The choice facing American voters on immigration in the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is stark and consequential. On the surface, it might seem that the differences between the two candidates have narrowed, as Harris has moved closer to Trump’s hard line on border enforcement. Starting in mid-2023, President Joe Biden, who struggled during the first three years of his term to confront unprecedented mass migration, began using executive authority to impose a series of tough measures. These executive actions have reduced stops by border agents of unlawful crossers by 78 percent since the numbers peaked last December, to levels lower than those recorded at the end of Trump’s term. And Harris has pledged, if she is elected, to support a security bill introduced in the Senate early this year that would codify many of Biden’s sharply restrictive measures into law.

But behind their apparent convergence, Harris and Trump have fundamentally opposed views on the value immigrants bring to American society and radically different approaches to confronting unlawful migration. Harris has offered nuts-and-bolts policies focused on curbing unauthorized border crossings and fixing the dysfunctional U.S. asylum system—a central driver of the growing disorder at the southern border over the past decade. She aims to build more secure and orderly channels for migrants to enter the country while also opening pathways for undocumented immigrants already settled in the United States to attain legal status. Underlying her plan is a recognition of the essential contributions of immigrants to American prosperity and social dynamism, an understanding she derives in no small part from her own experience as the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.

By contrast, Trump, in his third presidential bid, has espoused a fevered xenophobia, vilifying immigrants as predatory criminals and laying out draconian plans to repress immigration, not fix it. Trump has promised to extend enforcement far into the interior, unleashing a nationwide blitz of punitive deportations to forcibly expel millions of immigrants. He also wants to limit new legal immigration, as he explicitly aims to return to a strident nativism not seen in the United States since the 1950s.

Despite the ugly rhetoric and sparse detail, Trump’s plans have garnered wide approval, with polls showing majorities of voters citing immigration as a top issue for them and saying Trump would handle it better than Harris. But a careful reading of the two candidates’ records shows that Harris’s work as vice president has been generally misunderstood by the public and that Trump’s border policies as president were considerably less effective than many Americans seem to believe. The choice in the election is not between two competing blueprints for border management. Harris is proposing practical reforms to fortify the border and overhaul the immigration process in line with the nation’s labor needs and humanitarian aspirations. Trump proposes an exclusionist project that would not only bring turmoil and hardship to communities across the country but would also do long-term damage to the U.S. economy and undermine the United States’ global reputation as a place of opportunity and freedom.

PRAGMATISM OR PHANTASM

There is no question that Harris has taken a sharp turn on border policy, shifting away from the welcoming strategies that Democrats have pursued ever since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, when Latino voters helped lift him to the White House based on his promises (still unfulfilled) of immigration reform. On September 27, in the border city of Douglas, Arizona, Harris laid out an approach that offers no comfort to unauthorized migrants hoping to cross and unequivocally puts enforcement first. Leaning into her history as attorney general in California, when she prosecuted Sinaloa cartel drug traffickers and human smugglers, Harris said she would impose new penalties to ban unlawful crossers from any access to asylum, speed up deportations, and bar deportees from returning for five years. Repeat offenders would face severe criminal charges, Harris said, eliminating any doubts that she favors decriminalization, as she once seemed to suggest during her short-lived 2019 presidential campaign. 

In Douglas, Harris also said she would work to open legal pathways for undocumented immigrants, especially the farm workers who make up nearly half of the nation’s agricultural labor force and those who came as children, known as Dreamers. But the core of her program is one frequently repeated commitment: if elected president, she will resurrect and sign the border security bill that was negotiated by three senators—Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a liberal Democrat; Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a border state independent; and James Lankford of Oklahoma, a conservative Republican—which would enshrine into law the broadest crackdown ever seen on the border. The bill incorporated many Republican demands, but it was dead on arrival on Capitol Hill when it was unveiled in February 2024; Trump, who wanted to keep the border issue alive for his campaign, succeeded in strong-arming Republican lawmakers to torpedo it.

