For the third consecutive presidential election, immigration became a defining issue of the campaign, with Donald Trump running on his characteristic threats of mass deportations. For her part, Harris, despite signing onto a relatively progressive immigration platform as Joe Biden’s running mate four years earlier, also tacked to the right, promising to pass sweeping border restrictions into law.
One novel feature of the 2024 campaign, however, was that the now familiar debate about immigration was not exclusively (or even primarily) about which candidate is most committed to “controlling the border.” Politicians and journalists also showed a distinct interest in how immigrants find their way to and integrate into—or, supposedly, fail to integrate into—specific communities around the country: from speculation that homeless migrants sent from Texas would overshadow the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to Trump and J.D. Vance’s racist lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
This focus on immigrants’ movement points to an overlooked dimension of immigration law. We typically think of immigration law’s essential function as policing the border, telling us who can enter or remain in the country, and who can be removed. But looking at immigration law holistically—including not just the federal immigration statutes, but also a wide range of state and local laws that regulate the status of noncitizens—reveals a body of law, with a long history, that also shapes the ways in which immigrants choose where to make their home within the United States’s borders.
The failure of this law of internal migration to respond to the increased arrivals of humanitarian migrants in large part accounts for the so-called “migrant crisis” that has turned public opinion against immigration in recent years. Trump and Vance’s solution to this problem will be more of the same cruelty that they have always called for: incarceration, deportation, and border walls. And in the wake of their recent defeat, Democrats are more likely than ever to simply concede the issue to Republicans and offer cruelty-lite versions of these same positions—a strategy that is bound to continue to fail. Rather than move further right and naively hope for the best, Democrats need to offer their own agenda for immigration and internal migration. To do so, they should look to institutional experiments from a forgotten past.
Contextualizing the “Migrant Crisis”
As Daniel Morales has previously written for this blog, we should be wary of political rhetoric that describes the mere arrival of human beings as a “crisis.” But the failure of our institutions to coordinate this arrival has nonetheless had serious consequences, undermining local support for immigrant inclusion in meaningful ways. It is worth understanding the roots of this failure.
Though a long tradition of immigration case law reaffirms the idea that immigration is fundamentally an exclusive federal responsibility—in the recent words of Justice Kagan, “the zenith of federal power”—state and local governments have long imposed numerous restrictions on movement both within and across state lines. Even today, these governments continue to enact a range of policies that either encourage or discourage the movement of undocumented residents. Decisions about whether to grant access to important rights or public services—from driver’s licenses to affordable public higher education to health coverage—or whether or not local police cooperate with ICE send a meaningful signal about where undocumented immigrants will be welcomed as equals, and where they will be pushed into the shadows.
Recent events, however, have revealed the fragility of this policy divergence between different jurisdictions. The more welcoming jurisdictions tend to be large, diverse cities in blue states. As the Biden administration began preparing to undo the Covid-era border restrictions put in place by Donald Trump, this inevitably resulted in large numbers of asylum seekers entering the United States via the southern border. Rather than remain in border states like Texas or Arizona, many chose to make their way to some of those same large, diverse cities—some to join family members who were already there, but others because they believed they could find work or receive a warmer welcome in those places. A relatively small but politically significant number received free bus travel to New York, D.C., Chicago, and other destinations courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Many of these cities are also places with the greatest scarcity of affordable housing. Since asylum seekers are barred from formal employment for an extended period of time, this has led to many migrants sleeping in police stations, airports, or in the streets. City-provided shelters have resulted both in enormous costs—rather than build new housing, New York has spent hundreds of millions on hotel rooms and unreliable migrant services contractors—and political blowback in working-class neighborhoods that have experienced sustained disinvestment. In response, many of these same cities have taken a page out of Abbott’s book and begun their own initiatives to put migrants on buses or planes out of town.
These logistical challenges, in theory surmountable, have nonetheless had serious political consequences. Many cities and states with histories of solid support for inclusive immigration policies—both during Trump’s presidency and long before—have seen public opinion and official statements turn towards greater restriction. In Chicago, where even immigration hawk Rahm Emanuel enacted a Welcoming City Ordinance during his time as mayor, current mayor Brandon Johnson and his allies had to fight to keep a referendum off of city ballots to repeal that ordinance, fearing it would pass. New York City mayor Eric Adams has emerged as a harsh critic of the Biden administration’s immigration policies (to the point that he now claims that his pending federal corruption charges are retaliation for speaking out).
