How the Left Accidentally Bolstered the Nativist Right
· The Atlantic
On March 12, the Heritage Foundation posted six words on X: “We have a legal immigration problem.” That sentence would once have been unthinkable from a major conservative institution. And Heritage is not alone in breaking taboos. Last fall, Vice President Vance told a crowd at the University of Mississippi that the United States needs to get legal-immigration numbers “way, way down” and attacked high-skill H-1B visas for undercutting American wages. The Republican Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee has proposed legislation that would scrap the H-1B visa program entirely, along with the diversity visa lottery. Analysts at the National Foundation for American Policy estimate that the Trump administration’s policies will cut legal immigration by 33 to 50 percent over four years, translating to 1.5 to 2.4 million fewer foreign-born lawful residents.
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For many years, a robust norm held in American politics: You could be in favor of legal immigration while still opposing illegal immigration. The two were fundamentally different, the thinking went, and supporting one while opposing the other was a coherent, mainstream position. That norm is now in danger of collapsing—under pressure not only from the right, but from left-leaning immigration advocates and scholars who have coalesced around the idea that all immigration restrictions are indefensible, abandoning the legal/illegal distinction in the process.
As long as both sides accepted the distinction, legal immigration was assumed to be good for the country. Without that shared premise, every legal immigration channel is at risk. Understanding how both sides contributed to the breakdown of the old norm is the first step toward rebuilding it and resurrecting the bipartisan coalition for productive immigration reform.
For decades, the standard line from immigration restrictionists was some version of “I support legal immigration; I just oppose illegal immigration.” Whether or not they meant it, they felt compelled to say it. The basic idea that immigration was good was nearly as uncontroversial as the notion that racism was bad. This norm meant that programs such as H-1B visas, family sponsorship, and refugee resettlement were treated as presumptively legitimate. Even nativist politicians who privately wanted fewer foreign-born people in the country, period, had to frame their proposals around enforcement, not cuts to legal admissions.
[Idrees Kahloon: Trump doesn’t want legal immigrants either]
For ordinary voters, meanwhile, the distinction between legal and illegal immigration reflected a belief that unlawful activity should be opposed as a matter of principle. Political scientists have shown that when Americans evaluate illegal immigration, they switch from weighing individual immigrants’ characteristics to making categorical moral judgments rooted in the rule of law. In their 2020 book, Immigration and the American Ethos, Morris Levy and Matthew Wright found that civic fairness, not racial anxiety, was the dominant consideration through which most Americans assessed immigration.
Many of my academic colleagues felt differently, however. To them, “I just oppose illegal immigration” was a socially acceptable way to express opposition to foreigners in general—xenophobia dressed in procedural language. I have been guilty of dismissing popular attitudes myself; when giving lectures about, say, the H-1B visa backlog or refugee processing times, I have found myself exasperated by audience members who stand up to ask why I haven’t gone out of my way to condemn illegal immigration.
Over the years, many scholars and advocates thus came to see the distinction as illegitimate. For some, the American immigration system is already so unfair and restrictive—fewer than 1 percent of people who want to immigrate can do so legally—that saying “Just follow the rules” can feel cruel. Others go further: Unauthorized border crossing is a victimless regulatory violation, they argue, and any law restricting people’s free movement is unjust.
In immigration scholarship, a growing body of work began to emphasize the “blurriness” of legal status—how people cycle between documented and undocumented status, how visa categories create precarity even for “legal” immigrants, how enforcement itself produces illegality. This work is empirically important. But its political implication, sometimes stated explicitly, was that the legal/illegal binary is a fiction that serves only to divide immigrant communities.
The assumption that legal immigration is already settled, that only unauthorized migration deserves serious attention, is widespread in the field. When Michelangelo Landgrave and I submitted a study testing whether informing voters about the difficulty of legal immigration could shift their views on it, one reviewer recommended rejecting the paper because, they argued, we should have been trying to increase support for illegal immigration instead.
Nor was this shift confined to academic journals. Over the past dozen or so years, major media organizations (including the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Atlantic) dropped the term illegal immigrant from their style guides. Advocacy organizations rebranded around undocumented as the only acceptable term. The practical effect was to make the legal/illegal distinction itself sound like a slur—something only restrictionists would invoke.
This helps explain why, when the first Trump administration began cutting legal immigration, pro-immigration organizations struggled to respond. The major advocacy groups had built their messaging and donor bases around the rights of people who immigrated illegally. Policies such as rescinding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and family separation generated massive protests. But when the administration quietly raised H-1B denial rates and expanded the “public charge” rule to discourage legal applicants, there was no organized constituency pushing back.
In his book, The Normalization of the Radical Right, the political scientist Vicente Valentim shows that much of the recent rise in radical-right political behavior reflects not a change in what people believe, but a change in what they feel comfortable expressing. When norms weaken, often after radical-right politicians achieve electoral success, privately held views long kept quiet become publicly acceptable. Valentim’s work focuses on Europe, but his analysis applies to America too. Over the past two decades, voters with restrictionist views have sorted into the GOP, making those preferences louder within the party. President Trump did not create this constituency, but he recognized and catered to it more than any modern president before him had. Each taboo he shattered around immigration made it easier for him and his supporters to transgress even more.
[Marc Novicoff: ]The immigration restriction Trump won’t try
And so, in Trump’s second term, under Stephen Miller’s newfound influence, the obliteration of the legal/illegal distinction has been formalized much more strongly into policy. The result: an administration now openly attacking legal immigration channels, including by targeting asylum and skilled-worker visas and implementing a visa freeze covering 75 countries. Like so much of the Trump agenda, these attacks are not broadly popular—in fact, polling suggests that support for legal immigration has never been higher—but they appeal to a small though intense nativist minority that no longer feels constrained and that makes up an important part of Trump’s core coalition.
The Republican Party is responsible for its drift into full-blown nativism. But the American left unintentionally made that shift more likely by breaking down the conceptual categories that had restrained it. By dismissing the legal/illegal distinction as bogus, advocates signaled that they would not defend it. When one side dismisses a norm as meaningless and the other realizes it no longer needs to pretend to respect that norm, it erodes from both ends.
If immigration is to survive the current political moment, advocates will need to acknowledge what they have spent a decade denying: that illegal immigration has negative consequences and that people are justified in opposing it. The political scientists Omer Solodoch and Ryan Briggs have found that when Americans perceive immigration as orderly and government-controlled, they support higher levels of it. Solodoch’s earlier research in Europe showed a similar pattern: Policy responses that restored a sense of control over asylum or other irregular flows reduced public opposition to immigration. My own work shows that opposing illegal immigration is not the same as hating the individuals who are forced to immigrate illegally. It is about opposing a broken system that harms those individuals by leaving them vulnerable, fuels backlash that falls on all immigrants, and corrodes the political support needed to bring people in through legal channels. The goal of policy should be to channel this impulse toward building a legal system that actually works.
Any viable immigration-reform coalition has to include voters who oppose illegal immigration but support legal channels. That coalition cannot form if the distinction between the two has been erased. The next time someone attending one of my talks insists that I separate legal from illegal immigration, I will try to be less annoyed, even if the question is not very relevant. They are defending a dying norm that, once lost, will be very hard to rebuild.