Harris likes to emphasize that the bill would provide $20 billion to hire 1,500 additional border agents and more immigration judges and to purchase fentanyl detection technology. But in its lesser-known provisions, the Senate bill also offers, for the first time in major legislation, fundamental changes to asylum. Based on laws dating back to the Cold War era of the early 1980s, the U.S. asylum system created a wide opening at the border for migrants who were escaping persecution, giving those who reached U.S. soil, whether or not they crossed the line lawfully, a right to request asylum and remain in the country until their claims were heard. The asylum procedures were never designed to handle large numbers of migrants. But since 2010, changes in the populations that were migrating, and the failure of Congress to update the system with new legal channels for refugees and laborers, have made asylum the default access for migrants coming to the southwest border. But asylum claims must pass through the narrow pipeline of immigration courts increasingly clogged with a huge backlog of cases, the majority of which, usually after years of waiting, are ultimately denied.

As a blunt tool to halt the surge of asylum seekers through the opening at the border, the Senate negotiators created a novel trigger that would allow border authorities to shut down most access to asylum between official entry stations in periods when unlawful crossings are high. In its fine print, the Senate bill Harris has embraced also begins to construct the scaffolding of a new and more efficient asylum process. It includes provisions to move asylum claims out of the immigration courts and empower a corps of specially trained asylum officers to decide cases in no longer than six months. It raises the legal standard for the fear of return a migrant must show to initiate an asylum claim. It requires detention or supervision of migrants in asylum proceedings, expands detention facilities, and provides for expedited removal when claims are denied.

In early June, as unlawful crossings were once again starting to soar, Biden used executive powers to activate, without congressional action, some key measures of the Senate bill, including the trigger. Since then, stops of unauthorized crossers have plummeted. Although Harris has kept a careful distance from Biden and his policies as she tries to cultivate the image of a change candidate, her border plans would build on these measures that Biden has already honed and are showing notable results.

For Trump, by contrast, policy details are secondary to an obsessive, dark xenophobic vision that is increasingly detached from verifiable reality. In ever more apocalyptic language, Trump has sought to unify his MAGA movement with strongman pledges to defend Americans from millions of hostile foreigners seeking to storm the country and to root out enemy aliens within. In a relentless barrage of mistruths, Trump insists that the influx of undocumented migrants under Biden is on the order of 21 million people, a wholly made-up figure. He conjures armies of immigrants that he claims are “taking over the towns. They‘re taking over buildings. They‘re going in violently.” He claims that unnamed foreign governments have unloaded their most savage criminals, with millions of migrants “pouring into the country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” assertions for which no evidence has emerged. He regularly likens migrants to Hannibal Lecter; it is a mark of how inured Americans have become to Trump’s bigoted rhetoric that this bizarre slur—equating asylum seekers to a fictional flesh-eating psychopath—has been accepted as everyday discourse.

But Trump’s words have consequences. Consider his vicious claim in the September 10 debate with Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the pets of the people that live there.” Although it was immediately debunked by town officials and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, the town faced several dozen anti-immigrant bomb threats, forcing a hospital lockdown, temporary closings of city hall and two schools, and the emergency deployment of Ohio state troopers. Trump was unapologetic for demeaning the Haitians, telling a cheering crowd in Indiana a few days later, “You have to get ’em the hell out.” Indeed, the centerpiece of his plan is what he says will be “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” which he said he would launch in Springfield. It doesn’t matter to Trump or his supporters that most of the Haitians are in the United States legally and gainfully providing much-needed labor to growing businesses in that city.

FROM CRACKDOWN TO CHAOS

As the presidential race enters its final weeks with razor-thin margins, political maneuvering has left no room for reasoned debate on border policy. Fortunately, both candidates have records from their time in Washington to help assess their proposals. These records provide a corrective to many commonly held assumptions about both Harris and Trump.

In his White House term, one of Trump’s most powerful deterrents was the menacing language he had deployed in his 2016 campaign, which echoed across the hemisphere. During his first six months in office, the number of unlawful crossers declined sharply, dropping to a low of just over 11,100 stops by border authorities in April 2017. Yet by August of that year, as migrants and human smugglers found ways around the enforcement regime, crossings began a steady rise. They peaked at more than 850,000 apprehensions for the year in 2019, the highest level in 12 years.

Trump’s signature policy was, of course, his wall. But his engineering plans ran up against the reality that about 1,240 miles of a 2,000-mile border run down the middle of the Rio Grande, unfavorable conditions for wall construction. In four years, at a cost of $16.4 billion, Trump erected only 85 miles of new wall, while reinforcing 373 miles of existing barriers. 

