Where they stand: Trump and Harris on immigration

I’m declaring a Horse Race Moratorium.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Good morning! It’s Monday, October 28, 2024. Election Day is eight days away.

Eight days, folks. We’re officially in the home stretch of the 2024 campaign, and the race only seems to be getting tighter: per 538, Kamala Harris’ national lead is down to 1.4 percentage points, making the contest the closest it’s been since August.

In such a close race, there just isn’t much left that the polls can tell us. I already outlined for you last week, if either candidate wins, how I think they will have pulled it off; as of this writing, both “pre-mortems” remain entirely credible accounts of how the election will end, and I expect it will be that way up until a victor is declared. Either candidate could win. Neither one has much of an edge. End of story.

So, with that in mind, I plan to do something a little different with the newsletters this week. I’m declaring a Horse Race Moratorium, forgoing a focus on “who’s up” and “who’s down,” since, well, neither one of them is really up or down anyways. Instead, I’ll be spending each of the final days closely covering the policy stakes of this election, taking one issue per day and breaking down for you what both candidates plan to do in that area and what their agendas look like.

For each issue, I’ve enlisted a non-partisan expert, who will help us wade through that policy area. Each day, they’ll help tell us three things: 1) what Trump and Harris have proposed in that area; 2) where there’s overlap between Trump and Harris’ plans; and 3) the blindspots that neither Trump nor Harris are talking about.

I hope it will be educational and give all of you a sense of what either of these two potential administrations could look like.

Before we dive in, I do have one request: I’m proud to be able to make this policy coverage available free to all my readers — but if you appreciate my independent journalism seeking to provide substantive coverage of this election, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription:

Your support is what makes this work possible, and will allow me to cover the policy stakes of the election in the final stretch — even if that’s decidedly not the coverage that normally draws the most clicks. Even if you can’t support financially, you can always help give WUTP a boost by liking and restacking the newsletter by clicking the “heart” and “recycle” buttons at the top and bottom of this post. Just by making clicking those buttons a part of your daily routine, you can ensure the newsletter gets shared more widely in the Substack universe.

And with that, let’s kick things off with our first issue area: Immigration.

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Immigration has defined the 2024 election like few other issues. Donald Trump began his political career talking about the issue — and has spent much of his 2024 campaign running on it as well, arguing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have created a crisis on the southern border.

As see in the chart below, migrant crossings have surged to record levels during the Biden administration, although they have since come down after the president instituted new restrictions.

Source: Pew Research Center

But that delay has given Trump a major opening: as Semafor’s Dave Weigel tweeted recently, “no individual Harris move [right now] matters as much as the immigration/border decisions made in January 2021,” which have haunted Biden and Harris ever since — and led to a striking evolution on the issue. Here’s how Trump and Harris plan to handle immigration if elected:

Trump vs. Harris: Immigration

The centerpiece of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda is a promise to carry out — as the Republican platform puts it — the “largest deportation operation in American history,” a broad plan for “sending Illegal Aliens back home and removing those who have violated our Laws.”

Trump references his mass deportations proposal at nearly every campaign rally, but he has yet to outline many specifics. There are at least 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally; finding and removing all of them would be incredibly logistically challenging, likely with a price tag in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

“Deporting the unauthorized population already in the United States would be much, much harder than what the Biden administration is focused on, which is recent arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “It’s much easier to return people there quickly, either back to Mexico or back to Northern/Central American countries, than it is to go into local U.S. communities and find people where they live and work, and arrest them individually, and then try to come up with planes and places to hold people, to remove them from the interior of the country. That’s much more expensive and difficult.”

When deporting members of drug cartels and criminal gangs, Trump has said that he would deny them due process by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a controversial 1798 law that gives the president expanded deportation powers in times of war. Trump has suggested that he would enlist the help of local law enforcement, as well as the National Guard. (“These aren’t civilians,” he told TIME Magazine, when asked about the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits deploying the U.S. military domestically against civilians. Legal challenges are sure to follow.) He has not explained where the migrants would be detained while they await deportation flights, although his adviser Stephen Miller has proposed mass deportation camps.

He has also not explained where the migrants would be brought to. “It’s really important to not forget that other countries’ cooperation would be required for all of this,” Bush-Joseph noted, hinting at the type of diplomacy required before other countries agree to accept potentially millions of people into their borders. The economic impact of the mass deportations would be substantial: “We’re talking about removing workers that in some sectors make up large percentages of the workforce,”Bush-Joseph said.

