Kamala Harris Brings Balanced Solutions to Immigration | Opinion

It’s a severe understatement to note that immigration is central to the 2024 presidential campaign. Yet it remains under-appreciated just how consequential the immigration policy contrasts are between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump—and with big implications for all Americans.
Since she became the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has charted a vision on immigration that recognizes our broken immigration system, and how it needs an overhaul, and that proposed reforms should pair an orderly border with legal pathways and opportunities for long-settled immigrants. While her recent endorsement of asylum restrictions has garnered most of the attention, the strategy modeled by VP Harris goes beyond the border to also include support for legal channels to promote orderly migration and citizenship pathways for long-established immigrants who already live and work in America.
During her recent speech at the Arizona border and in follow-up remarks in Las Vegas, VP Harris noted that her vision includes both “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship — including for hard-working immigrants who have been here for years, including our Dreamers.” This is the sweet spot of American public opinion—strong majorities support this type of balanced approach that pairs an orderly border with support for legal immigration and citizenship for Dreamers and long-settled immigrants.
VP Harris also has been trumpeting the continued plummeting of monthly border encounter numbers while consistently calling out Donald Trump’s preference for immigration politics over solutions. This includes a focus on Trump’s cynical obstruction of the bipartisan, enforcement-heavy Senate bill earlier this year. As VP Harris recently said, “He’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
That goes to the heart of the immigration contrast between the candidates. These days, Donald Trump’s campaign seems little more than a collection of lurid, anti-immigrant assertions and falsehoods. As I recently stated, every one of his sentences seems to contain a noun, a verb, and a dehumanizing and dangerous lie about immigrants. While anti-immigrant ugliness has been central to Trump’s political persona ever since he descended the escalators at Trump Tower in 2015 and slandered Mexicans, it’s getting even darker, even more unhinged, and even more dangerous in the homestretch of 2024.
Yet for all his focus on immigration, don’t believe that Donald Trump has any real solutions to fixing the broken immigration system or buy his attempts to whitewash his real first-term record. His time in office included efforts to dismantle the asylum process, legal visa channels, and the refugee program. And from damaging policies that separated toddlers from their parents at the border to ugly attacks on the popular DACA program for Dreamers to banning Muslim and African families from entering America to his funneling of billions toward an ineffective border wall breached by a $20 handsaw, it was a cruel and chaotic failure.
Now, Trump wants to go further, with his relentless anti-immigrant rhetoric a precursor to his signature second-term promise—unsparing mass deportations. That means, “No one is off the table,” as his team has made clear, and that includes long-settled immigrants deeply rooted in America. Trump wants to make as many people as possible deportable, even many with current legal status—from Haitians with TPS to Dreamers with DACA to spouses of U.S. citizens eligible for the new Keeping Families Together (Parole in Place) process.
There’s a reason Trump and JD Vance are refusing to answer key details about their proposed mass deportation vision—the specifics are politically toxic and would be economically catastrophic for all Americans. A mass roundup, military detention camps, and mass deportation would tear apart communities and involve red-state National Guard troops going door-to-door in blue-state communities throughout America to detain, purge, and deport millions. It also would be economically devastating, destroying vital American industries, skyrocketing inflation, and evicting millions of homeowners, entrepreneurs, essential workers, health care providers, and teachers. And it wouldn’t do anything to fix the broken immigration system.
The two candidates’ immigration stances are rooted in fundamentally different worldviews and visions of America. The Harris vision recognizes that legal and orderly immigration and the stories, dreams, and sacrifices of generations of immigrants are among America’s greatest strengths and enduring advantages. Meanwhile, the Trump vision is filled with darkness and disinformation, demagoguing immigrants in a dangerous and obvious attempt to seize power and divide and distract us on issues of race and immigration.
Americans want real and common sense solutions on immigration instead of cynical obstruction, ugly lies, and mass deportations of long-settled immigrants. The contrasts, and stakes, are clear and consequential.
Vanessa Cárdenas is executive director of America’s Voice.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.