knowing exactly what their voters want? They study polls. They watch the news. They listen to supporters. So the elephant in the room is this. How did America's political leaders veer so dramatically off track? Essentially handing Donald Trump a lifeline back into the White House. Hey, I'm Ken Laort. This isn't a partisan take on immigration or even politics, but an understanding of how that crazy situation came about. Because only by looking fairly at uncomfortable truths can we actually learn from them. In the next few minutes, you'll discover how the history of illegal immigration set this stage. How Trump's first term shifted the landscape and how Biden's overreach turn the issue into a political boomerang.
Okay, so America's immigration debate obviously didn't start with Biden or Trump. For the last few decades, both political parties have danced around illegal immigration, each looking for opportunity and each afraid of getting burned by voter backlash. Both parties had mixed motives. On the Republican side, many leaders feared the racist label if they pushed hard for border crackdown. They also got subtle pressure from corporate donors who wanted cheap labor. I mean, a lot of businesses, agriculture, construction, service industries. They benefit from a steady flow of workers who will work for lower wages.
On the other side, Democrats had their own balancing act. Latinos were an essential part of their political base, and so they feared an immigration crackdown would cost them votes. But many Democratic voters, especially union and workingclass Americans, they didn't want lenient policies that brought people into the country who would essentially lower their own wages.
Historically, both parties saw how the Balancing Act blew up in the face of a Republican governor back in the '90s. Pete Wilson of California rode to reelection with a landslide by supporting Prop 187. It was a ballot measure denying state services to illegal immigrants. Voters loved it, too. It passed by nearly 60%. And for Republicans, it was a huge win, at least for a little bit, because it quickly backfired big time. Prop 187 became a rallying cry for California's Latino community, who saw it as an attack on them. And soon, hundreds of thousands of Latinos registered to vote, nearly all of them Democrat. And the result, within a few years, the reliably red state of California, it actually was back then, it turned permanently blue. Republicans never recovered, and today, California is basically a one party state. Wilson's name became a cautionary tale for Republicans nationwide. Tough immigration policies might win short term, but the long-term fallout could be tough.
Now, you fast forward to Barack Obama. He smartly wanted to both look tough on illegal immigration, yet not anger his Latino base. He earned the nickname deorter chief for deporting 3 million illegal immigrants, more than any other president. But Latino activists knew that really wasn't the case. And that's because a lot of those record deportations were actually a statistical slight of hand. Under earlier administrations, people just turned away at the border weren't usually counted as deportations. Obama's team decided to count turnarounds as formal removals, and that gave a much inflated deportation figure. That tough on immigration stance allowed Obama to introduce DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. It was an executive order he did that allowed nearly a million young people who were brought to America illegally as little kids. It let them stay, work, study without fear of deportation. Politically, this two-step was pretty smart. It allowed Obama to look tough on immigration publicly while still scoring points with immigrant communities and progressive voters. Still, when you look at polling numbers from back then, only 37% of voters approved of Obama's overall handling of immigration. Now, that was driven mostly by Republicans, but even a majority of Latinos, who over the time had started to become a little bit more negative about the increased number of illegal immigrants. And this started a shift by both parties away from their base. Democrats had shifted a little further left than their base wanted to see. And Republican leaders were basically they were very quiet or even mixed on the issue creating a huge opportunity for a political candidate to fill that void. And of course eventually one did.
Donald Trump came out onto the political scene in 2015 in large part because he wasn't cautious at all about immigration. As Republican leaders tiptoed around border control, Trump took a super different approach. He was inspired partly by Anne Coulter's book, Adios America. And he went all in from the very moment he descended on the escalator coming down to announce his presidency. His quote saying that Mexico wasn't sending their best. They were sending criminals and rapists. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. It wasn't polite. It wasn't nuanced, but it resonated with millions of voters who just they believed that politicians had for decades just ignored a growing problem. That hardcore immigration stance completely set him apart from nearly every GOP candidate. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, others, they warned that the harsh rhetoric would alienate Hispanic voters. But Trump didn't listen and he doubled down, promising a big, beautiful wall along the southern border. I mean, the idea was mocked relentlessly by the media who couldn't stop talking about it and Trump. And and look, I worked in the news during that campaign and I saw it and it was pretty clear that it was the single most important issue that separated him from the other Republicans and helped him win that nomination.