Another cornerstone of his strategy was the program known as Remain in Mexico, which he has vowed to bring back. Launched in January 2019, it required asylum seekers to wait on the Mexican side of the border for their hearings in U.S. immigration courts. In practice, it proved to be an inefficient slog, requiring a lot of agents’ time shuttling migrants to the courts. It also created a humanitarian disaster, leaving migrant families stranded in squalid camps in Mexico, exposed to assault and kidnapping by smuggler gangs. In two years under Trump, just 68,000 people were enrolled in the program, only about five percent of the 1.3 million crossers apprehended during that period. Out of this group, a total of 723 migrants won asylum, according to the Migration Policy Institute. About 32,000 people were ordered deported, but almost all in absentia, so it is unclear where they are now. The deterrent effect of these policies has proved difficult to measure and appears to have been quite limited.

Trump has also said he will revive Title 42, a public health emergency order he put in place in March 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which Biden prolonged until May 2023. It authorized border agents to immediately expel unlawful crossers without allowing them to apply for asylum and without any legal process or record. As deterrence, Title 42 was largely unsuccessful: although the Border Patrol carried out more than 2.9 million expulsions under the program, crossings soared as expelled migrants, facing no consequences and leaving no official record, kept trying again until they succeeded. Trump’s zero-tolerance policy of criminally prosecuting unauthorized migrants led to the family separation crisis in which thousands of migrant children were cruelly separated from their parents, drawing a firestorm of outrage and an injunction from a federal judge. Trump was compelled to end the separations after two months. Trump did succeed in instituting harsh rules that all but shut down the adjudication of asylum cases, hobbling the immigration courts, with aftereffects that endure to this day.

On a big chart of border crossings that Trump has used at campaign events to illustrate his arguments, he likes to point to the lowest number, saying it was on his last day in office. In fact, that sharp dip—to about 16,180 in one month—came in April 2020 with the onset of COVID-19, which constrained migration across the globe. In all, despite the pandemic shutdown, border authorities recorded more than 2.3 million unlawful crossings during Trump’s term. He left office without ever coming close to sealing the border.

THE TORRENT AND THE TRIGGER

So it fell to Biden, with Harris in the background, to deal with a foundering asylum system. Seeking to make a contrast with Trump, Biden initially offered a welcoming message and rolled back many of Trump’s policies, immediately attracting a migratory upswell. The administration was caught off-guard by sudden, vast migrations spurred by the economic shocks of the pandemic and cataclysmic political crises in several Latin American countries. Migrants from South America forged a harrowing route through Panama’s Darién Gap and marched in caravans across Mexico. Smugglers, increasingly under the command of narcotics cartels, turned the movement of asylum-seeking migrants into a multibillion-dollar business. For two years, U.S. border authorities were continuously overwhelmed.

With border detention facilities packed dangerously beyond capacity, authorities were forced to release tens of thousands of migrants into the country with limited vetting. Images of chaos went viral. In April 2022, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, began busing migrants north to Democratic-run cities such as Boston, Chicago, Denver, and New York, skillfully turning the politics of immigration against the Democrats by exporting the crisis to their own streets. The generous shelter and services that the mayors of these cities offered asylum seekers proved expensive, and the federal government proffered little help, causing tensions with the White House. Residents also grew frustrated, as migrants reluctantly snared in endless court proceedings appeared to be gaming the system and living off the taxpayers’ dole. In December 2023, when Mexico temporarily suspended its own immigration patrols, U.S. authorities registered 250,000 unlawful crossings in a single month, a staggering record.

But by then, the Biden administration had already begun to pivot. A transit ban the administration rolled out in May 2023, when it ended Title 42, required migrants to seek asylum in countries they passed through before reaching the United States. That rule had some effect, slowing unlawful crossings for several months. A year later, Biden implemented the trigger rule, raising alarm among immigrant rights advocates and further straining the Democratic coalition. Biden’s version of the trigger bars most unauthorized crossers from almost any access to asylum whenever authorities encounter an average of 2,500 border crossers or more a day for seven days; traffic has been above that level throughout the Biden administration. Border Patrol agents are no longer required to ask migrants if they fear returning to their countries; the burden is now on the migrants to express those fears and initiate an asylum claim. The Biden administration also adopted a higher standard of risk of persecution that asylum seekers must meet to pass an early screening.

