Draw the Line

Democrats should embrace immigration again

Photo by Frank Kastle on Unsplash

For a generation the Democratic Party has been told, by people who are paid to know such things, that the way to win an election in the United States is to concede the moral premise of the opposition on immigration and then quarrel over the implementation. Secure the border first. Enforcement is a precondition. We can talk about a path once the public is reassured. The consultants who said these things were paid handsomely. The polling that supported them was extensive. The strategy was executed with discipline for thirty years.

It did not work. It was never going to work. A politics that begins by conceding the moral premise of the opposition cannot defeat the opposition; it can only manage the speed at which it loses. And while it has been losing, the apparatus it was helping to legitimize has grown into the thing we are now living through. American citizens have been detained by federal agents who could not produce a warrant and would not name the authority under which they acted. Legally present immigrants — green card holders, visa holders, asylees with paperwork in good order — have been removed from the country in defiance of statute and in defiance of judicial orders. Children have been separated from parents who committed no crime. People have died in custody. Cruelty has been administered at a scale unlike anything in this country in living memory, and it has been administered openly, deliberately, as policy.

This is a stain. The older word is the accurate word. The apparatus that has been built and the apparatus that is being built every day are the documentary practices of a regime, and they are being conducted in the name of every American citizen, including the ones who voted against it and the ones who did not vote at all. We are all implicated in what is done in our name until we say, out loud and in public, that it must stop.

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It must stop. All deportations should be halted pending a full investigation of the apparatus and its conduct. Every person currently in detention should have their case reviewed by a court that is independent of the executive that detained them. Every removal that has occurred under this administration should be examined for compliance with law. And the persons who have been deported in violation of statute should be returned, at the expense of the government that wronged them, to the lives the government took from them.

That is the floor. That is what a serious country does when it discovers that its own enforcement apparatus has been operating outside the law. It is not radical. It is not utopian. It is the minimum a republic owes to the persons within its jurisdiction when the republic’s agents have violated the trust placed in them.

The ceiling is higher and it is also older than us. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. He granted amnesty to roughly three million undocumented immigrants. He did so because he understood, as a conservative, that a country cannot maintain a permanent shadow class of persons who live and work and pay taxes and raise children within its borders without legal standing. He did so because the cruelty of maintaining such a class was inconsistent with the country he believed himself to lead. He did so because it was the right thing to do, and because doing the right thing was, in his framing, also the conservative thing to do.

The policy I am calling for is to the right of Ronald Reagan on his own terms. The Democratic Party should run, openly and without apology, on an amnesty for all persons currently in the United States who have committed no serious crime. Not a path. Not a process. An amnesty. The word Reagan used, the policy Reagan signed, the moral framing Reagan accepted. If the consultants tell you this is politically impossible, ask them how the politically possible has been working out.

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I am asking the Democratic Party to do something the consultants have spent thirty years explaining cannot be done. I am asking it to draw a line in the sand. I am asking it to say, in language that a citizen can understand, that there are things this country does not do, and that the deportation of legally present immigrants and the detention of citizens and the administration of cruelty as policy are among those things, and that a party which cannot say so out loud has nothing left worth running on.

The line in the sand is not a slogan. It is a structural commitment. It is the difference between a politics organized around what is testable in a focus group and a politics organized around what is true. The first kind of politics has produced the present situation. It has produced a Democratic Party that, in the face of an evil apparatus, has spent its energy explaining why it cannot afford to say the apparatus is evil. The second kind of politics — morality-driven politics, in the older sense — is the only thing that can defeat what is in front of us, because it is the only thing that names what is in front of us.

I have written, in these pages, that the man at the center of this administration is evil and that the orbit around him has chosen, every day, to participate. The Democratic strategists and consultants who have spent a generation telling their party that the way to defeat this man is to concede his moral premise on immigration are part of that orbit too, in their own way. They are not in his Cabinet. They are not signing his orders. But they have, by their craft and their advice and their professional confidence, helped to construct the political world in which the apparatus could be built and could grow and could conduct itself as it has. That is a participation also, and it requires its own accounting.

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I have written, in these pages, about the constitutional commitments this country once made to persons within its jurisdiction. I have written, in these pages, about the moral language a country once meant when it spoke of welcoming the stranger. I have written, in these pages, about the kind of politics worth running on, and the kind of candidates a serious opposition would produce. Each of these pieces is part of one argument. The argument is that the recovery of this country requires the recovery of the older moral vocabulary, and that the recovery of the older moral vocabulary requires the political courage to use it in public, on a platform, under one’s own name, in front of voters who have been told for a generation that such language is too dangerous to deploy.

It is not too dangerous. It is the only thing that is not too dangerous. Everything else has been tried.

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We should be a welcoming country again. The sentence is simple and it is the sentence on which the platform stands. A halt to deportations pending investigation. An amnesty for all persons within the country who have committed no serious crime. A return of those wrongfully removed. A restoration of due process to the detention of any person, citizen or otherwise, in the territory of the United States. A public accounting of the apparatus that has done what has been done. A commitment that no future administration of either party will be permitted to operate such an apparatus again.

These are not gifts to immigrants. These are obligations of a republic to the persons within its jurisdiction, and they are also obligations of a republic to itself. A country that does what this country is doing is not the country it claims to be. The gap between what we are and what we claim to be is the stain. The work of closing the gap is the line in the sand.

I am asking the Democratic Party to draw it. I am asking every candidate for federal office in the next two cycles to be asked, on the record, whether they will draw it. I am asking every Democratic strategist who is paid to advise such candidates to be asked, on the record, whether they have advised against drawing it. I am asking every voter who reads these pages to refuse to vote for a candidate who will not say the line out loud.

The consultants will say this is impossible. The consultants have been wrong for thirty years. Draw the line.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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