Democrats Clash Over How to Defeat Trump on Immigration in 2020

Democratic presidential candidates are clashing over their different visions on immigration, an issue Donald Trump has made a cornerstone of his presidency and re-election campaign.

Contenders like Joe Biden want to pursue a moderate platform with the uncertain goal of winning back swing voters who put Trump in the White House.

Elizabeth Warren and others advocate aggressively pro-immigration ideas that could boost turnout among Latinos and progressives in key states but risk turning off middle-of-the road voters.

This presidential election is likely to present the sharpest contrast in generations between Republicans and Democrats on immigration. A January 2019 survey by Pew Research Center found that 83% of Democrats say “immigrants strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents;” just 38% of Republicans agreed with that statement. In a Gallup poll last month, about one-quarter of respondents cited immigration as the country’s most important problem, a record high since the survey began asking the question in 1993.

Trump ran in 2016 on a dark vision of a country threatened by an invasion of “drug dealers, criminals, rapists” who need to be contained by a wall along the southern border, a theme he repeatedly returned to as a candidate and since becoming president.

The Democratic contenders are united in condemning Trump’s harsh policies such as family separation, child detention and the roundups of undocumented people that were expected to have taken place over the weekend. But they don’t agree on the policies needed to fix an immigration system that many Americans consider broken.

One of the biggest fault lines among Democrats is whether illegal migration should continue to be treated as a criminal offense. Some candidates like Warren, Julian Castro and Kamala Harris are proposing making undocumented crossings a civil violation, an idea backed by Domingo Garcia, the national president of the Latino civil rights group LULAC.

But contenders such as front-runner Biden and Beto O’Rourke reject that proposal, which they consider unnecessary to stop Trump’s family separation. Biden’s immigration plan focuses on rolling back Trump’s policies and pushing ideas with consensus Democratic support like citizenship for young “DREAMers” and bringing them “out of the shadows through fair treatment.”