Across The Atlantic
The Groups have exiles. Listen to them on immigration.
The Atlantic has a pair of new, powerful pieces on immigration.
Rogé Karma’s Why Democrats Got The Politics of Immigration So Wrong For So Long dives into how the party “spent more than a decade tacking left on the issue to win Latino votes” - and how “it may have cost them the White House—twice.”
Karma breaks down the relationship between Democratic pollsters, their foundation-funded nonprofit clients, and the impact that advocacy had on moving candidates out of step with voters.
For more than a decade, Democrats have struck an implicit electoral bargain: Even if liberal immigration stances alienated some working-class white voters, those policies were essential to holding together the party’s multiracial coalition. That bargain now appears to have been based on a false understanding of the motivations of Latino voters. How did that misreading become so entrenched in the first place?
Part of the story is the rise of progressive immigration-advocacy nonprofits within the Democratic coalition. These groups convinced party leaders that shifting to the left on immigration would win Latino support. Their influence can be seen in the focus of Hillary Clinton’s campaign on immigration and diversity in 2016, the party’s near-universal embrace of border decriminalization in 2020, and the Biden administration’s hesitance to crack down on the border until late in his presidency.
The Democratic Party’s embrace of these groups was based on a mistake that in hindsight appears simple: conflating the views of the highly educated, progressive Latinos who run and staff these organizations, and who care passionately about immigration-policy reform, with the views of Latino voters, who overwhelmingly do not. Avoiding that mistake might very well have made the difference in 2016 and 2024. It could therefore rank among the costliest blunders the Democratic Party has ever made.
You can read the whole piece here.
Listen to the Exiles
Democrats are just starting to reckon with what the progressive nonprofit complex has wrought. Last month, Ezra Klein proclaimed The End of the Obama Coalition, bemoaning “a culture in which nobody is saying no to the groups at any level of American Democratic politics.” Adam Jentleson captured the zeitgeist with New York Times op-ed asking When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?
Progressive critics think this reflection is going too far. After Jentleson’s piece, we wrote about just how hard it is to say no to these groups, as the attacks are relentless - not only from professional advocates, but from the donors, staffers, and journalists they influence.
How do practical Democrats respond?
We called for more “zealous converts” - leaders with progressive credibility who can speak to their specific experiences within coalitions dominated by The Groups.
And that’s why this second piece in The Atlantic is so important.
You can read the whole thing here, by Frank Sharry and Cecilia Munoz. They were leaders of major immigration and civil rights groups - America’s Voice, the National Immigration Forum, and the National Council of La Raza. The Washington Bureau Chief of Semafor remarked of the authors: “Two of the most quoted immigration reform advocates across decades both saying Democrats moved too far left — not your typical op-ed making this case.”
They ask:
How did Democrats fall so far and so quickly on immigration?
It’s easy to blame Trump, and the lure of his xenophobic rhetoric. But we believe that immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left, beyond the political space available to them. Voters, feeling unheard and frustrated, may have squirmed at Trump’s racism and radicalism, but they also saw him as someone who took the problem seriously and was trying to address it.
One of us, Cecilia, spent two decades at the National Council of La Raza, America’s biggest Latino advocacy group, and later advised Obama on immigration issues as head of his White House Domestic Policy Council. The other, Frank, ran pro-immigrant organizations for more than three decades, and advised the Harris campaign on immigration. This is a heartfelt critique, informed by our decades of experience as immigrant advocates who also understand the realities of governing. Unless something changes, Republicans will continue exploiting the situation at the border, more immigrants will suffer, and Democrats will continue to lose the trust of voters—damaging their chances of unseating the authoritarians now returning to power.
The call is coming from inside the tent. They go on, with a call for moderation and snapshot of recent years:
We pragmatists hoped that the existential threat posed by Trump might lead to moderation in the movement, with the unity forged in resistance creating political space to identify solutions that enjoy majority public support. It was not to be. Four years fighting Trump seemed only to further radicalize the left.
This became evident when, in the run-up to the 2020 election, some movement leaders decided to discard and discredit comprehensive immigration reform. Calling it “an outdated and flawed strategy” that criminalized and punished some immigrants in exchange for legal status for others, these leaders demanded a “bold, new vision for our immigration system, one that rivals the boldness of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.”
This call had its intended effect. Virtually overnight, most of the movement shelved the concept of comprehensive reform—despite the fact that this approach enjoyed strong public support, had put Democrats on the offense for nearly a decade, had the support of prominent Republicans, and was backed by Democratic senators including Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin.
Candidates sought to connect with the progressive shift. In one early debate during the Democratic primary, eight out of 10 candidates raised their hand when asked if they favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But decriminalization was deeply unpopular. A poll at the time found that just 27 percent of people surveyed supported decriminalizing it. (Harris was among those who raised her hand. Her progressive posturing in 2019 would come back to haunt her 2024 candidacy, drawing brutal and relentless attack ads.)
You should read the whole thing here. And encourage more leaders to step forward. Saying no to The Groups is hard. Telling them the truth from inside the tent is even harder.
We already know what the alternative looks like - we’re living in it.