America’s immigration debate follows a well-worn script: border crisis, government failure, criminals pouring in.
Donald Trump has mastered this narrative. At his joint address to Congress, he spotlighted Laken Riley’s tragic and horrific murder to stoke fear. But his goal is not to solve the problem. His goal is to ensure it never goes away. Chaos is the stage, and he is its star performer.
Large-scale migration is a real challenge, one that demands acknowledgment and policy solutions. But instead of offering any of those, Democrats have allowed Trump’s theatrics to dictate the conversation. By failing to articulate a forceful, coherent immigration strategy — one that speaks to both security and order — they have abandoned the stage entirely. And when one side leaves the stage, the other takes control of the script.
What’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border is about shifting global migration patterns. For decades, most migrants came from Mexico and Central America. But today, arrivals from South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe have surged.
Economic asylum claims, once a tiny fraction of cases, have ballooned. The influx of such claims has overwhelmed the system, leading to prolonged processing times and backlogs. The average asylum case in immigration court now takes 4.25 years from start through the final hearing.
Smuggling networks are putting migrants in danger. In a harrowing 2022 incident, 53 migrants perished from hyperthermia inside a sweltering, airless tractor-trailer during an illegal immigration smuggling attempt from Laredo to San Antonio.
America’s immigration policy has not kept up with the world’s shifting migration. Instead of trying to fix the problem, Trump uses it for a political performance. His administration has fired immigration judges responsible for processing asylum claims and deprioritized fentanyl trafficking and counterterrorism in favor of mass immigration raids. He has pressured Panama to detain people before they even reach the U.S. border.
This is not an attempt to govern; it is an attempt to stage-manage a perpetual crisis. Because without disorder, he loses his most effective political weapon. The crisis is not a bug in Trump’s plan. It’s the plan.
Democrats should have seen this coming. There was a time when their immigration message worked. Barack Obama deported people, yes, but he also sold Americans on a vision of immigration as a national strength. He understood that security and opportunity were not contradictions.
Biden, by contrast, had no message. His administration lurched between appeasing progressives and moderates demanding control. The result did not address the problem but created a vacuum that Trump has gleefully filled. The failure to control migration isn’t just a policy lapse; it’s a failure of a compelling political vision. And that failure showed up in the election.
For decades, Black and Latino voters have been the backbone of the Democratic coalition. But that coalition is fracturing. Immigration, once a unifying cause, has become a point of division — not because these communities oppose immigration but because they see immigration as an unmanaged and messy system that helps newcomers while neglecting the people already here.
In Chicago and New York, Black and Latino communities struggled to absorb migrants with little support. Schools, hospitals, and social services — already underfunded — became overwhelmed. In Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, predominantly Latino residents protested the city’s plan to establish a winterized tent community for migrants. The lack of communication and resources led to heightened tensions, culminating in an incident where Alderman Julia Ramirez was assaulted while attempting to address the crowd.
The suburbs — lauded as the pristine symbol of the American Dream — have also become a battleground. Schools are filling with non-English-speaking students, with heroic but under-supported teachers scrambling to bridge the language gap with translation apps and sheer determination. In Charleroi, Pennsylvania, educators face classrooms transformed almost overnight as Haitian students arrive in record numbers, their trauma and linguistic barriers creating urgent challenges for teachers who never expected to be on the frontlines of America’s immigration system.
In Worthington, Minnesota, a once predominantly white farming town, over 80 percent of students now come from immigrant backgrounds. While the local economy has benefited from new workers, the strain is undeniable. Emergency services are stretched, and local resources — already thin — feel even thinner.
What fuels resentment is not simply the presence of immigrants but the creeping suspicion that long-time residents are being asked to bear the costs of transition alone while political leaders look the other way. This turns anxiety into anger.
Trump understands something Democrats don’t: Fear is most persuasive when it contains a sprinkle of truth. He tells people their communities are being taken from them, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” That is a disgusting lie.
But what makes it resonate is the undeniable reality that the government has failed to manage immigration in a way that feels fair, ordered, or sustainable. The chaos isn’t a conspiracy, but the lack of a coherent system allows Trump to sell it as one.
Democrats need to wake up. They cannot cede this issue to Trump. They cannot keep pretending that concerns over immigration are fringe or reactionary. If they continue to treat this as a Republican-manufactured distraction rather than a substantive issue, they will lose the argument to Republicans.
The answer isn’t to mimic Trump’s cruelty or call for mass deportations. It is to offer a clear alternative — one that reassures Americans that the government is in control of its borders while recognizing that immigration is one of the great engines of this country’s strength. They need to say, unequivocally, that America is better with immigrants — but that an uncontrolled system benefits no one.
Democrats need to point out that the real winners of our immigration dysfunction are wealthy corporations. A broken system creates exploitable labor. It weakens unions. It keeps wages low. For decades, the same politicians who claim to champion workers have allowed businesses to profit from a status quo that benefits neither citizens nor migrants.
If Democrats don’t fix this, Trump’s message will keep winning. His politics of fear thrive in moments of dysfunction. His message resonates when Democrats seem weak. He doesn’t need to propose solutions — he just needs to point at the problem and say, They won’t protect you, but “I alone can fix it.”
And right now, too many Americans believe him. A recent Axios/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans now support mass deportations, a position that once seemed unthinkable.
America has always struggled with the tension between being a nation of immigrants and the impulse to police the boundaries of belonging. But that tension is not destiny. It is the result of choices — of leaders who either step up and take control of the issue or allow it to spiral into chaos.
Trump has turned immigration into a spectacle, a never-ending production where fear dictates the plot and crisis is the set piece. In his theater, there are no solutions, only villains and victims, chaos and control. If Democrats remain passive, they will be consigned to the audience, watching as Trump directs a nation gripped by manufactured fear.
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