On September 30, the administration revised the rule to make the trigger more difficult to lift by requiring that the weekly average of migrant encounters fall below 1,500 a day for 28 consecutive days. Since June, authorities have deported more than 160,000 migrants from the border, putting the Biden administration on pace to surpass overall removals under Trump. Encounters of unauthorized crossers dropped to about 55,900 in September, the lowest number since August 2020. A sense of calm has returned to border cities where hungry and exhausted migrants once slept in the streets. But more migrants, moving farther into remote backlands to elude the Border Patrol, have died in scorching desert heat, a shameful indicator that enforcement is having an effect in many places.

At the same time, as part of its overall design to discourage unlawful crossings, the Biden administration has opened new legal pathways. Since January 2023, more than 852,000 migrants have been admitted at official border stations by making appointments using a mobile app called CBP One. More than 531,000 people have arrived through a special parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, which allows them to live and work in the country legally for two years. (The administration recently announced it will not renew that temporary program, since the border emergency seems to be winding down.) In June, Biden created a direct pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are long-term residents married to United States citizens. About half a million immigrants are eligible. But Republican-led states immediately sued to stop the program, and a federal judge placed it on hold.

BETTER DETERRENCE, MORE PATHWAYS

Despite the return of a semblance of order to the border, the political damage to Democrats was done. Under Biden, in all, more than 3.4 million migrants encountered at the southwest border were released into the country in various ways; tens of thousands of asylum seekers are still lodged in shelters in northern cities. Americans were intensely critical of Biden’s border handling and soured on immigration in general. In a Gallup poll in July, 55 percent of adults said they favored lower immigration, the first time since 2005 that a majority held that negative view.

Perhaps fortunately for Harris, the only part of immigration policy she was directly in charge of was a thankless assignment Biden gave her early in the administration to address the root causes of migration in three Central American countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, called the Northern Triangle. Contrary to Republican talking points, Harris was never the “border czar.” She was given the task of reviving U.S. assistance to those countries, after Trump had slashed it during his term, and fostering job creation to give people reasons to stay home. 

In May 2021 Harris established an unusual program called the Partnership for Central America—a collaboration among the U.S. government, private businesses, and nonprofits—that has so far achieved investments by more than 50 companies of $1.3 billion, with $5.5 billion committed, according to its reports. The program created 90,000 jobs and provided training for more than 380,000 people. Since the program was launched, migration from the Northern Triangle has dropped by about 35 percent. The three countries have welcomed the partnership’s investments, but it is difficult to know exactly what role Harris’s initiative played in the complex sociopolitical realities that led to the decline. More recent migration surges have come from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela, countries gripped by epic crises that the United States can do little to abate.

During a visit to Guatemala in June 2021, Harris issued a warning to prospective migrants. “Do not come,” she said. “I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.” Immigrant advocates were appalled. In retrospect, however, her stern message was a preview of the no-nonsense law enforcement approach that has become her theme in the presidential race. Harris’s campaign strategy has been to go on offense, calling Trump’s bluff by showing she can be the tougher border cop. Up to now, her support for the Senate security bill she touts has been mainly tactical, a way of showing she is ready to compromise with Republicans in Congress to get things done while Trump is perpetuating chaos for his own political gain. But she is enough of a lawyer to know the bill’s reforms to asylum could one day be significant.

In its current form, the bill is heavy on Republican enforcement priorities and does not address Democrats’ most long-standing reform demands, particularly for pathways to citizenship for Dreamers, farm workers, and spouses of American citizens. The bill stops short of building out an asylum system that would provide timely but also fair decisions, ensure due process, and support lasting resettlement for migrants who are legitimately fleeing persecution. If Harris wins the White House and takes up the bill, it will be only the starting point for intense negotiations in what will inevitably still be a closely divided, bitterly polarized Congress. Harris will face a test to discover if lawmakers finally want to get something done on immigration.

TRUMP’S SOUTHERN STRATEGY

As he campaigns, Trump rarely speaks about any other immigration plan but deportations. He blames immigrants for crime, Black unemployment, the affordable housing shortage, even inflation. He makes no secret of his white nationalist purposes, telling his followers that immigrants are criminals with “bad genes” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump energizes his rally crowds by summoning them to chant, “Send them back! Send them back!” and “Mass deportation now!”

