Better Vague Than Venal
Why Harris needs to further toughen her stance on immigration.
It is not difficult to choose between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. You do not elect as president a man you would not trust to babysit your children – much less one who so profoundly disrespects democracy that he summoned a violent mob to try and overthrow a national election.
This should end the matter, but it doesn’t.
Residents of Berkeley and Oakland realize that our favorite daughter is an accidental candidate. We recognize that she came of age in a one-party state comfortable with preferred pronouns, DEI, and land acknowledgement. We don’t much care — but others do.
Others know that Harris has few political enemies because she never had to carve her own path through national politics the way Obama and Clinton did. Until a few weeks ago, she had never faced competition from a conservative who forced her to pivot to the center.
She is often vague because she is still fairly new at speaking to Americans instead of Californians. Harris was a cautious, bog-standard Attorney General and Senator. When she ran for president in 2020, she attacked Biden on race from the left, then crashed before reaching the starting line in Iowa. She has been naturally cautious, so when asked to work on immigration she never called for the immediate closure of the amnesty loophole. This makes it hard for her to answer questions about why the administration waited three years to finally act. Although Harris is gaining command of a wider range of policy issues, she is still vague about the topics that voters care most about: inflation and immigration.
Biden has been a truly outstanding president, but on three occasions he badly undermined Harris. First, he publicized his promise to Jim Clyburn to name a Black woman as his running mate. He did not strengthen her by making her look like a DEI hire. Then he tossed Harris a flaming hot potato by asking her to address the underlying causes of surging illegal immigration on the Southern border. It turns out that the most important underlying cause was Biden’s own reluctance to issue the proclamation that shut down illegal crossings. He finally signed it in June of this year and the problem mostly ended. Finally, by waiting so long to withdraw from the 2024 race, Biden denied Harris the experience, credibility, and base of support that candidates earn by running in state primaries. Biden gave the Democratic National Convention no choice but to bequeath the nomination to Harris as next in line.
If Biden occasionally undermined Harris, the Supreme Court saved her. Their decision to overturn Roe v Wade was terrible for America, but it forced Harris to up her game. Harris forged strong relationships with state leaders as she built support for a woman’s right to choose. She grew stronger as a speaker and as a leader. Her two years fighting Dobbs created the joyous warrior who gave a truly outstanding convention speech and had the confidence to pick Tim Walz as her running mate. This Kamala Harris might even have prevailed in an open primary against our deep bench of talented and experienced blue-state governors.
Thankfully for Harris, Donald Trump makes the election simple in a way that Nikki Haley or Glenn Youngkin would not. In two plus centuries as a nation, the United States has produced our share of charlatans and con-men. None compare with Trump, who despises core American values: opposition to foreign tyrants, the peaceful transfer of power, and the belief that our system of constitutional government comes before any individual in it. He truly believes that any election he wins is fair and any election he loses is fraudulent and worthy of violent protest. It is a certainty that he will not concede if, as we must fervently hope, he loses again in November. This fact alone should disqualify him from running for any office, much less the Presidency.
Even those of us who despise Trump must acknowledge his strengths. He is one of only six Americans to be nominated three times for President by a major party. He seeks to join Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and Richard Nixon as men who ran three times and were elected twice. In each case, they were elected the third time they ran. (FDR was four for four. William Jennings Bryan zero for three. Eugene Debs zero for five — but not a major party). For the past decade, Donald Trump has had a greater impact on American politics than any other person. Nancy Pelosi may be number two, but she did not build a movement with tens of millions of fervent supporters.
Like many of the authoritarian leaders he so admires, Trump built MAGA around opposition to immigration. He grasped the extent to which our immigration system had collapsed. He took full advantage of broken asylum provisions that enable hundreds of thousands to seek refuge under laws designed to shelter persecuted dissidents from authoritarian regimes. Trump ties every possible frustration to illegal immigration, including crime, inflation, housing, and missing pets. He has succeeded in part because Democrats have lost their voice on the issue, often in the name of diversity and anti-racism.
In her visit to the border this week, Harris acknowledged the enduring benefits of immigration. She tacitly acknowledged that illegal immigration erodes social trust. She knows very well that it nourishes hard-right political parties. Uncontrolled and illegal migration led directly to the own goal that was Brexit. It has fueled the rise of authoritarian parties not only in the US, but in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden.
To be clear, immigration is a very good thing and even illegal immigration does far less economic damage than its opponents often claim. But it is politically deadly for progressives. Not only Democrats in the US, but Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada, the German Greens, Podemos in Spain, LFI in France, and various red/green parties in the Nordic countries are being pounded by the political backlash that followed immigration surges. Most liberal and welcoming countries start to tip once ten percent of their population is foreign born. Few countries tolerate fifteen percent very well, including the US. Go higher, as several European countries have done, and you tempt a right-wing political reaction. There is no magic threshold - but there is also so far no country that has not revealed social and cultural limits to how many immigrants it can absorb without triggering a conservative political reaction.
Harris should bring prosecutorial clarity to this issue by promising to end illegal immigration. How can a President sworn to uphold the law promise anything else? She would do this not with a wall, but with smarter enforcement and legal immigration.
She should promise to build and deploy an accurate electronic work eligibility verification system. The solution is not e-Verify, which is easily defeated and comically broken. Registration would be voluntary, just like the passport system, but employers and anyone seeking employment would be required to register, just as they must for Social Security.
She should promise to impose substantial fines on companies that hire people not authorized to work here. This would simultaneously put upward pressure on wages at the bottom and lead employers to support work visas and a path to citizenship for critical immigrants.
She should promise both pathways to citizenship and future visa programs biased slightly towards families and skilled immigrants.
Given her history on this issue, Harris needs to be resolute and forthright, not vague. Especially in crucial midwestern states still reeling from China aftershocks, Harris cannot allow Democrats in her campaign to decry all efforts to control immigration as racist. Instead, she needs to assure midwestern noncollege workers that they are not, in Arlie Hochschild’s memorable phrase, strangers in their own land. Fundamentally, it helps her to win voters who want to end illegal immigration without Donald Trump.
Harris is practiced and skilled at defending reproductive choice and at reminding voters of Trump’s legendary weaknesses. He is congenitally incapable of telling the truth. He flirts with tyrants and mocks veterans. His bigotry, criminality, and corruption are legion. His tariffs would pour sand in our economic gears and his tax cuts would reward the undeserving and compromise our solvency. His demonic fantasies of mass deportations would inspire massive resistance.
Harris might do well to point out that Trump is no more a conservative than he is a successful businessman. He mocks every conservative value: individual liberty means nothing to a man who threatens to prosecute his political rivals. Trump does not believe in limited government, family values, free markets, or even a strong national defense. Harris knows that defeating him is critical for the preservation of a constitutional order. It is also the essential first step to building a responsible conservative party in the United States.