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Mar 26, 2026, 12:47:01 PMMar 26

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From: zbara...@gmail.com <zbara...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 26 March 2026 5:36 am
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Subject: Swain

The Immigration Divide That Isn’t

Americans mostly agree on the border and migrants, even if our politicians can’t.

Barton Swaim

March 25, 2026 4:52 pm ET

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The U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Ariz., Feb. 4. Olivier Touron/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

You wouldn’t know it from Capitol Hill and activist-class bombast, but voters on both left and right have moderated on immigration. Is a compromise possible? Probably not, inasmuch as elected Democrats, having labeled Donald Trump a fascist, can’t then be seen to negotiate with him, and the administration’s ultras think migrant laborers drive up prices and crime. But public sentiment clusters near the middle, and one day politicians may find their way there.

A signal moment occurred on the night of June 27, 2019. At the Democratic presidential debate, 10 candidates were asked to raise their hands if their healthcare plans would provide coverage for “undocumented immigrants.” All 10, ranging ideologically from Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders, raised their hands. There was a time when liberals and leftists would object to unfettered immigration because it infringed on their ability to expand the welfare state. That time seemed to have gone.

Seven years later, every Democrat in the country not named Biden knows Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election because her party refused for three years to do anything about the southern border. When a lengthy New York Times report making exactly that assertion ran in December, the newsworthy part was that it ran in the Times. Democrats know they blew it by groveling before the progressive-left immigrant-rights crowd. It’s conceivable that they may avoid that mistake for a few election cycles.

A liberal outfit called the Searchlight Institute on Monday published an impressive report on the electoral advantages to be had by Democrats if they can move to the center on immigration. Look past the report’s pro forma carping about how Mr. Trump’s first-term aggressions started it all. In fact, Mr. Trump won the 2016 election largely on the strength of the Obama administration’s negligence on border security—a fact worth mentioning only because the porous borders are, almost by definition, a consequence of progressivism’s refusal to say “no” to any perceived constituency.

Otherwise the Searchlight report offers nothing but common sense. Its polling indicates that Republicans, Democrats and independents support robust border enforcement and value legal immigration even as they worry that too much of it, too fast does damage to American society. Majorities believe that asylum seekers should apply for entry outside the U.S., and that illegal aliens who have worked and committed no crimes over the course of many years merit some path to citizenship.

The report advises Democrats to acknowledge that the party’s know-nothing recklessness of 2021-23 was a debacle and that failure to enforce borders encourages human smuggling and other perils. Expect smart Democrats to calibrate accordingly. Every time some young innocent dies by the gun or knife of an illegal immigrant—as happened last week in Chicago to 18-year-old Loyola student Sheridan Gorman—watch elected Democrats mosey further away from their former radicalism.

The bulk of GOP voters never took philosophically radical views on immigration, as progressives did, though many Republicans took politically radical ones—deport every last illegal alien, including ones who were brought to the country as children, and so on. What Democratic pols and liberal commentators may not appreciate is that today’s GOP electorate is a decade removed from 2016.

Talk to GOP voters and you may hear notes of moderation that weren’t detectable a decade ago. On the question of border enforcement, Republicans are where they’ve always been—zero tolerance. What about the 12 million to 14 million mostly Latin American migrants already here? The past decade has made a few things plain to right-leaning Americans, among them that the migrant workers whose presence in the country they once regretted tend toward religious observance and family cohesion. Also, they know how to work.

Don’t underestimate that point. A corollary to the GOP’s partial transformation over the past decade into a working-class party—it’s almost a tautology—is that ordinary Republican voters identify more readily than they once did with a class of people known for sedulous manual labor. Illegal migrants, whatever Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller may say, don’t vote and don’t rely on welfare to any significant degree. But if they did vote, they wouldn’t necessarily plump for Democrats and their offers of free stuff. Ten or 15 years ago, right-wing radio hosts told their audiences daily that Democrats wanted to addict illegal aliens to welfare and put them permanently in the D column. Things haven’t worked out that way. That Hispanic voters moved markedly toward the GOP in 2024 reflects that point.

None of this makes the federal government’s failure to police the border any less of an outrage. No solution to the problem is free of pain. But it is no longer true, if it ever was, that one party’s voters want everything the other’s don’t. That Mr. Trump had strong support on immigration, then lost a hefty measure of it as enforcement efforts became chaotic, tells us that most Americans find themselves somewhere in the middle, waiting for their politicians to come up with some messy compromise.

WSJ Opinion: Nuking the Filibuster to SAVE America

WSJ Opinion: Nuking the Filibuster to SAVE AmericaPlay video: WSJ Opinion: Nuking the Filibuster to SAVE America

Unruly Republic: President Trump is urging the Senate GOP to abolish the filibuster as a way to pass the 'SAVE America Act.' Columnist Barton Swaim explains why, despite appearances, it won't happen—drawing on a similar threat from Democrats in 2020. Photo: Annabelle Gordon/Reuters/Sue Dorfman/ZUMA Press

Appeared in the March 26, 2026, print edition as 'The Immigration Divide That Isn’t'.

Barton began writing for the Journal as a regular book reviewer in 2012 and began a column on political books in 2017. He came to the Journal as an editorial-page writer in 2019, and in 2025 he began a weekly column on politics and culture, Unruly Republic. He was opinion editor at the Weekly Standard from 2017 to 2018. He is the author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics” (2015).

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