When he won and he started to implement some of his policies, the backlash was immediate. It was intense. Most of the media hated him to begin with and they painted his immigration policies as cruel and inhumane. Kids in cages, migrants supposedly being whipped, crying politicians and celebrities at the Mexican border. They flooded television screens and dominated headlines. And look, I could get into the accuracy and the fairness of that coverage, but but that's not the point here. The point was that it was effective, not with Trump's core voters, but with many moderates, and they're the ones who often swing elections. And more importantly, Democrats believed those optics alone would help crush Trump politically. They looked at polls, often influenced by how the questions were framed and often commissioned by advocacy groups. And those polls reinforce that same assumption, making Democrats confident that Trump's stance was politically suicidal. But while a lot of Americans didn't like the concept of child separations, they still supported stricter enforcement overall. The numbers were still driven more by Republicans. But by the end of Trump's presidency, 80% of Democrats wanted more, not fewer, resources to go police the border. But by that time, the major Democratic candidates were going allin on the other way. None supported building a physical barrier. And instead, their policies were more about pathways for citizenship or decriminalizing border crossing, softening the force at the border, and offering illegal immigrants more services, not fewer. All of these beliefs and some miscalculations by the Democratic leadership set the stage for the Biden administration. And it might not have hurt them as badly as it did, except for one man whose name isn't Donald Trump. I'll explain that in just a second.
First though, let me talk just a bit about the politics of illegal immigration, specifically among that Democratic leadership. Now, I'll keep this part short because it's an important part of the equation, but it's in the realm of things that I I can't document with a poll or a statistic. Okay? So, politicians often lie, and many times it's in ways that no one can prove. I mean, when one stands up and says, "I have deep love for the Albanian-American community." I mean, it's tough to know if that's real or if there's a political calculation to something like that. And even when I have strong suspicions, I can't read minds. But it's fair to ask, what's really behind those who want to open up the border? I discussed the concept of trying to signal support for Latino Americans, something that's routinely and publicly stated. Now, that bet worked pretty well for a long time until it didn't. But are there more underlying reasons to want more undocumented immigration? Well, many Democrats would say there's an obvious reason. Compassion. I mean, we are a nation of immigrants and and even the most jaded person would look at some kid living just a few miles south of the United States in a one room house with dirt floors and see something that's just cosmically unfair about that. And usually that compassion didn't have a political cost. Declaring your Vermont town to be a sanctuary city, that sounds great on campaign ads and and there's little downside, especially in far-flung cities. After all, half of the nation's illegal immigrants live in the four border states: California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. But we also can't deny a strategic calculation Democrats have banked on for decades. Immigrants and their kids tend to vote Democratic. So, if you let millions in and eventually legalize them, that's millions more future Democrats. Now, politicians never quite say it that bluntly, of course. They talk about path to citizenship or comprehensive immigration reform or whatever euphemism they use that won't spook people, but most people understand the game. Again, those are things that are difficult to prove, but you can't just ignore them and pretend they're not a factor at all.
Okay, so all this leads us to the Biden administration where the political miscalculations finally collided with reality. On his very first day in office, President Biden didn't waste any time. He was determined to prove that he wasn't Trump and immigration was his top target. With a few executive action signatures, he stopped construction on Trump's border wall. He tried to freeze deportations for 100 days, and he scrapped the remain in Mexico policy. That and more sent a crystal clear message to anyone thinking about heading north. America was open again. Almost immediately, the numbers exploded. In Biden's first year alone, border crossings soared to 2.4 million encounters, the highest ever recorded. Biden's defenders tried to cite external factors like poverty or violence or climate change, anything. But those problems existed long before he took office. The only real change was the country's immigration policies.