In summary, as large numbers of asylum seekers entered the United States over the past two years, state and local governments with limited resources have taken the lead in managing their transportation and welcome. While the federal government has made some funds available to reimburse state and local initiatives, it has taken little initiative of its own. The result has been to undermine a significant degree of support for immigrant inclusion within the Democratic Party.
A Path Not Taken
This turn towards restriction was not inevitable. Once again, an uptick in immigration—humanitarian or otherwise—does not automatically trigger hostility. Institutional failures can be corrected, and in the process, we can learn from earlier experiments.
A century ago, facing unprecedented migration from Europe, Progressive-era lawmakers took a markedly different approach. In 1907, facing now familiar fears that immigrants in large Northeastern cities caused crime, congested housing, and labor unrest—with both labor unions and bosses accusing immigrants of advancing the other’s cause—Congress created the Division of Information, a new federal immigration agency charged with promoting a “beneficial distribution” of immigrants throughout the United States.
Former Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly was appointed as the chief of the Division. Powderly was convinced that encouraging migration out of the largest cities would be good for unions, avoiding large “reservoir[s] of strike breakers” for employers to call upon in a labor dispute. While some in the Department of Commerce and Labor argued that the new agency was authorized to do little more than hand out pamphlets of information to arriving immigrants about opportunities in faraway states, Powderly took this mission a step further, working to place immigrant workers directly in jobs across the country. Running the first federal public employment agency, he hoped to undermine the work of exploitative private labor brokers who charged immigrants a fee to send them away to nonexistent faraway jobs.
During the Progressive era, a time of rapid experimentation in modern governance, the Division of Information sought to include immigration in an emerging apparatus for what we might today call economic planning or industrial policy. The Division’s mission was simultaneously to encourage immigrants’ movement throughout the country’s interior, and to seek out information about where there were opportunities for immigrants to contribute to local communities and economies. To do this, Powderly’s federal immigration agency sought to position itself as a mediator between various stakeholders, including state governments, private employers and railroad companies, and labor unions—rather than, as under current immigration law, largely deferring simply to employer demand for workers.
World War I ultimately cut short the Division’s experiment, as immigration nosedived during the war, and postwar nativists were successful in passing restrictive legislation that kept immigration relatively low throughout much of the twentieth century. We don’t know what our immigration system might have looked like if it had followed this path, but some similar challenges remain with us.
Immigration as Industrial Policy
This history reveals a precedent for a much more robust federal role in coordinating internal migration in the immigration context. The current situation suggests that there should be much stronger federal leadership in coordinating the arrival of humanitarian migrants. We cannot leave it to each state or local government to try to encourage or discourage immigrant movement as they see fit. Welcoming communities should not be solely responsible for providing shelter and support to those in need, and immigrant restrictionist officials should not be allowed simply to push migrants on to other jurisdictions. Only the federal government can adequately distribute the resources to support this task, and coordinate migration outcomes on a nationwide basis.
Addressing the immediate “crisis,” this might mean an expanded refugee resettlement program. By expanding eligibility for resettlement placements to the broader group of humanitarian migrants—currently reserved for refugees processed by international organizations as well as unaccompanied minors—this would allow federal agencies to coordinate where new arrivals end up.
A broader federal role in managing internal migration, however, should not be limited to the humanitarian context. Like a century ago, we should reconsider the ways in which immigration law can promote place-based economic and industrial policy interventions. Many federal economic priorities—from promoting domestic manufacturing, to facilitating the construction of affordable housing, to subsidizing green energy production—require policy decisions about where to encourage people to live and work. Immigration law can be a powerful tool in building workforces in the places where they are needed. State and local governments can also play an integral role in identifying where these needs exist. These sorts of intergovernmental partnerships might also create more direct mechanisms for sub-federal officials to identify where immigration can benefit their communities, taking the focus off of the abstract discussions of the border and national security that currently dominate our immigration politics.
The prospects of immigration policy for the next four years are bleak. But unless Democrats begin to identify policies that will respond to the “crisis” that has undermined support for immigrant inclusion, while also articulating a positive vision of the role of immigrants in building a better future, they will have little chance of convincing voters that there is any alternative.