If Trump wins a second White House term, he is likely to execute more effectively on his platform than he did in his first term. Stephen Miller, formerly Trump’s principal immigration adviser in the White House, went on to found America First Legal, where he has spent four years honing litigation strategies once deployed against Trump by the American Civil Liberties Union, turning them around to wage legal combat against the Biden administration. Miller leads a cohort of former officials and anti-immigrant MAGA crusaders who now better understand the levers of government. They are ready to purge civil servants who don’t agree with them.

So Trump must be taken at his word when he promises a massive operation. He says he will invoke an obscure statute, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to mobilize multiple law enforcement agencies, the National Guard, and U.S. military troops to repel the “predatory incursion.” Miller speaks of setting up “vast holding facilities” along the border, reminiscent of the internment camps where Japanese American citizens were confined during World War II. Trump has made it clear the roundup could be violent. “And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story,” he told a rally in Wisconsin.

The operation will face legal challenges and logistical constraints. Immigrants who commit serious crimes in the United States are prosecuted, like anyone else, in the criminal justice system. It is unclear whether Trump plans to reach into American prisons to find his deportees, or how he will persuade countries such as El Salvador, Mexico, and Venezuela, already besieged with lawless violence, to take back large numbers of convicted criminals. Immigration courts have issued about 1.3 million deportation orders that have not been executed. But in most cases, the courts do not know where those people are. Many of the immigrants Trump has vowed to deport, like the Haitian workers in Springfield, are in the United States legally.

To achieve the scale of deportations he envisions, Trump’s plan calls for a far-reaching countrywide dragnet. Agents would go house to house and raid workplaces in an offensive that would sweep up many people who are not criminals, disrupt businesses and schools, and forcefully separate families. They would go hunting among the 11 million undocumented people in the country. Nearly three-quarters of those immigrants have been settled in the United States for more than a decade, long since gaining steady work, paying taxes, buying homes, and melding productively into the society.

Economists are broadly united in warning of the severe negative consequences of Trump’s deportation plan. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Adam S. Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote that Trump’s deportations “would lead to slower growth (if not a recession), rising inflation, reduced employment for citizens and legal residents, and less innovation.” Trump’s plan to shrink the country’s labor force, Posen wrote, “is both broadly and deeply self-destructive.”

But those most vulnerable to harm from Trump’s siege are about 5.5 million American citizen children who live in mixed-status families with at least one undocumented member. Communities where these families live have come to know the scarring devastation for children that deportations leave behind, especially if a parent is taken away by police. With a breadwinner gone, food insecurity rises. Children become sad, anxious, or angry, unable to understand why the parent left and feeling shame about the absence. Often they struggle in school. Suicide risk rises among teenagers who have lost a parent to deportation. Destabilized families and communities withdraw from cooperation with police, leading to more neighborhood crime, not less.

THE NATIVIST PRECIPICE

In 1954, when expanding postwar agriculture and industry had attracted a large migration of unauthorized Mexican laborers, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower launched a purge called Operation Wetback, a derisive term for the workers. The government warned that the foreigners were bringing crime and disease, sapping public services, and stealing jobs from Americans. Fanning out across Texas and California, immigration agents deported more than 200,000 Mexicans, crammed into boxcars and herded back over the border, and terrorized hundreds of thousands more into leaving. The operation left indelible trauma in Mexican immigrant communities and depressed American farming, but it did little over the long run to slow the movement of Mexican laborers to jobs that needed them in the United States.

Seven decades later, the country is at another inflection point. Trump holds up Eisenhower’s operation as the model for his own plans. He promises to restore American greatness by turning Americans against imagined enemies to justify a drastic reduction of the immigrant population. Trump’s purge does not offer functional solutions to a broken system that would make the border more secure. Instead, his nativist agenda would spread divisive conflict and mainly serve to fortify his presidential powers and enhance his image as the leader of an incipient authoritarian project.

Harris offers something entirely different, a pragmatic program based on respect for immigrants, in which she rejects “the false choice” between securing the border and creating an immigration system that is “safe, orderly, and humane.” Progressive Democrats and immigrant rights advocates have fiercely criticized Biden’s border crackdown and the Senate bill Harris endorses, arguing that the asylum bans they involve violate American law and humanitarian principles. But these groups know their communities will be in grave danger under Trump, while with Harris they will be able to bargain over policy. As for Harris, while challenging Trump’s hate-mongering, she has chosen to engage him primarily in a battle of competence. The choice, as she sees it, is between running on a problem or solving it.