Trump has also spoken about limiting legal immigration, including by revoking the Temporary Protected Status that the Biden administration gave to a record number of migrants. He has, however, also suggested that he would grant legal status to any non-citizens who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he said in June.

He has also said that, on his first day in office, he would sign an executive order “ending automatic citizenship for the children of illegal aliens,” although most legal experts agree that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

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Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has made the bipartisan border bill negotiated earlier this year the beginning, middle, and end of her immigration agenda. The legislation, which has now failed twice to advance in the Senate, would give the Department of Homeland Security expanded authority to close the border at times when the number of migrant encounters reaches certain levels. The bill would also make it more difficult for migrants to claim asylum, while seeking to reduce the backlog of asylum cases by allowing asylum officers to make more streamlined decisions rather than going through the immigration court system.

The bill also includes $20 billion in border security funding, to allow for the hiring of 1,500 new Customs and Border Protection personnel and 4,300 asylum officers.

Almost every Harris answer on immigration inevitably circles back to this bipartisan legislation — but has she explained what she would do if Congress fails to advance the measure, as it has two times before? “Not that I’m aware of,” Bush-Joseph told me.

No matter what Congress does, Harris has signaled that she would keep in place the border restrictions set by Biden (although, asked repeatedly, she has never explained why the administration waited until this year to implement them, even as migrant crossings surged in 2021 and 2022). She said in September that she will also “take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry,” although she did not offer much detail on the additional actions she would implement.

According to her campaign website, Harris also supports an “earned pathway to citizenship,” a line she has repeated at her campaign rallies. Her campaign has yet to explain what she means by that, declining to outline exactly who the migrants are that she would support extending citizenship to and what process they would have to go through.

At a speech near the border in September, Harris spoke warmly about “DREAMers,” people who were crossed the border illegally as minors. “They who have grown up in the United States, were educated here, pay taxes here, serve in our military, and contribute to our communities every day,” Harris said. “They are American in every way, but still, they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship.” She did not offer details on a proposed pathway to citizenship for that group of around 2 million.

Where they overlap

The center of gravity on the immigration debate has shifted remarkably in the last few months. For decades, Democrats insisted that any border security bill in Congress be paired with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — until that pattern ended with the bipartisan bill Harris refers to frequently on the campaign trail. The fact that Democrats have essentially dropped their half of Washington’s long-running border security bargain is a sign of the party’s rightward shift on immigration.

Harris herself is also a perfect example of this evolution: in 2019, when she ran for president the first time, Harris supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now, she has said she would institute border security measures even tougher than the ones put in place by Biden.

The two candidates have little other overlap on border policy — Trump’s proposed mass deportations are much farther than anything Harris has put forward on the issue — but, directionally, they have moved closer together, since Harris has sprinted away from her previously lax border stance towards a more muscular approach. In one example of overlap that Harris often avoid talking about, they do both support continued construction of a border wall, since wall funding is included in the bipartisan border package.

What Trump and Harris aren’t talking about

Bush-Joseph told me that one urgent issue neither candidate has given much attention to is “bringing the U.S. immigration system into the 21st century.”

“At the U.S.-Mexico border,” she told me, “agents are still using paper files. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services still receives large numbers of applications as paper filings, mailed to the agency.” Modernizing the system — and making it more efficient as a result — is likely an effort that would require legislative action.

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More news to know

Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last night was marked by racist rhetoric, including one warm-up speaker who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and invoked offensive stereotypes about Hispanics, Black people, Jews, and Palestinians.

The Trump campaign quickly sought to distance itself from the comment about Puerto Rico, after Republican lawmakers from Florida condemned the remark.

Some billionaires who have previously sparred with Trump are toning down their criticism in preparation for his potential return to the White House. In one notable example, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos spiked his editorial board’s planned endorsement of Harris.

Philadelphia’s district attorney is suing Elon Musk over his $1 million sweepstakes for registered voters.

A pair of New York Times polls shows the Nebraska Senate race within the margin of error.

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The day ahead

VP Kamala Harris: Saginaw, Macomb, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• Gov. Tim Walz: Manitowoc and Waukesha, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

• Gwen Walz and First Lady Jill Biden: Traverse City and Bay City, Michigan, and La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Former President Donald Trump: Atlanta, Georgia.

• Sen. JD Vance: Wausau and Racine, Wisconsin.

• Donald Trump, Jr: Coplay, Pennsylvania

• Eric Trump: Wyandotte, Michigan.

• Lara Trump: Phoenix, Arizona.