Now, look, I need to make a quick side point about immigration numbers, though, because they're super convoluted. I mean, no one knows how many illegal immigrants are in the country. Some of that's because we don't know how many have sneaked in, but a lot of it is because of intentional government actions that intentionally make those numbers confusing. By the way, if I screwed up any of these numbers, I'll correct them in a pin comment below. And if you're digging this, don't forget to subscribe. Okay, so take changing the remain in Mexico policy I mentioned. What that means is that someone who may have had an almost non-existent chance of getting asylum could come into the country and be allowed to stay here while he was waiting for his court hearing. Courts that were backlogged by about four years. So there were about a million people who weren't considered illegal under the Biden administration because technically they were waiting for their hearing even though many of them would never show up. But now, for instance, that status under Trump has been revoked. So now they're illegal again. So look, if you want to play games with immigration numbers, they're so squishy it's easy to do. And both sides do it all the time. And that allowed, for instance, years the Biden administration to just pretend it wasn't happening or it was exaggerated. We have a secure border. and that that is a priority for any nation, including ours in our administration. And for the first couple of years, most of the media played along. I mean, if you watch Fox News or followed conservative media, it looked like an ongoing invasion. But if you watched other outlets, you might have hardly even seen it at all. One conservative media watchdog group looked at the coverage in August 2021 when border encounters had shot up to 200,000 in just a month. The national news networks that month, ABC, CBS, and NBC, they covered it combined for a total of six and a half minutes over the entire month.
But one man eventually made the entire media pay attention. That was Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas. In April of 2022, he started busing migrants from Texas to cities throughout the United States. He started with Washington DC and then expanded to sanctuary cities around the country, mainly New York, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Abbott's actions may have been political theater, but it undeniably changed the conversation. In two years, he had sent out over a 100,000 migrants to these cities, and it forced these mayors to grapple with the same chaos that Texas border towns had dealt with for decades. Let's look at one example. Eric Adams, New York City's mayor. He quickly changed his tune from being a strong supporter of sanctuary cities to saying the surge would destroy New York City as immigrants from Texas and then other areas started flocking there. They estimated 175,000 immigrants came to New York with a three-year budget cost of 12 billion dollars. Before too long, this wasn't a fake Fox News problem anymore. Across the country, you had urban Democratic voters experiencing the masses of immigrants firsthand, displacing job markets, apartments, and overcrowding schools. And if you're struggling to make ends meet and then see your city spending tons of money on people who came uninvited from other countries, that's the kind of thing that changes minds and changes votes. We have homeless. We have veterans that we're concerned about our vets and our homeless in America need to be prioritized.
By the time the Biden administration realized the size of the political backlash, it was too late. By mid 2023, twothirds of Americans disapproved of his immigration policies. Immigration had shot up as a top voter concern. sometimes even overshadowing inflation. By June 2024, polls showed Americans trusted Trump over Biden on immigration by a 13point margin, 44% to 31%. Overall, the fundamental mistakes the administration made, listening to proimmigration groups and their polls more than they should have, and just paying attention to the press that agreed with them. And that's a lesson we should all pay attention to because the press is just partisan these days. The border wasn't just a short-term political problem. Biden inadvertently gave Donald Trump the perfect campaign weapon. Suddenly, Trump's message of controlled borders, which Democrats once mocked as fear-mongering, that started sounding pretty reasonable to everyday voters, and it helped hand Trump exactly the comeback opportunity he needed. It's a story very similar to what happened with the transgender movement. In my lifetime, I haven't seen any kind of social movement that rose in importance so quickly and then lost power so dramatically. It's a fascinating story. Hey, I gave this to you as straightforward as I could. If you got something good out of it, come back again for more.